Search results

Social media has been gaining importance in recent years as an integral part of entrepreneurs’ business and marketing strategies. At the same time, the entrepreneurial use of social media can lead to dark and negative consequences. This aspect has received less attention in the literature so far. The purpose of this study is to advice entrepreneurial practitioners to balance the sides of pros and cons as being an inherent reality to acknowledge the full scenario of business life and the interplay of diverse influences.

The qualitative interviews focused on the dark side experiences of micro-entrepreneurs on social media and on strategies to protect their private identities and businesses from those dark side effects. For the theoretical classification of dark side experiences, the framework of Baccarella et al. (2018) was used and adapted based on the experiences reported.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to provide an understanding of the negative experiences micro-entrepreneurs face on social media. The research showed the relevance of five out of the seven dark-side building blocks and identified time as a further influential aspect. Thereby, the authors learn to comprehend the negative sides of social media for micro-operated businesses. The findings highlight the need to understand entrepreneurial social media use with simultaneously negative hazards and economic and social challenges. Addressing the entanglement of the entrepreneurial and private selves of micro-entrepreneurs, the findings demonstrate entrepreneur’s attempts of distancing or cleaning the negativity from their private identities and their businesses.

This paper problematizes dark sides as critical elements in entrepreneurial practice, which are too often neglected when discussing entrepreneurial marketing in general and entrepreneurship in social media specifically. The self is always captured between two sides, including the problematic (“dark”) and the bright.

Textbook knowledge about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is always very sterile because discussion treats enterprises and their actors in an “all are alike” approach as if there is a unique and average size and type. Entrepreneurship takes place in multiple sites and spaces and researchers must specify and contextualize rather than decontextualizing their cases. The chapter argues that the vast majority of entrepreneurs falls into the category of micro-entrepreneurs where economic activities are run without further employees paid by wage or salary. In the average of the European Union, more than 70 out of 100 entrepreneurs belong to this group of small business(wo)men. However, even this category is wide and covers many forms of activities under different labels, such as small farmers, freelancers, solo self-employed, independent professionals and others. In this context, also the development of new media and technologies as well as digitalization influence those economic activities of the actors due to their significant impact on processes and possibilities. Social media influences those one-(wo)men-firm owners privately and commercially but social media are – vice versa – also an object of influence since businesspeople use platforms to orchestrate themselves on the internet. Online platforms serve as tools to advertise where people create their own identity and typical brand. This chapter asks for the links between craftsmen, artisans and micro-entrepreneurs and their use and handling of social media by presenting first empirical results of an investigation which has been undertaken in Austria.