Multiple Case Study Design for Social Media Marketing Research

   
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rovide feedback on the qualitative research design your classmate selected.
Provide suggestions to your classmate for an alternative qualitative design they might want to consider, appropriate for their proposed topic and research question.

 
Multiple Case Study Design for Social Media Marketing Research
In the last decade, organizations around the world have become more aware of the increasing number of their employees that are utilizing social media platforms at work for interpersonal communications, and some of these organizations have begun to wonder how best to engage with this growing group, if that engagement leads to increased job satisfaction, and how those employees’ level of engagement and satisfaction impacts customer engagement (Cawsey & Rowley, 2015; Cervellon & Lirio, 2017; How to increase employee engagement, 2014; Kane, 2015; Martin, Parry, & Flowers, 2015; Sievert & Scholz, 2017).  Despite the promised rewards, potential barriers such as lack of comfort with social media (Martin et al., 2015; Cervellon & Lirio, 2017), distrustful (or lack of) organizational culture (Hemmer, 2016; Holland et al., 2016; How to increase employee engagement, 2014; Kane, 2015; Martin et al., 2015; Naim & Lenka, 2017; Sievert & Scholz, 2017; Smith, Stumberger, Guild, & Dugan, 2017), digital communication fatigue (van Zoonen & Rice, 2017), employee age (Cervellon & Lirio, 2017; Holland et al., 2016; Naim & Lenka, 2017; Sievert & Scholz, 2017), privacy concerns (Cervellon & Lirio, 2017; Smith et al., 2017), and work/life balance concerns (Holland et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2017; van Zoonen & Rice, 2017) can limit meaningful engagement with employees on social media.  Understanding the promises without ignoring the potential barriers, the problem to be addressed in this qualitative, multiple case study is whether or not a strategic, internally focused social media program can improve employee engagement and satisfaction and how engagement and satisfaction levels correlate with customer engagement.
            After studying the types of qualitative designs discussed in this class, this researcher feels that case study design – specifically multiple case study design – would be the optimal research design to use in studying the internally focused corporate social media programs and their impact on satisfaction, retention, and customer engagement.  Not in any way to take away the potential value of research of this type to the academy, the driving purpose behind this researcher’s selection of this topic is the real-world benefits to social media marketers for organizations both large and small.  As such, multiple case study design seems most likely to provide actionable intelligence in a career field that, in this researcher’s experience, commonly is left to judge outcomes by volume of inputs (money spent, ads placed, blogs written, social media content posted, etc.) rather than quality of outcomes.  Case study design’s connectedness to real life (Flyvbjerg, 2010) promises to provide a level of depth and nuance necessary to glean the kind of real world solutions that marketing professionals are seeking.  Personal experience once again serves as the driver for this researcher to select multiple case studies instead of a single, deeper dive case study as this researcher suspects that studying numerous corporate marketing programs will be necessary in order to ensure that all areas of corporate marketing are adequately explored.  For example, this researcher handles the majority of the social media content marketing for our organization, but outsources blog writing and top of funnel marketing strategy to a third-party vendor.  For the purposes of a research study, this researcher could speak in depth about his personal experiences with social media content marketing, but would provide little value in a discussion of top of funnel blogging.  The diversity of experiences to be uncovered in a multiple case study, combined with Yin’s (2003) assertion that multiple case studies can provide a more accurate understanding of the topic being studied, leads this researcher to believe that multiple case study design is optimal. 
            Creswell and Poth (2018) point to two particular challenges that are endemic to case study research: selecting the case (or cases) and developing a study that the academy will consider rigorous enough for acceptance.  To the first, this researcher has already determined that a multiple case study would be most likely to provide the level of detail necessary to understand the realities of internally focused social media marketing.  To the second, this researcher will effort to create satisfactory boundaries for the case studies to ensure that they remain focused (Creswell & Poth, 2018).  One means of bounding this potential study would be to limit the scope to the study of marketing programs at State Veterans’ Homes across the United States.  This researcher works for a State Veterans’ Home system in Maine, and has access to marketing personnel in other states.  By limiting the case studies to the nonprofit, veterans nursing home sector, this researcher hopes to keep the study bounded and specific enough to fill a gap in the existing literature as well as provide findings that may transcend this narrow scale and prove applicable to marketers in long term care and beyond. 
References:
Cawsey, T., & Rowley, J. (2016). Social media brand building strategies in B2B companies.  Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 34(6), 754-776. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/1826809315?accountid=12085
Cervellon, M., & Lirio, P. (2017). When employees don’t ‘like’ their employers on social media. MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(2), 63-70. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-