Perspectives on social media ant its use by key account managers 54 p 33–43

Social media has recently received increased attention from practitioners and academics. Although social media helps build relationships, no academic study to date has investigated the use of social media by key account managers, although building and developing relationships with key customers are at the core of these managers' expertise. This research contributes to building the first level of understanding of howkey account managers use social media and the major issues. To address this topic, we perform a qualitative research study using the grounded theory methodology. We present a model of key account managers' use of social media derived from our empirical data and relate it to a key customer engagement model.