Using Social Media for Service Innovations: Challenges and Pitfalls

This article investigates how social software such as blogs can be used to collect ideas generated by the users in the service innovation process. After a theoretical discussion of user involvement and more specifically user involvement using social software and interactive web-tools, the article reports the results from a field experiment at a university library. In the experiment, a blog was established to collect ideas for service innovations from the library users. The experiment shows that blogs may generate a modest, but very useful amount of ideas. The experiment furthermore reveals that blogs might be useful to provide the institution with an image of openness and willingness to listen to customer input.