Effects of content marketing on attitude formation in the South African energy drink market

The rapid technological innovation of the last decade has altered the way people understand and communicate information. The internet specifically has made possible unprecedented access to information which has added another dimension to consumer and marketing practitioner behaviour. The most salient consequence of these developments in the marketing communication arena has been the transition from domination by the marketing practitioner to that of the consumer. More precisely, the huge product variety and the access to non-commercial information in terms of user-generated content gives the consumer incredible autonomy. Facing these circumstances, marketing practitioners are adjusting their strategies in producing informative or entertaining content to surround their product in order to impact the new complex, user-driven market. This specific type of content driven marketing is referred to as content marketing. While the idea of providing useful content around the product/brand is a well-known marketing strategy, consistent technological innovation enables marketers to approach the consumer in a different way. Encouraged by a proliferation of user-generated content, marketing practitioners have already embraced content marketing and established a considerable case series of effective examples. Nevertheless, a scholarly analysis of the impact of content marketing on attitude formation has not yet occurred. Thus the goal of this thesis is to unpack content marketing, and explore its impact on the consumer in order to locate content marketing within Integrated Marketing Communications. Specifically, this study investigates how consumers perceive the sponsor through content marketing, and if emotions triggered by this content influence consumer attitudes towards the sponsor. In order to substantiate the theoretical discourse with practical evidence, a video from the energy drink manufacturer Red Bull serves as a research object and real-world example. By demonstrating the particular strengths of the medium, this thesis aims to establish an academic foundation for the analysis of content marketing, and contribute to the content marketing renaissance

Social media adoption by microbusinesses

The social media implementation process (initiation, adoption, adaptation, acceptance, use and incorporation) is examined in correlation with the five factors (individual, organisational, technological, environmental and performance). Numerous existing theories from the innovation, technology adoption and performance measurement literature are used to derive probable relation between the implementation process and the five factors. Such expansive scope and comprehensive theory development has been articulated but never attempted. To manage the large scope, microbusinesses are selected purposefully due to their limited business processes. The research design reflects the need for relevance by using Lewin’s action research (traditional social change model) as the primary method augmented by participant observation (physical and online). Data collection uses a mix of unstructured, semi-structured and structured interviews assisted by structured observation. Data analysis uses a set of routines, such as tabulation, categorisation, abstraction and verification, involving prediction and testing. The research finds that a collaborative process to address concerns, along with quick start and self-training, helped to adopt social media. Participants needed to focus on concrete experience, work-place learning and personal knowledge for learning to use social media. Usefulness arising from improved communication, fitness and medium richness was the dominant indicator for acceptance and use. Continued use relied on satisfaction and habit of the user. Individual characteristics and personality factors both seemed to be a poor indicator of adoption with weak links towards extroversion. Microbusinesses suffered primarily from context and mental mode related challenges for social media use. Type of business, such as service shops, had a greater probability of success. Social media positively affected relationship marketing in terms of service quality. Business activity associated with specialisation seemed to perform poorly with social media. Finally, performance measurement techniques included finding the capability of social media to meet survival objectives, improve capacity utilisation and business resale value

The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference: Themes and Impacts

The Bled eConference is the longest-running themed conference associated with the Information Systems discipline. The focus throughout its first quarter-century has been the application of electronic tools, migrating progressively from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via Inter-Organisational Systems (IOS) and eCommerce to encompass all aspects of the use of networking facilities in industry and government, and more recently by individuals, groups and society as a whole. This paper reports on an examination of the conference titles and of the titles and abstracts of the 773 refereed papers published in the Proceedings since 1995. This identified a long and strong focus on categories of electronic business and corporate perspectives, which has broadened in recent years to encompass the democratic, the social and the personal. The conference\u27s extend well beyond the papers and their thousands of citations and tens of thousands of downloads. Other impacts have included innovative forms of support for the development of large numbers of graduate students, and the many international research collaborations that have been conceived and developed in a beautiful lake-side setting in Slovenia

Beyond NETmundial: The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem

Beyond NETmundial: The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem explores options for the implementation of a key section of the “NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement” that was adopted at the Global Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial) held on April 23rd and 24th 2014 in São Paulo, Brazil. The Roadmap section of the statement concisely sets out a series of proposed enhancements to existing mechanisms for global internet governance, as well as suggestions of possible new initiatives that the global community may wish to consider. The sixteen chapters by leading practitioners and scholars are grouped into six sections: The NETmundial Meeting; Strengthening the Internet Governance Forum; Filling the Gaps; Improving ICANN; Broader Analytical Perspectives; and Moving Forward

Twitter Analysis to Predict the Satisfaction of Saudi Telecommunication Companies’ Customers

The flexibility in mobile communications allows customers to quickly switch from one service provider to another, making customer churn one of the most critical challenges for the data and voice telecommunication service industry. In 2019, the percentage of post-paid telecommunication customers in Saudi Arabia decreased; this represents a great deal of customer dissatisfaction and subsequent corporate fiscal losses. Many studies correlate customer satisfaction with customer churn. The Telecom companies have depended on historical customer data to measure customer churn. However, historical data does not reveal current customer satisfaction or future likeliness to switch between telecom companies. Current methods of analysing churn rates are inadequate and faced some issues, particularly in the Saudi market. This research was conducted to realize the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer churn and how to use social media mining to measure customer satisfaction and predict customer churn. This research conducted a systematic review to address the churn prediction models problems and their relation to Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The findings show that the current churn models lack integrating structural data frameworks with real-time analytics to target customers in real-time. In addition, the findings show that the specific issues in the existing churn prediction models in Saudi Arabia relate to the Arabic language itself, its complexity, and lack of resources. As a result, I have constructed the first gold standard corpus of Saudi tweets related to telecom companies, comprising 20,000 manually annotated tweets. It has been generated as a dialect sentiment lexicon extracted from a larger Twitter dataset collected by me to capture text characteristics in social media. I developed a new ASA prediction model for telecommunication that fills the detected gaps in the ASA literature and fits the telecommunication field. The proposed model proved its effectiveness for Arabic sentiment analysis and churn prediction. This is the first work using Twitter mining to predict potential customer loss (churn) in Saudi telecom companies, which has not been attempted before. Different fields, such as education, have different features, making applying the proposed model is interesting because it based on text-mining

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2021

This open access book is the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 28th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER21@yourplace virtual conference January 19–22, 2021. This book advances the current knowledge base of information and communication technologies and tourism in the areas of social media and sharing economy, technology including AI-driven technologies, research related to destination management and innovations, COVID-19 repercussions, and others. Readers will find a wealth of state-of-the-art insights, ideas, and case studies on how information and communication technologies can be applied in travel and tourism as we encounter new opportunities and challenges in an unpredictable world