A Bibliometric Review of Research Trends in Social CRM

Social customer relationship management (social CRM) is a relatively new domain, numerous studies have begun to emerge along the border between CRM and social media. This study uses the method of bibliometrics to sort out and analyze the development of social CRM study, and conducts statistical analysis and co-citation network of the literature sample. There has been a significant growth in the social CRM literature with America, China and England being the main contributors. The newest social CRM hotspots focus on the value creation and technical approach of social CRM. The research ideas and conclusions of this paper are of some enlightenment to the academic research and practical application of social CRM

Social media marketing in Italian luxury fashion

Industries nowadays have been comfortable with the incorporation of social media to their marketing strategy. Italy has been known as a major center of the European fashion industry, a sector that is also following the social media marketing trends. This paper provides empirical findings on Italian luxury fashion brands? social media marketing activities. We present and analyze two case studies of Italian luxury fashion brands: Gucci and The Bridge (Il Ponte Pelletteria). Gucci is one of worldwide leading Italian fashion companies and The Bridge is a SME fashion brand that focuses on leather products. This study is based on a conceptual framework on social media marketing strategy synthesized from extensive social media marketing literature. The research methodology includes content analysis of Gucci?s and The Bridge?s public posts on their Facebook brand pages and Twitter. Our findings suggest that social media actions implemented by both brands are directed toward promotion and sales marketing activities. However, there are differences on the specific actions carried out by both brands, and the use the companies make of the two social media platforms. This paper provides valuable insight for framing social media marketing strategic actions and set the basis for social media performance measurements, especially among luxury fashion brands

Platform Competition: A Systematic and Interdisciplinary Review of the Literature

Over the past three decades, platform competition—the competition between firms that facilitate transactions and govern interactions between two or more distinct user groups who are connected via an indirect network—has attracted significant interest from the fields of management and organizations, information systems, economics, and marketing. Despite common interests in research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts by scholars from across these fields, the literature has developed mostly in isolated fashion. This article offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on platform competition by analyzing a sample of 333 articles published between 1985 and 2019. The review contributes by (a) documenting how the literature on platform competition has evolved; (b) outlining four themes of shared scholarly interest, including how network effects generate “winner-takes-all” dynamics that influence strategies, such as pricing and quality; how network externalities and platform strategy interact with corporate-level decisions, such as vertical integration or diversification into complementary goods; how heterogeneity in the platform and its users influences platform dynamics; and how the platform “hub” orchestrates value creation and capture in the overall ecosystem; and (c) highlighting several areas for future research. The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of the platform competition research that helps to advance our knowledge of how platforms compete to create and capture value

THREE ESSAYS ON COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES FOR DIGITAL PLATFORM BUSINESSES

As businesses in many industries adopt the platform business model, many aspects of the traditional business are going through a shake-up, including competition and strategies for gaining competitive advantage. When platforms are competing with each other, the network effects due to having a strong installed base create a strategic advantage and shape the competition. Additionally, another level of competition in the world of platforms is between complementors on a given platform which is also influenced by the presence of the network effects. In the three studies of this dissertation, we focus on competitive strategies for digital platform businesses. In the first essay, we look at competition between platforms and examine the emergence of Winners-Take-Some (WTS) market outcome in IT platform markets, where such markets are expected to yield a Winner-Takes-All (WTA) outcome. We use the cyclical video game console market as an appropriate context to investigate the influential factors in the market outcome in platform markets. We find a consistent increase in multi-homing among the most popular video-games that can pave the way for the emergence of WTS outcome. In the second essay, we are turning our focus to the strategies that platforms can adopt to improve emerging success metrics such as user engagement. We examine how digital content platforms can improve users’ engagement by providing popularity information signals. We evaluate the effect of conflicting and aligned information signals on users’ engagement in the context of music content platforms. We find that conflicting popularity information signals are more effective in increasing user engagement than the aligned popularity information signals. In the third essay and in the context of mobile app platforms, we focus on the competition between complementors. We study the role of app category characteristics on the performance of mobile app developers who offer apps in those categories and strive to gain competitive advantage. We evaluate category concentration and category popularity as two important factors and find that respectively, they negatively and positively influence new app’s performance for a given developer. We find that the negative effect of category concentration is stronger than the positive effect of category popularity

Social Media Influencers- A Review of Operations Management Literature

This literature review provides a comprehensive survey of research on Social Media Influencers (SMIs) across the fields of SMIs in marketing, seeding strategies, influence maximization and applications of SMIs in society. Specifically, we focus on examining the methods employed by researchers to reach their conclusions. Through our analysis, we identify opportunities for future research that align with emerging areas and unexplored territories related to theory, context, and methodology. This approach offers a fresh perspective on existing research, paving the way for more effective and impactful studies in the future. Additionally, gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying principles and methodologies of these concepts enables more informed decision-making when implementing these strategie

The Economics of Public Beta Testing

A growing number of software firms now rely on public beta testing to improve the quality of their products before commercial release. While the benefits resulting from improved software reliability are well recognized, some important market-related benefits have not been studied. Through word-of-mouth, public beta testers can accelerate the diffusion of a software product after its release. Additionally, because of network effects, public beta testers can increase users’ valuation of a product. In this study, we consider both reliability-related and market-related benefits, and develop models to determine the optimal number of public beta testers and the optimal duration of testing. Our analyses show that public beta testing can be profitable even if word-of-mouth and network effects are the only benefits. Furthermore, when both benefits are considered, there is significant “economies of scope”—the net profit increases at a faster rate when both word-of-mouth and network effects are significant than when only one benefit is present. Finally, our sensitivity analyses demonstrate that public beta testing remains highly valuable to software firms over a wide range of testing and market conditions. In particular, firms will realize greater profits when recruiting public beta testers who are interested in the software but unable to afford it