Measuring consumers' engagement with brand-related social-media content: development and validation of a scale that identifies levels of social-media engagement with brands

The main purpose of this study is to develop a scale to measure consumer's engagement with social media brand-related content. The reported scale (CESBC) comprises three dimensions: consumption, contribution, and creation. Qualitative techniques were used to generate an initial pool of items that capture different levels of consumer engagement with social media brand-related content. Quantitative data from a consumer survey (=2252) was then collected in two phases to calibrate and validate the ensuing scale. Results confirmed the structure and psychometric properties of the CESBC. As expected, each subscale is significantly correlated with nomological network constructs, i.e., brand equity and brand attitudes

The Romantic Collective Author

Although the romantic collective author is a much more elusive creature than its romantic individual counterpart, it can be discerned amidst the proliferation of expression on the Internet. This article first outlines the ways in which the romantic author effect operates through both its genius and its arbiter prongs within collaborative authorship practices in digital networks. It next turns to scientific collaboration, where this author effect is attenuated, to assess whether scientific authorship practices might contribute to a more realistic and less romantic understanding of expressive authorship practices. A subsequent case study of collaborative digital authorship by Wikipedia contributors uncovers some of the underlying social processes giving rise to Wikipedia’s position of collective genius and authority. Analysis of these collaborative authorship processes reveals implicit certification functions, which can obscure various biases that should be addressed in order to shape a more inclusive and reliable knowledge environment

The Romantic Collective Author

Although the romantic collective author is a much more elusive creature than its romantic individual counterpart, it can be discerned amidst the proliferation of expression on the Internet. This Article first outlines the ways in which the romantic author effect operates through both its genius and its arbiter prongs within collaborative authorship practices in digital networks. It next turns to scientific collaboration, where this author effect is attenuated, to assess whether scientific authorship practices might contribute to a more realistic and less romantic understanding of expressive authorship practices. A subsequent case study of collaborative digital authorship by Wikipedia contributors uncovers some of the underlying social processes giving rise to Wikipedia\u27s position of collective genius and authority. Analysis of these collaborative authorship processes reveals implicit certification functions, which can obscure various biases that should be addressed in order to shape a more inclusive and reliable knowledge environment

The Romantic Collective Author

Although the romantic collective author is a much more elusive creature than its romantic individual counterpart, it can be discerned amidst the proliferation of expression on the Internet. This Article first outlines the ways in which the romantic author effect operates through both its genius and its arbiter prongs within collaborative authorship practices in digital networks. It next turns to scientific collaboration, where this author effect is attenuated, to assess whether scientific authorship practices might contribute to a more realistic and less romantic understanding of expressive authorship practices. A subsequent case study of collaborative digital authorship by Wikipedia contributors uncovers some of the underlying social processes giving rise to Wikipedia\u27s position of collective genius and authority. Analysis of these collaborative authorship processes reveals implicit certification functions, which can obscure various biases that should be addressed in order to shape a more inclusive and reliable knowledge environment

Participatory Design for User-generated Content: Understanding the challenges and moving forward

Research on participatory design (PD) dates back to the 1970s, and has focused historically on internal organization settings. Recently, the proliferation of content-producing technologies such as social media and crowdsourcing has led to the explosion of user-generated content (UGC) that originates outside of organizations. Participative challenges in UGC differ from those in traditional organizational, as well as other distributed multi-user, settings; e.g.; open source software, multi-party systems. UGC is an interesting emerging domain and exploring PD in this context may contribute to knowledge and practices in PD itself. In this paper, we analyze the challenges and opportunities associated with PD in organization-directed UGC development, illustrate these with two UGC projects, and propose fruitful directions for future research

The Web 2.0 as Marketing Tool: Opportunities for SMEs

The new generation of Internet applications widely known as Social Media or Web 2.0 offers corporations a whole range of opportunities for improving their marketing efficiency and internal operations. Web 2.0 applications have already become part of the daily life of an increasing number of consumers who regard them as prime channels of communication, information exchange, sharing of expertise, dissemination of individual creativity and entertainment. Web logs, podcasts, online forums and social networks are rapidly becoming major sources of customer information and influence while the effectiveness of traditional mass media is rapidly decreasing. Using the social media as a marketing tool is an issue attracting increasing attention. The hitherto experience is that large public corporations are more likely to make use of such instruments as part of their marketing and internal operations (McKinsey, 2007).The paper defines the Web 2.0 phenomenon and based on the experience of large corporations examines how SMEs could engage the various Web 2.0 instruments in order to efficiently market their products, improve customer relations, increase customer retention and enhance internal operations

Antecedents driving the different levels of behavioral engagement in online travel communities

With the rapid development of online travel communities, understanding the determinants of users ’ engagement with the online travel communities is critically important for researchers and practitioners. The purpose of this study is to understand which environmental cues drive the engagement behaviors. Specifically, by using a rich data set from a large travel knowledge sharing website and seemingly unrelated regression model, we investigate and compare the antecedents leading to two different behavioral engagements including liking and social interaction. We find that information-, source-, and social interaction-level cues are associated with these behavioral engagements. The results also demonstrate the differential effectiveness of these cues between these two engagement behaviors. Our empirical findings provide theoretical and practical implication for online travel community operators to build a vibrant and successful online travel community

Using the appraisal theory to analyze online restaurant reviews in the Lisbon region

Mestrado em Ciências EmpresariaisUser-generated content on Web 2.0 touristic websites can be important both for clients and companies of the sector. In the present work it were analyzed 503 online reviews, divided into 2769 sentence segments, from 22 restaurants in the Lisbon region, during the summer period 2012, on Tripadvisor.com. Resorting to an exploratory approach, the objective of this work is to identify the presence of attitude (affect, appreciation and judgement), in accordance with the Appraisal Theory. As well as verify the most mentioned attributes and polarity in each segment. Inter-rater agreement between two other evaluators was also checked, for attitude. The results obtained indicate that the dominant attitude is appreciation with positive polarity. Judgement is usually present when the service and Staff are mentioned, while affect is not often cited in this sample. This indicates that users tend to be more objective and less emotional on their restaurants evaluation. The most mentioned attributes were Quality of Food, Staff and Communication and Price, the majority of these had also positive polarity, which indicates that even in times of economic contention, Quality of Food should be the main focus. The inter-rater agreement was satisfactory. It is also concluded that user-generated content can be useful for managers to better understand the motivations, necessities and expectations of their clients and, in that way, focus their communication campaigns, products and services in order to answer these issues.A informação gerada pelos utilizadores em sítios turísticos Web 2.0 pode ser potencialmente importante tanto para clientes como para as empresas do sector. Neste trabalho foram analisados 503 comentários online, posteriormente divididos em 2769 segmentos de frase, provenientes do site Tripadisor.com referentes a 22 restaurantes da região de Lisboa, durante o período Verão de 2012. O objetivo do trabalho passou por, recorrendo a uma abordagem exploratória, identificar os tipos de atitude presente (afeto, apreciação e julgamento), de acordo com a Teoria da Avaliação. Assim como, verificar os tipos de atributos mais mencionados e a polaridade em cada segmento. Aferiu-se ainda a concordância da avaliação de atitude, recorrendo a dois avaliadores externos. Os resultados obtidos indicam que a atitude dominante é a apreciação com polaridade positiva. Julgamento é mencionado geralmente quando se aborda o serviço e o Staff, enquanto afeto foi pouco citado nesta amostra. Isto indica que os utilizadores tendem a ser mais objetivos e menos emocionais nas suas avaliações a restaurantes. Os atributos mais mencionados são Qualidade da Comida, Staff e Comunicação e Preço, todos com maioritariamente avaliação positiva, o que demonstra que mesmo em tempos de contenção a Qualidade da Comida deve continuar a ser a principal aposta. A concordância obtida foi satisfatória. Conclui-se ainda que a análise detalhada de comentários pode ser útil para que os gestores compreendam melhor as motivações, necessidades e expectativas dos seus clientes e dessa forma orientem as suas campanhas de comunicação e os seus produtos e serviços de forma a dar-lhes resposta

Too Crowded to Disclose! Exploring the Relationship Between Online Crowdedness and Self-Disclosure

Nowadays, people communicate with many others online. Of the online sites, product review pages have become an important communication medium on which consumers share information about a product. Drawing upon this trend, we examined the factors that affect reviewers’ self-disclosure behavior. Prior studies have found that privacy behaviors such as self-disclosure are affected by diverse contextual factors. In this study, we propose that online crowdedness is an important contextual factor for self-disclosure behavior. Using review data from the largest online apparel rental site in the U.S., we empirically explored the relationship between online crowdedness and self-disclosure behavior. The result shows that online crowdedness can discourage self-disclosure behavior

INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF SELFPRESENTATION AT SOCIAL NETWORK SITES ON PURCHASE BEHAVIOR: A TEXT MINING AND ECONOMETRIC APPROACH

With advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), companies and platforms look to use the increasing volume and diversity of user-generated content (UGC) to predict consumer behavior, but with mixed results. In this study, we propose a text mining technique to find support for self-presentation in online social media and show that this is correlated with the content producer’s offline purchase behaviour. We use unique datasets from a social network site (SNS) and an offline fashion retailer to find that: 1) while public and private volume and sentiment metrics leads to non-significant predictions, the sentiment divergence can significantly explain offline purchases, 2) users who engage in SNS for self-presentation spend less money and buy less quantities, and 3) however, they spend more when exposed to specific site features that inspire self-presentation, like brand pages. Marketers and platform owners can benefit from our results by designing appropriate features to target such users