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Friend or Foe? A Small Business Success Story of Collaborating with Competitors Using Social Media
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to share the social media success story of Lexington Beerworks, a craft beer taproom located in Lexington, KY. As the paper will delineate, Lexington Beerworks’ success stems from some conventional social media usage similar to Blakeman and Brown’s (Bull Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 37(1):47–50, 2010) recommendation; however, a great deal of Lexington Beerworks’ social media success is a result of unconventional use of social media, particularly its collaboration with its main competitors.
We present craft beer as part of an artisan industry case study that demonstrates how the use of social media creates a community narrative that engages both producer and consumer around the artisanal produce and its values. In contrast to mass drinks production, the past decade has seen a resurgence in specialist artisan 'craft beer' producers, making niche, high-quality products. Specifically, we examine the craft beer industry's use of digital technologies as a way of engendering bilateral consumer engagement with their products, and how it can influence brewing practices and support in-the-field quality control. A qualitative approach, using grounded theory, was undertaken to understand the digital relationships between key stakeholders in the craft beer community, including craft brewers, retailers, bloggers, and fans, through a series of interviews, ethnographies, focus groups, and public events. Our analysis reveals future design considerations for these stakeholders, with findings supporting the design of future interactions that can further strengthen the relationship between small, artisan industries and their consumers.
We argue in this paper that when the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms. The large-scale reliance on interorganizational collaborations in the biotechnology industry reflects a fundamental and pervasive concern with access to knowledge. We develop a network approach to organizational learning and derive firm-level, longitudinal hypotheses that link research and development alliances, experience with managing interfirm relationships, network position, rates of growth, and portfolios of collaborative activities. We test these hypotheses on a sample of dedicated biotechnology firms in the years 1990-1994. Results from pooled, within-firm, time series analyses support a learning view and have broad implications for future theoretical and empirical research on organizational networks and strategic alliances.•.
Over the past decade, trust has emerged as the central means of achieving cooperation in interorganizational relationships. Past empirical inquiries have largely focused on the role of trust within the context of vertical relations between channel members or service providers and their clients. Thus, little is known about the nature or the role of trust in horizontal relations. A number of interorganizational scholars suggest that the nature and the effect of behavioral norms such as trust may be widely different in horizontal versus vertical relationships. This study examines the effect of relationship form on organizational trust using data from a survey of 106 U.S. firms who have recently participated in either horizontal or vertical R&D alliances. The results of this survey indicate that participants in vertical alliances display higher levels of organizational trust than participants in horizontal alliances. In addition, while organizational trust enhances cooperation in vertical alliances, trust is unrelated to cooperation in horizontal alliances.
Traditionally the relationships between competitors in the industrial market have been based on competition. The network approach and literature about strategic alliances have provided new insights into cooperation between firms based on the value chain. The empirical findings from two in-depth studies, the rack and pinion industry and the lining industry, show that a firm can be involved in four different types of horizontal relationships at the same time. Apart from relationships consisting of competition or cooperation, a firm can live in symbiosis by coexisting with other relationships, or being involved in a relationship simultaneously containing elements of both cooperation and competition. Consequently, a successful firm needs to focus on relationship management in order to achieve a portfolio consisting of the four types of relationships to other horizontal firms.
Karen Blakeman's company, RBA Information Services, provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet for business, social and collaborative web tools and on accessing and managing information resources. Twitter at http://twitter.com/karenblakmen and Facebook at www.facebook.com/karenblakeman
Existing theory and research on relationships among competitors focuses either on competitive or on cooperative relationships between them, and the one relationship is argued to harm or threaten the other. Little research has considered that two firms can be involved in and benefit from both cooperation and competition simultaneously, and hence that both types of relationships need to be emphasized at the same time. In this article, it is argued that the most complex, but also the most advantageous relationship between competitors, is “coopetition” where two competitors both compete and cooperate with each other. Complexity is due to the fundamentally different and contradictory logics of interaction that competition and cooperation are built on. It is of crucial importance to separate the two different parts of the relationship to manage the complexity and thereby make it possible to benefit from such a relationship. This article uses an explorative case study of two Swedish and one Finnish industries where coopetition is to be found, to develop propositions about how the competitive and cooperative part of the relationship can be divided and managed. It is shown that the two parts can be separated depending on the activities degree of proximity to the customer and on the competitors' access to specific resources. It is also shown that individuals within the firm only can act in accordance with one of the two logics of interaction at a time and hence that either the two parts have to be divided between individuals within the company, or that one part needs to be controlled and regulated by an intermediate actor such as a collective association.
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