SME success in challenging times: Generating Social Capital

Our award winning research project, Success in Challenging Times: Key lessons for UK SMEs, not surprisingly linked business success to social, physical, and online activity.

In the original report, SMEs talked about direct referrals being extremely important to their businesses, as well as search engine optimisation, networking at events, and using LinkedIn to research and target customers, to give a few examples. Yet, none of the entrepreneurs regarded themselves as experts. The perception was that physical networking and social media were regarded by many as a “necessary evil”, and there was no choice but to engage in this area. Respondents regarded engaging with a number of online and offline communities including their customers, associates and even former employees, as a means of generating social capital.

A new 2014 study will focus on how SMEs generate social capital and will address the following questions:

• What are the key business advantages SMEs gain from generating social capital?
• What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of online vs offline within this?
• Which forms of social capital, if any, have SMEs tried but considered not worth pursuing?
• Which communities do SMEs connect with and for what reasons?
• What criteria do SMEs use when judging which communities to connect to?

Gathering data on what SMEs see as the advantages and disadvantages of both online and offline of social media, and the communities they connect to (both virtually and physically), will help shed light on SMEs’ use of web technologies, as well as their relationship with more traditional ways of accessing social capital.