Perceived credibility of Facebook reviews and start-ups: the effect of the quantity of reviews and the profile of reviewers in aggregate on the perceived credibility of reviews

Objectives The main objectives of this study were (1) to explore the effect of the quantity of reviews on the perceived credibility of reviews and (2) to explore the effect of the reviewer profile in aggregate on the perceived credibility of reviews Summary Nowadays, consumers often rely on customer reviews to make purchase decisions because it saves time in making purchase decisions and lower purchase risks. Therefore, the credibility of companies will increase if customers recommend their products, which increases profits for the companies. However, consumers may not completely believe in online reviews because they are aware that reviews may be generated or manipulated by marketers (Kulmala et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2015). To increase the credibility of reviews, enterprises should manage these customer feedbacks. They should pay attention to not only the quality of reviews but also the quantity of reviews and the collection of the profile of reviewers to have the most effective action. Conclusions If the number of reviews is smaller than what consumers expected, the credibility of these reviews is likely to be suspected as being created by the start-ups themselves. Furthermore, reviews seem more credible if the collection of reviewers is socially diversified regarding age, education level, lifestyle and content on their Facebook profile. In general, if consumers perceive positive reviews as lowly credible, the start-ups are highly likely to lose credibility. Therefore, rather than creating fake reviews, start-ups should employ methods to encourage customers to leave feedbacks and manage the diversity of the collection of reviewers

Prevalent User-centered Monetization Techniques in Social Media

This study provides a solid illustration of the degree to which social media sites are now incorporated into market research. Several studies have explored the impact of the continual connection between customers and companies on the social web platforms, with direct connotation for the enhancement of new products and trading. The effect of user and content market-production for participation on social web platform line communities on purchase expenditures is positive. There is a specific connection between increasing social media interaction and improved customer participation and loyalty. It has been discovered that blogs aid managers in the screening phase of product development and give power for negotiating better contract conditions. The aim of the paper was to review relevant literature on user-centered monetization techniques in social media. The study employed prisma analysis for this review. During the study, the main social media monetization techniques that were found were sponsorship, advertisement, public relations, affiliate, ambassadors and crowd funding

Advances in Social Media Research:Past, Present and Future

Social media comprises communication websites that facilitate relationship forming between users from diverse backgrounds, resulting in a rich social structure. User generated content encourages inquiry and decision-making. Given the relevance of social media to various stakeholders, it has received significant attention from researchers of various fields, including information systems. There exists no comprehensive review that integrates and synthesises the findings of literature on social media. This study discusses the findings of 132 papers (in selected IS journals) on social media and social networking published between 1997 and 2017. Most papers reviewed here examine the behavioural side of social media, investigate the aspect of reviews and recommendations, and study its integration for organizational purposes. Furthermore, many studies have investigated the viability of online communities/social media as a marketing medium, while others have explored various aspects of social media, including the risks associated with its use, the value that it creates, and the negative stigma attached to it within workplaces. The use of social media for information sharing during critical events as well as for seeking and/or rendering help has also been investigated in prior research. Other contexts include political and public administration, and the comparison between traditional and social media. Overall, our study identifies multiple emergent themes in the existing corpus, thereby furthering our understanding of advances in social media research. The integrated view of the extant literature that our study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field

Social Media Marketing Strategies for Improving Customer Relationships

Despite the potential benefits of social media marketing (SMM) to improve customer relationships, some small business leaders lack SMM strategies to improve customer relationships. Small business leaders who fail to improve customer relationships may observe a decline in their customer base, leading to decreased profitability. Grounded in Berry’s relationship marketing theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore SMM strategies small business leaders used to improve customer relationships. Data were collected via reviews of company documentation, participants’ social media pages, and online semistructured interviews with five small retail business leaders who used SMM strategies to improve customer relationships. Data analysis was conducted using thematic analysis and three major themes emerged: social media engagement strategy, target audience strategy, and social customer relationship management strategy. A key recommendation is for business owners to use social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to communicate, interact, and obtain feedback from customers. The implications for positive social change include the potential to increase employment opportunities and the standards of living in the community

Evaluating the impact of social-media on sales forecasting: a quantitative study of worlds biggest brands using Twitter, Facebook and Google Trends

In the world of digital communication, data from online sources such as social networks might provide additional information about changing consumer interest and significantly improve the accuracy of forecasting models. In this thesis I investigate whether information from Twitter, Facebook and Google Trends have the ability to improve daily sales forecasts for companies with respect to the forecasts from transactional sales data only. My original contribution to this domain, exposed in the present thesis, consists in the following main steps: 1. Data collection. I collected Twitter, Facebook and Google Trends data for the period May 2013 May 2015 for 75 brands. Historical transactional sales data was supplied by Certona Corporation. 2. Sentiment analysis. I introduced a new sentiment classification approach based on combining the two standard techniques (lexicon-based and machine learning based). The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by 7% in F-score. 3. Identification and classification of events. I proposed a framework for events detection and a robust method for clustering Twitter events into different types based on the shape of the Twitter volume and sentiment peaks. This approach allows to capture the varying dynamics of information propagation through the social network. I provide empirical evidence that it is possible to identify types of Twitter events that have significant power to predict spikes in sales. 4. Forecasting next day sales. I explored linear, non-linear and cointegrating relationships between sales and social-media variables for 18 brands and showed that social-media variables can improve daily sales forecasts for the majority of brands by capturing factors, such as consumer sentiment and brand perception. Moreover, I identified that social-media data without sales information, can be used to predict sales direction with the accuracy of 63%. The experts from the industry consider the results obtained in this thesis to be valuable and useful for decision making and for making strategic planning for the future

Experiential marketing: bridging the gap between value creation to customers and value capture by firms

An already voluminous literature addressing the value of marketing to the firm has, until now, fallen short of expectations. In a context in which marketers have increasingly been challenged to prove their worth, the scholarly attempts to demonstrate the value of marketing to the firm have stumbled to reach unquestionable results. Part of the problem may lie in the lengthy and twisted chain of effects from marketing actions to marketing performance outcomes. Between inputs and outputs lie numerous uncontrollable and often confounding external factors, such as the actions of customers, competitors, and other market agents. The problematic operationalization of such complex market structures impelled researchers to analyze fractions of this web of effects rather than attempting to study overarching conceptual models in full. Prior empirical research has typically considered either the impact of marketing actions in the marketplace or the consequences to the firm of the behaviors of customers and rivals. There is still a gap in the literature of an all-encompassing end-to-end demonstration of how specific marketing inputs can drive specific marketing outputs unequivocally contributing to organizational performance. This thesis addresses the issue of marketing as a value-capturing corporate function through its determinant role in managing value-creating exchanges with customers in the marketplace while hindering competitors from appropriating it. Our research suggests that experiential marketing may bridge the gap between value creation to the customer and value capture by the firm. In particular, our findings show that marketing-crafted valuecreating online shopping experiences may predict value-capturing marketing performance outcomes with the mediation of superior customer-level marketing performance. Thus, our results suggest that experiential marketing may offer an opportunity to bridge the gap between "give and take," value creation and value capture, and demonstrate how relevant the contribution of marketing to the firm's value rising can be.Uma já volumosa literatura abordando o valor do marketing para a empresa tem até agora ficado aquém das expectativas. As tentativas para demonstrar a valia do marketing para a empresa não têm conseguido alcançar inequívocas demonstrações de como o marketing pode ter uma contribuição relevante para a apropriação de valor pela empresa. Parte do problema reside na longa e sinuosa cadeia de efeitos ligando os estímulos de marketing aos resultados do desempenho. Entre uns e outros existem inúmeros fatores externos, incontroláveis e perturbadores, tais como as ações de outros participantes no mercado. A investigação empírica anterior tem tipicamente estudado ou os efeitos the ações de marketing no mercado, sobretudo nos clientes, mas também nos concorrentes, ou então as consequências para a empresa dos comportamentos dos clientes e rivais. Consequentemente, há uma lacuna na literatura de uma demonstração abrangente de como determinados estímulos de marketing podem conduzir a efeitos específicos precursores do desempenho da organização. Esta tese equaciona o marketing como função de captura de valor para a empresa através do seu papel determinante na gestão de trocas de valor com clientes, em paralelo com o impedimento aos concorrentes de se apropriarem do valor criado. A nossa investigação sugere que o marketing experiencial pode estabelecer a ligação entre criação de valor para o cliente e captura de valor para a empresa. Em particular, os nossos resultados mostram que experiências de compra criadoras de valor para os clientes em ambientes digitais podem conduzir à captura de valor para a empresa através da mediação de desempenho de marketing a nível de cliente. Portanto, os nossos resultados sugerem que o marketing experiencial pode ser uma grande oportunidade para preencher a lacuna entre “dar e receber”, criação e captura de valor, e mostram quão relevante pode ser a contribuição do marketing para o valor da empresa

Sentiment analysis and real-time microblog search

This thesis sets out to examine the role played by sentiment in real-time microblog search. The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user query at a given point in time, automated methods are required to enable users to sift through this information. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling the text content in microblog streams. In this thesis we review the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis, with a specific focus on microblogging. We propose a system and method for evaluating the effect of sentiment on perceived search quality in real-time microblog search scenarios. Initially we provide an evaluation of sentiment analysis using supervised learning for classi- fying the short, informal content in microblog posts. We then evaluate our sentiment-based filtering system for microblog search in a user study with simulated real-time scenarios. Lastly, we conduct real-time user studies for the live broadcast of the popular television programme, the X Factor, and for the Leaders Debate during the Irish General Election. We find that we are able to satisfactorily classify positive, negative and neutral sentiment in microblog posts. We also find a significant role played by sentiment in many microblog search scenarios, observing some detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users’ prior topic sentiment

The value and importance of design when branding in social media

This thesis is an investigation into understanding the role of design and designers, when branding in social media. The work presented in this study considers what value design can bring to branding in social media. It identifies design skills necessary to work in branding in social media, and investigates how design strategy and marketing strategy can relate to social media strategy. It also examines what roles designers could play in the future of social media. In order to fully answer these interdisciplinary questions and address this recent phenomenon of social media, the literature review considers three different domains and areas of expertise: marketing, design and social media. With regard to marketing the focus was on the branding literature concerned with strategic brand management and also social marketing management literature. We attempted to connect aspects of brand design that were crucial to the social media field. In the design chapter we focused on its importance to both branding and social media. We addressed the importance of design management in branding today and how it is connected to new research in social media. We analysed social media history and how it has developed into a growing and important platform for brands to connect with consumers and vice versa. We aimed to underline the way these three different areas of expertise connect with one another in an attempt to answer the research questions. We conducted the empirical work with the collaboration of the one hundred and three multidisciplinary individuals (from marketing, design and/or social media areas) who answered the online questionnaire through a quantitative method approach. Qualitative data was also gathered from the twenty-one individuals through semi-structured interviews with experts in marketing, design and social media areas. We included participants from the United Kingdom and Portugal. We developed two models based on the literature review and empirical data analysis. These models were then validated with thirteen of the expert participants in an online mixed method questionnaire. This ultimately led to the remodelling of the previous models into two new models that combined the feedback and analysis and reflected the overall findings of this thesis