Strengthening customer relationship in the social media era. The importance of customer relationship orientation and customer knowledge management

Social media enable firms to better involve customers in co-creation and innovation processes, and to improve customer knowledge management to achieve greater performance. The study analyzes the net effect of customer relationship orientation through customer collaboration and customer role in innovation on customer knowledge management and on customer relationship performance, as outcomes, in the social media context. In order to empirically investigate the proposed research model, data collected from an online survey administered to 418 managers are processed with structural equation modeling. Findings suggest some detailed insights about the importance of engaging customers in value co-creation and innovation processes in order to gain a competitive advantage. Results contribute to both the theoretical and practical knowledge addressing the call for further research useful to improve the current understanding of the impact of customer relationship orientation on firm performance and highlighting the role played by social media in collecting customer-related knowledge.