Community engagement and online word of mouth: An empirical investigation

How customer engagement in a firm’s social media marketing platform ? online brand community ? might affect word-of-mouth behavior is an open research issue as well as a vital business problem in e-commerce. To this end, we collected a set of longitudinal data that include community engagement behavior, e-commerce transactions, and customers’ post-purchase reviews. Using a control function approach, we find that consumer engagement in a brand community not only increases the likelihood of generating post-purchase reviews but also increases the likelihood of posting positive online reviews. Furthermore, we find that customer tenure has a positive moderating effect.     

Business engagement on Twitter: a path analysis

Social media services, such as Twitter, enable commercial businesses to participate actively in online word-of-mouth communication. In this project, we examined the potential influences of business engagement in online word-of-mouth communication on the level of consumers’ engagement and investigated the trajectories of a business’ online word-of-mouth message diffusion in the Twitter community. We used path analysis to examine 164,478 tweets from 96,725 individual Twitter users with regards to nine brands during a 5-week study period. We operationalized business engagement as the amount of online word-of-mouth messages from brand and the number of consumers the brand follows. We operationalized consumers’ engagement as the number of online word-of-mouth messages from consumers both connecting to the brand and having no connection with the brand as well as the number of consumers following the brand. We concluded that the business engagement on Twitter relates directly to consumers’ engagement with online word-of-mouth communication. In addition, retweeting, as an explicit way to show consumers’ response to business engagement, indicates that the influence only reaches consumers with a second-degree relationship to the brand and that the life cycle of a tweet is generally 1.5 to 4 hours at most. Our research has critical implications in terms of advancing the understanding of the business’s role in the online word-of-mouth communication and bringing insight to the analytics of social networks and online word-of-mouth message diffusion patterns.     

Higher education scholars' participation and practices on Twitter

Scholars participate in online social networks for professional purposes. In such networks, learning takes the form of participation and identity formation through engagement in and contribution to networked practices. While current literature describes the possible benefits of online participation, empirical research on scholars' use of online social networks in the educational technology literature is negligible. The purpose of this paper is to understand scholars' naturalistic practices in social networks in general, and on Twitter in particular. Tweets from 45 scholars were analysed qualitatively to arrive at dominant themes describing online social network practice. Findings indicate that scholars participating on Twitter (1) shared information, resources, and media relating to their professional practice; (2) shared information about their classroom and their students; (3) requested assistance from and offered suggestions to others; (4) engaged in social commentary; (5) engaged in digital identity and impression management; (6) sought to network and make connections with others; and (7) highlighted their participation in online networks other than Twitter. These findings assist the field in understanding the emerging practice of scholarly participation in online networks.     

Consequences of customer engagement behavior: when negative Facebook posts have positive effects

Sharing product information has become an integral part of today’s online social networking world. This research study addresses the effects of customer engagement behavior in online social networks on other consumers in order to understand how online social connections impact decision making. We investigate how different variations of a brand-related Facebook post trigger different response reactions. In particular, we analyze under which conditions negative posts can have positive consequences. The results of two online experiments set in a restaurant context suggest a difference when the user knows the restaurant brand. For users who are familiar with the restaurant brand, a positive effect of negative information posted by distant acquaintances is found with regard to the visiting intention of the user. The results of both experiments demonstrate that information posted by a close friend is perceived to be more diagnostic. For users not familiar with the restaurant brand, negative posts from strong ties induce the highest diagnosticity levels.     

Brand followers’ retweeting behavior on Twitter: How brand relationships influence brand electronic word-of-mouth

Twitter, the popular microblogging site, has received increasing attention as a unique communication tool that facilitates electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). To gain greater insight into this potential, this study investigates how consumers’ relationships with brands influence their engagement in retweeting brand messages on Twitter. Data from a survey of 315 Korean consumers who currently follow brands on Twitter show that those who retweet brand messages outscore those who do not on brand identification, brand trust, community commitment, community membership intention, Twitter usage frequency, and total number of postings.     

Social media and relationship development: The effect of valence and intimacy of posts

Social media is becoming an increasingly common part of everyday life. Many social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) support new interpersonal interaction methods, some of which are neither directed nor reciprocated. For example, social media users can read online 'posts' (self-disclosures) of their friends without interacting with those friends. This is vastly different to traditional face-to-face communication. Our study investigated how reading online 'posts' affects relationship development. Using a longitudinal design sampling 243 participants, we focused on the effect of the posts' valence and intimacy. We found that high intimacy posts or negative posts decreased the social attractiveness of the self-discloser. The perception of the posts and the receiver's feelings of homophily to the self-discloser mediated this relationship. Studies of offline interpersonal interaction have found similar results. In offline communication, self-disclosure perception and homophily also mediate relationship outcomes. This suggests that reading posts on social media and interacting in real life trigger similar or identical relationship formation pathways. These results support the argument that passive consumption is a new method of interaction that does not fundamentally change human psychology. While novel, passive consumption is still based on the same principles as offline communication.     

Brand interactions and social media: Enhancing user loyalty through social networking sites

This paper aims to investigate how user loyalty can be achieved and maintained through social networking sites. More specifically, we intend to test the relationships between brands, user loyalty and social media. The research thus provides insights into user-brand relationships through social media and argues how loyal customers can be through social networking websites. Although there are considerable numbers of studies about loyalty; there exists very limited work studying user loyalty through social networking websites. This research presents clearly the reasons for engaging with brands online and examines user behaviors and loyalty. Research provided strong evidence that majority of the social network users follow brand fan pages via social media, even though they have different reasons to do so. The study also measures users’ behavioral and attitudinal loyalty behaviors. Their level of trust to the information they obtained about brands through social media is also established. The hypotheses tested show that brands and customer satisfaction are both positively related to users’ behavioral loyalty.     

Cybercrime detection in online communications: The experimental case of cyberbullying detection in the Twitter network

The popularity of online social networks has created massive social communication among their users and this leads to a huge amount of user-generated communication data. In recent years, Cyberbullying has grown into a major problem with the growth of online communication and social media. Cyberbullying has been recognized recently as a serious national health issue among online social network users and developing an efficient detection model holds tremendous practical significance. In this paper, we have proposed set of unique features derived from Twitter; network, activity, user, and tweet content, based on these feature, we developed a supervised machine learning solution for detecting cyberbullying in the Twitter. An evaluation demonstrates that our developed detection model based on our proposed features, achieved results with an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.943 and an f-measure of 0.936. These results indicate that the proposed model based on these features provides a feasible solution to detecting Cyberbullying in online communication environments. Finally, we compare result obtained using our proposed features with the result obtained from two baseline features. The comparison outcomes show the significance of the proposed features.     

Gift or threat? An examination of voice of the customer: The case of MyStarbucksIdea.com

In Web 2.0 environment, the influence of customers’ voices is increasing. Many companies have built their online brand communities for listening to the diverse voices of the customer (VOC) and promoting customer’s engagement. The information obtained from these brand communities is exploited for organizational innovation. However, the VOC with negative contents could possibly present threats to a firm in an online context. In this study, we develop a research model that includes the types of customer expectations, opinion leader engagement, negative valence of VOC, interaction, and innovation. Subsequently, we empirically validate the effects of customer expectations on the interactions among community members and organizational innovation by using a dataset from MyStarbucksIdea.com. The results show that the effects of VOC on the interaction within a brand community and organizational innovation are different depending on the types of expectation in the VOC. Opinion leaders’ engagement positively affects the interaction among community members. Moreover, the negative valence of VOC affects the relationships between customer expectations and interactions, and results in a possible threat within an online brand community. The research results give some insight into managing the brand community and analyzing the VOCs so as to achieve organizational innovation.     

The effects of collective MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) play on gamers’ online and offline social capital

This study examines the impact of collective MMORPG play on gamers’ social capital in both the virtual world and the real world. Collective MMORPG play is conceptualized as the frequency of joint gaming actions and gamers’ assessment of the experience in MMORPG guilds and groups. Social capital at the individual level refers to the resources and support provided by bonding and bridging social networks; collective-level social capital refers to people’s civic engagement. A two-wave online survey was conducted to collect data from 232 Chinese MMORPG players.Two structural equation models were developed to test whether collective play influences offline social capital via the mediation of online social capital; the results did not demonstrate the existence of mediation effects. Specifically, collective play positively influences gamers’ online bonding social capital, online bridging social capital and online civic engagement. The effect of collective play on offline bonding and bridging social capital is not significant; the effect of online bonding/bridging social capital on offline bonding/bridging social capital is not significant either. The study finds a significantly positive impact of collective play on offline civic engagement. The effect of online civic engagement on offline civic engagement is not significant. In contrast with collective play, the time of gaming is found to negatively influence online and offline social capital.This study contributes to the knowledge of social capital because it tests the effects of new media on online and offline social capital in the Chinese culture. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence for the positive effects of online games and highlights the social experience in MMORPG play and how it influences gamers’ social networks and collective participation.     

Attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter: A survey

In recent years, news media have been hugely disrupted by news promotion, commentary and sharing in online, social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit). This disruption has been the subject of a significant literature that has largely used AI techniques – machine learning, text analytics and network models – to both (i) understand the factors underlying audience attention and news dissemination on social media (e.g., effects of popularity, type of day) and (ii) provide new tools/guidelines for journalists to better disseminate their news via these social media. This paper provides an integrative review of the literature on the professional reporting of news on Twitter; focusing on how journalists and news outlets use Twitter as a platform to disseminate news, and on the factors that impact readers’ attention and engagement with that news on Twitter. Using the precise definition of a news-tweet (i.e., divided into user, content and context features), the survey structures the literature to reveal the main findings on features affecting audience attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter. From this analysis, it then considers the most effective guidelines for digital journalists to better disseminate news in the future.     

The power of comments: fostering social interactions in microblog networks

Today’s ubiquitous online social networks serve multiple purposes, including social communication (Facebook, Renren), and news dissemination (Twitter). But how does a social network’s design define its functionality? Answering this would need social network providers to take a proactive role in defining and guiding user behavior. In this paper, we first take a step to answer this question with a data-driven approach, through measurement and analysis of the Sina Weibo microblogging service. Often compared to Twitter because of its format,Weibo is interesting for our analysis because it serves as a social communication tool and a platform for news dissemination, too. While similar to Twitter in functionality, Weibo provides a distinguishing feature, comments, allowing users to form threaded conversations around a single tweet. Our study focuses on this feature, and how it contributes to interactions and improves social engagement.We use analysis of comment interactions to uncover their role in social interactivity, and use comment graphs to demonstrate the structure of Weibo users interactions. Finally, we present a case study that shows the impact of comments in malicious user detection, a key application on microblogging systems. That is, using properties of comments significantly improves the accuracy in both modeling and detection of malicious users.     

Becoming Friends in Online Brand Communities: Evidence From China

With the aid of information technology, consumers have increasingly engaged in social interaction in online brand communities. How can these strangers make friends online? Drawing on embeddedness theory and media richness theory, we examine the antecedents and intermediate mechanisms of online friendship. We theorize that online brand community interactivity aided by instant messaging technology is the main driving force of online friendship, whereas social presence and a sense of yuan (a Chinese concept describing predetermined relations) mediate online friendship development. Online friendship in turn enhances consumer online brand community commitment. We test our conceptual model with a sample of consumers from Chinese online sporting goods forums. The results support our hypotheses and inform online brand community research and practice.     

Discovering public sentiment in social media for predicting stock movement of publicly listed companies

The popularity of many social media sites has prompted both academic and practical research on the possibility of mining social media data for the analysis of public sentiment. Studies have suggested that public emotions shown through Twitter could be well correlated with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. However, it remains unclear how public sentiment, as reflected on social media, can be used to predict stock price movement of a particular publicly-listed company. In this study, we attempt to fill this research void by proposing a technique, called SMeDA-SA, to mine Twitter data for sentiment analysis and then predict the stock movement of specific listed companies. For the purpose of experimentation, we collected 200 million tweets that mentioned one or more of 30 companies that were listed in NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. SMeDA-SA performs its task by first extracting ambiguous textual messages from these tweets to create a list of words that reflects public sentiment. SMeDA-SA then made use of a data mining algorithm to expand the word list by adding emotional phrases so as to better classify sentiments in the tweets. With SMeDA-SA, we discover that the stock movement of many companies can be predicted rather accurately with an average accuracy over 70%. This paper describes how SMeDA-SA can be used to mine social media date for sentiments. It also presents the key implications of our study.     

Price competition in e-tailing under service and recognition differentiation

The Internet has significantly increased the bargaining power of consumers. Many online shopping search engines allow consumers to find most retailers that sell a specific product, compare product prices, and review detailed store ratings. With competition just a click away, online retailers have little control over where consumers would shop. Offering the lowest price alone does not always guarantee that consumers will come and buy at your site. Other non-price attributes, such as service quality and a merchant’s brand recognition, also play important roles in helping online retailers to build competitive advantages. In this paper, we present a model of price competition that assumes e-tailers can mainly differentiate themselves by providing different levels of service and by establishing a different online recognition. Closed-form equilibrium solutions are obtained for the different scenarios that may arise in this model. Based on such solutions, we give managerial insights on how e-tailers should position themselves when parameters such as service cost, service levels, and recognition are varied.     

Key values driving continued interaction on brand pages in social media: An examination across genders

Brand pages in social media provide companies with a competitive marketing tool to create added value for their firms and customers. Past studies suggest that understanding what customers really value in brand pages is the most vital step in promoting their continued interaction, and that the relative impacts of customer values on continued interaction are contingent on individual demographic factors such as gender. However, little research has examined the relationships between customer values and their intention to engage in continued interaction, and how these relationships are moderated by gender, in the context of brand pages. This study identified eight value factors to measure customer values on brand pages, then examined their impacts on customers' continued interaction intention, and studied gender effects on the latter relationship. Our proposed hypotheses are mostly supported by data collected from users of Sina Microblog brand pages and analyzed by partial least squares.     

“When Is Short,Sweet?” Selection Uncertainty and Online Review Presentations

Online customer reviews are an important part of e-commerce product selection. When used effectively, online reviews may reduce the uncertainty inherent in making product selection decisions online, but how best to deal with thousands of online customer reviews? Past research considers online review summarization, where reviews are reduced to numeric ratings, key phrases, keywords or product characteristics. However, in their original form, online reviews contain the carefully crafted narratives of past customers, elements of which may not be amenable to summarization. In this research, we present findings of a laboratory experiment which examines the impact of review summarization when evaluating different types of products online. Key findings include evidence that perceptions of product selection uncertainty depend on online review presentation format and the category of the product under consideration. Additionally, the study provides evidence that the e-commerce retailers may benefit from varying online review presentations across specific types of products.     

The impact of online real-time interactivity on patronage intention: The use of avatars

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of online real-time interactivity on the desire of users to visit and to purchase products/services from the company in the future. Online real-time interactivity has been increased by the use of avatars. We also investigated the antecedents of online real-time interactivity by focusing on trust, emotional appeal, and social presence. As far as the methodology is concerned, we designated companies using avatars on their websites. We asked respondents to visit these websites and then fill in our questionnaire. We received 945 questionnaires back. As we had several latent variables, we used partial least squares (PLS), a variance-based structural equation modeling method. The results show that online real-time interactivity significantly increases the patronage intention. The results also illustrate the impact of the degree of trust and the emotional appeal on user's perception about the online real-time interactivity. Nevertheless, the impact of the emotional appeal is less relevant compared to the degree of trust. Moreover, the degree of trust in the information found on the website explains user's emotional appeal during the conversation. Finally, avatar's social presence has a significant impact on trust and emotional appeal. Our results have immediate and direct implications for avatars' developers and companies who want to invest in improving the real-time interactivity of their website.     

Befriended to polarise? The impact of friend identity on review polarisation—A quasi-experiment

Opinion polarisation in social media has recently become a significant issue. The existing literature mainly attributes polarisation to online friends' informational social influence, that is, users are more likely to interact with others with similar opinions, which leads to the echo chamber effect. However, the impact of social interaction on individual polarisation may also result from normative social influence, which varies with social settings on the platform. In this paper, we leverage a quasi-experiment to investigate the normative social influence of online friends on focal users' review polarity. We use fixed effects and difference-in-differences approaches, along with propensity score matching, to address the potential endogeneity in users' friend function adoption decisions. Our results indicate that adopting the friend function leads users to post less extreme ratings. We further separate the reviews into positive and negative, finding that the reduction in the review polarity for positive reviews is more prominent than for negative ones. Regarding user heterogeneity, our causal forest analysis uncovers that users with a higher engagement level on the platform are less affected by adopting the friend function than those with less engagement. Our study has clear implications for managers and platform designers, highlighting the importance of social function design in reducing social media induced polarisation.     

Understanding online consumers’ purchase intentions: a contribution from social network theory

There is a dynamic and interconnected international setting shaped by the power of the Internet and social media. To gain more consumers, understand their behaviours and needs, and maintain closest relationships with them, businesses should understand how consumers behave in social media and how they vary in their purchase intentions. In the scope of the study, we integrate the social network theory and the theory of planned behaviour to analyse online consumers’ purchase intentions and to investigate their structural positions by analysing their friendships in social networks. We target Twitter users to conduct analysis due to Twitter's popularity in use, market penetration, and opportunity to work with open-source data. This study contributes to a better theoretical understanding of online consumers’ purchase intentions by integrating multiple theoretical perspectives. It expands the literature by considering both online consumers’ friendship network in Twitter and their individual online purchasing intentions. The study also guides e-marketers to design proper strategies for potential and current consumers and target the right sets of people in the social networks.