Effectiveness of Corporate Social Media Activities to Increase Relational Outcomes

This study applies social media analytics to investigate the impact of different corporate social media activities on user word of mouth and attitudinal loyalty. We conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately 5 million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of 28 large global companies. We empirically identify different social media activities in terms of social media management strategies (using social media management tools or the web-frontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or disseminative). We find positive effects of social media management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational communication on public perception

Exploring the commercial value of social networks: enhancing consumers’ brand experience through Facebook pages

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors which impact upon the consumers’ willingness to utilise company Facebook pages and e-word-of mouth by proposing and testing a conceptual framework which is inspired by theories in marketing and information systems fields. The authors believe that only by applying both theories will provide a more complete understanding of the relationship between brand experience and Facebook. The research model attempts to illustrate the factors according to customers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their impact on brand experience, brand Facebook page loyalty and e-word-of-mouth (E-WOM). Design/methodology/approach – The authors adopted an online survey method for data collection. The subjects the authors used were Facebook users. The data were collected in Taiwan over spring 2011. The authors then used the structural equation model to analyse the data collected. Findings – The findings suggest that users are influenced by the technical characterises of a brand Facebook page, such as ease of use and usefulness, which might be combated by attempting to reduce customer effort when accessing Facebook pages. The authors conclude that customer effort influenced brand experience and consequently loyalty to brand Facebook pages and E-WOM. Research limitations/implications – The limitations of this study relate to the investigation of consumer perspectives in a specific geographical context and time frame. Originality/value – The study’s contributions are both theoretical and practical, as it offers new insights into brand experience attitudes in an online environment and useful insights to companies willing to market themselves on Facebook. Keywords Marketing, Facebook, Virtual community, Extrinsic motivations, Intrinsic motivations Paper type Research pape

Crowdsourced real-world sensing: sentiment analysis and the real-time web

The advent of the real-time web is proving both challeng- ing and at the same time disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis oers a promising direction for modelling the text content available in real-time streams. This paper reviews the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis and discusses the motivations and challenges behind such a direction

Recommender Systems

The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking, which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports

Word of Mouth, the Importance of Reviews and Ratings in Tourism Marketing

The Internet and social media have given place to what is commonly known as the democratization of content and this phenomenon is changing the way that consumers and companies interact. Business strategies are shifting from influencing consumers directly and induce sales to mediating the influence that Internet users have on each other. A consumer review is “a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and sentiment, found and unfound tidbits, experiences, and even rumor” (Blackshaw & Nazarro, 2006). Consumers' comments are seen as honest and transparent, but it is their subjective perception what shapes the behavior of other potential consumers. With the emergence of the Internet, tourists search for information and reviews of destinations, hotels or services. Several studies have highlighted the great influence of online reputation through reviews and ratings and how it affects purchasing decisions by others (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015). These reviews are seen as unbiased and trustworthy, and considered to reduce uncertainty and perceived risks (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Park & Nicolau, 2015). Before choosing a destination, tourists are likely to spend a significant amount of time searching for information including reviews of other tourists posted on the Internet. The average traveler browses 38 websites prior to purchasing vacation packages (Schaal, 2013), which may include tourism forums, online reviews in booking sites and other generic social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names that are long and difficult for humans to read. In this paper, we study how people perceive, understand, and use onion services based on data from 17 semi-structured interviews and an online survey of 517 users. We find that users have an incomplete mental model of onion services, use these services for anonymity and have varying trust in onion services in general. Users also have difficulty discovering and tracking onion sites and authenticating them. Finally, users want technical improvements to onion services and better information on how to use them. Our findings suggest various improvements for the security and usability of Tor onion services, including ways to automatically detect phishing of onion services, more clear security indicators, and ways to manage onion domain names that are difficult to remember.Comment: Appeared in USENIX Security Symposium 201