Profiles of social networking sites users in the Netherlands

Online social networking has become a reality and integral part of the daily personal, social and business life. The extraordinary increase of the user numbers of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the rampant creation of online communities presents businesses with many challenges and opportunities. From the commercial perspective, the SNS are an interesting and promising field: online social networks are important sources of market intelligence and also offer interesting options for co-operation, networking and marketing. For SMEs especially the Social Networking Sites represent a simple and low cost solution for listening the customer’s voice, reaching potential customers and creating extensive business networks. This paper presents the results of a national survey mapping the demographic, social and behavioral characteristics of the Dutch users of SNS. The study identifies four different user profiles and proposes a segmentation framework as basis for better understanding the nature and behavior of the participants in online communities. The findings present new insights to marketing strategists eager to use the communication potential of such communities; the findings are also interesting for businesses willing to explore the potential of online networking as a low cost yet very efficient alternative to physical, traditional networking

Social networking and transnational capitalism

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have become a key component of users’ experience of the internet. Whilst much has been made of the social dynamics of online SNS, the influence of the structures and operations of these sites – and the business models behind them – on users is rarely accounted for. This paper argues that behind the social behaviours sup- ported by SNS, there is a growing shift towards viewing online communities as commodities, and SNS as an extension of mainstream capitalist ideologies fostered by existing patterns of commercialization and consumption. Using the works of Gramsci, Gill and Hardt & Negri to provide a critical grounding, this paper explores the popular SNS site ‘Facebook’ and suggests that SNS may feel to the users to be free, social, personal, but in fact SNS are business as usual

Success in Challenging Times: Generating Social Capital [Summary Report]

Prompted by findings from the 2012 Kingston Smith funded national survey, Success in challenging times: Key lessons for UK SMEs, this new study focuses on the ways in which SMEs use and benefit from social capital is created through both offline activities such as networking events, and online activities including social media use. Offline and online networking activities are not mutually exclusive alternatives for SMEs. Successful SMEs network with a number of different communities, integrating a combination of both offline and online methods. SMEs’ websites are crucial and need to be optimised to improve search engine positioning. Social media sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn are used widely to both showcase the business and build relationships with customers, but are not considered a substitute for face-to-face networking. The most popular reason for SMEs using social media is to develop their business image or to market products. The fast, easy and low cost access to people and businesses provided by Web 2.0 and social media helps them do this better. Online networking can enable SMEs to overcome the drawbacks of traditional face-to-face contact, such as limited numbers and diversity, and the associated high costs. SMEs that proactively engage with social media can systematically raise their profiles to successfully compete with larger organisations. Few SMEs claim to be experts in social media use. IT and social media are regarded as necessary evils and SMEs consider that there is no choice other than to engage very proactively in these areas. However, there is a need to manage this engagement strategically, along with traditional networking, to avoid a disproportionate amount of resource being dedicated to this area. Face-to-face (offline) networking events remain the most important form of all types of SME networking with roughly two thirds of SMEs devoting one to six hours per week to this activity. In general, locally oriented SMEs without a scalable business offering prefer face-to-face networking events, whereas globally oriented non-scalable SMEs put significant effort into social media. Networks included customers, associates and former employees who had moved on to become independent contractors. Networking is about making contacts, outside the SME, who can offer feedback or advice or be used to outsource work. These networks are regarded as a ‘community of people’ who might join in with a new business proposal or be used to provide external expertise. The methods SMEs use to increase social capital, must be fit for purpose and appropriate to their business model. Social media are complementary to, rather than a substitute for, traditional networking and events. The challenge facing SMEs is how best to integrate their online and offline activities to complement their business and generate social capital

Knowledge Sharing in Social Networking Sites: How Context Impacts Individuals’ Social and Intrinsic Motivation to Contribute in Online Communities

Knowledge-sharing research in online communities has primarily focused on communities of practice and the social factors of knowledge-sharing behavior in organizational contexts. Academic research has not rigorously examined non-business-oriented online communities as venues for facilitating knowledge sharing. Thus, in this paper, we address this research gap by examining the contextual roles of anonymity and community type on an individual’s social and individual drivers of knowledge-sharing attitude in social networking sites. Using social capital theory as a theoretical backbone, we propose and empirically validate a relational model through a survey of 329 users of Facebook, LinkedIn, and CNET. From analyzing the data with the partial least squares (PLS) method, we found strong explanatory power of the proposed research model. We discuss our study’s implications for both research and practice

An Examination of Automobile Online Brand Communities (AOBCs) in the U.S. and South Korea: Linkages among Motivation, Experience, and Satisfaction

This study explores automobile online brand communities in the different cultural contexts between South Korea and the United States. The core assumption is that members of automobile online brand communities in different cultures have different motivation orientations to visit their online communities and have different community experiences. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions were utilized as embedded cultural circumstances in examining relationships between different motivation orientations and community experiences. Two steps of qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted to determine the relationships among community members’ motivation orientations, community experiences, and satisfaction. The study found that Korean automobile online brand community (KAOBC) members have stronger social, business, and communication motivations than American automobile online brand community (AAOBC) members. These community members’ motivations also influenced their community experiences. Both social network motivations and communication motivations are crucial predictors for four community experiences: Community loyalty, trust, membership identity, and word of mouth (WOM). Community members who have a stronger social networking and/or communication motivation are more likely to have a higher level of community loyalty, trust, membership identity, and WOM. Finally, community experiences were the most important indicators of the satisfaction of online community members among nationality, demographic factors, and motivation orientations

User Acceptance of Social Shopping Sites: A Research Proposal

With social networking and Web 2.0 technologies becoming increasingly popular, they pose great potentials and challenges for the future of E-commerce. Social shopping sites emerged as the latest developments to leverage the power of social networking with online shopping. Users on social shopping sites can post product recommendations, create wish lists, post photos, make purchases, and form social shopping communities. Despite enormous business interests and potentials, little is known about whether users will adopt such systems. This research-in-progress paper proposes to apply and extend the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to understand the adoption of social shopping sites, and the factors that lead to the adoption. TAM posits two factors, the perceived ease of use and the perceived usefulness, determine a person\u27s intention to use a new IT. This study explores two additional antecedents in the context of social shopping adoption: an online shopper\u27s tendency to social comparison, and trust in the website. The extended TAM model will be tested through surveys. This research is among the very first to systematically examine the merge of social networking with E-commerce technologies. With the increasing importance of Web 2.0 to E-commerce, this study is timely and important

Implicit Community in Online Social Groups: Understand Consumer Network and Purchase Behavior

Social networking platforms, such as WeChat and Facebook, increasingly become an important channel for advertising and transaction. Despite the growing importance of social network in facilitating social commerce, there has been limited research focusing on the dynamic implicit communities within the social network. This paper proposes a framework for gathering business intelligence from one popular social media platform in China (WeChat) by collecting and analyzing social network contents and consumer’s interaction networks. It is one of the first studies to our knowledge that identifies and analyzes implicit communities from social media platform for social commerce. We conduct case studies in a relationship-based online social group of WeChat. We first extract and analyze implicit communities, representing interactions among users and product vendors, from a large dataset. This is then combined with interaction-based content analysis to identify position of product vendors from these identified implicit communities. After examining the influence of network properties and community structures on consumer’s purchase, we propose a chat log-based content analysis to identify product-related information (including product attribute information, user experience information, social support information, and entertainment information). Finally, by combining those information and network structure, we build weighted implicit communities and calculate the influence of these weighted implicit communities on product vendors’ income. Our case studies demonstrate how to use the framework and appropriate techniques to effectively collect, extract, and analyze implicit communities related to the topics of interest, reveal novel patterns in the interactions and communities, and answer important business intelligence questions in the domains

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ONLINE RATING, HOTEL STAR CATEGORY AND ROOM PRICING POWER

In the digital way of doing business we see a substantial rise of online customer feedback and customer information sharing communities. The role and importance of social media has considerably increased in the past several years and businesses can no longer overlook its impact. For companies, the acceptance of such sources are not only tangential rather they are becoming central in how they approach their operations. Numerous web based platforms that include social networking, online communities and review sites are critical reference points for companies while deciding how to structure and price their products and services. The tourism and hospitality industry is no exception to this phenomenon, as a matter of fact, it is at the very forefront of this new trend that we are observing. Some of these sites are more popular than others, such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Travelocity or Expedia but all of them affect how service providers conduct their business, specifically in the area of pricing. The aim of this paper is to examine and quantify the relationship between customer online rating, hotel category and room pricing power in hotel industry. Findings suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between hotel star category, online rating and service provider’s room pricing power. Moreover, results indicate a strong correlation between TripAdvisor and Booking.com online customer reviews, suggesting that contrary to popular beliefs, TripAdvisor is as reliable as Booking.com

Setting Strategies In Social Networking Sites: Community-Based Indicators For Small And Medium Industries In Malaysia

Theconstant growth of data on social media that deals with the business nature generated by online communities has inundated business owners and marketers with business-related conversations. The consideration, preference, and action stages about brands and products are easily influenced by the community members in social networking sites (SNS), making the flow of information become multidirectional, interconnected, and difficult to predict. Therefore, firms and brands are called upon to attract the attentionof these communities by focusing on building, enhancing and maintaining interactions through an effective and strategic approach to SNS marketing. This paper will gain insights on such valuable information by integrating findings from both perspectives ofsmall and medium enterprises (SMEs) and engaged brand communities in SNS. Two distinct questionnaire surveys are conducted upon 30 SMEs and 30 active SNS customers in order to obtain more clarity. As a result, a spectrum of coalesced data was obtained andconcluded that the firms, brands and the brand's community must always give each other's continual commitment so that the nurturing relationships provide satisfactory mutual benefits to all community participants in the interest of increasing the overall brand performance