46,878 research outputs found
Conceptualizing the Electronic Word-of-Mouth Process: What We Know and Need to Know About eWOM Creation, Exposure, and Evaluation
Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a prevalent consumer practice that has undeniable effects on the company bottom line, yet it remains an over-labeled and under-theorized concept. Thus, marketers could benefit from a practical, science-based roadmap to maximize its business value. Building on the consumer motivationâopportunityâability framework, this study conceptualizes three distinct stages in the eWOM process: eWOM creation, eWOM exposure, and eWOM evaluation. For each stage, we adopt a dual lensâfrom the perspective of the consumer (who sends and receives eWOM) and that of the marketer (who amplifies and manages eWOM for business results)âto synthesize key research insights and propose a research agenda based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of 1050 academic publications on eWOM published between 1996 and 2019. We conclude with a discussion of the future of eWOM research and practice
Delivering a Public Service? The BBC Asian Network and British Asian audiences.
This thesis examines how minority ethnic producers employed by the BBC Asian Network, the BBCâs only ethnic specific digital radio station, construct a distinctive audience for the broadcaster. The study looks at the challenges, barriers and conflicts that have emerged as a consequence of BBC strategic attempts to make the radio station relevant for younger British Asian listeners. This research sets out to fill a gap regarding the experiences of ethnic staff working within a public service remit. This type of study is necessary because evidence suggests the number of Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff working in the media remain small and this impacts the views articulated in the media.
The study combines a production studies approach with a grounded theory framework for the analysis of thirty in-depth interviews with editors, producers and presenters working at the BBC Asian Network. Three different audience strategies are examined from the perspective of staff working at the station: 2006 young strategy, 2009 friend of the family and 2016, young digital native. What is also exposed through the in-depth interviews is the existence of an internal divide between two groups of minority ethic staff; the older traditional British Asian staff members who are concerned about the dilution of âAsianâ identity, and the younger group, comprised of third or fourth generation British Asians, who are likely to be integrated and better placed to promote a broad vision of British Asian identity. The interviews illustrate that a rigid gatekeeping system limits the dissemination of original journalism about the British Asian communities because the wider BBC ignores or marginalises the expertise and stories pitched by minority ethnic journalists working at the BBC Asian Network. Therefore, this thesis evaluates how the BBC as a public service broadcaster, articulates and manages issues pertaining to race and ethnicity within the organisation.
The study is significant and timely, because the BBC as a public service broadcaster, is under increased pressure since the Charter Renewal in 2016, to demonstrate that it is taking diversity seriously, and meet its own self-imposed diversity initiatives; in terms of the recruitment of staff from minority backgrounds, both on-air and behind the scenes, and improve the representation of minority groups in content. This study explores the BBCâs endeavours to attract minority listeners through music, news and programme content on the contemporary BBC Asian Network. The study focuses upon a period of time between 2006 and 2018
The Web 2.0 as Marketing Tool: Opportunities for SMEs
The new generation of Internet applications widely known as Social Media or Web 2.0 offers corporations a whole range of opportunities for improving their marketing efficiency and internal operations. Web 2.0 applications have already become part of the daily life of an increasing number of consumers who regard them as prime channels of communication, information exchange, sharing of expertise, dissemination of individual creativity and entertainment. Web logs, podcasts, online forums and social networks are rapidly becoming major sources of customer information and influence while the effectiveness of traditional mass media is rapidly decreasing. Using the social media as a marketing tool is an issue attracting increasing attention. The hitherto experience is that large public corporations are more likely to make use of such instruments as part of their marketing and internal operations (McKinsey, 2007).The paper defines the Web 2.0 phenomenon and based on the experience of large corporations examines how SMEs could engage the various Web 2.0 instruments in order to efficiently market their products, improve customer relations, increase customer retention and enhance internal operations
Twitter: Businesses Increasing Their Revenues 140 Characters at a Time
With the consumer market becoming more competitive by the day, businesses must find innovative yet cost effective means of reaching their target markets and steadily increasing their revenues. While businesses compete with one another to remain the best, they must have a strategic market plan that differentiates their products and/or services from their competitors. In an effort to do this, many businesses have begun using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn as a means of reaching their target markets. Such sites have opened businesses to a new level of advertising where they reach consumers faster, have the ability to be more innovative, and spend less money than they would with conventional means of advertising. In addition to these social networking sites, Twitter has emerged, gaining interest from businesses looking to get their products and/or services out to consumers through a new medium. With the number of users increasing daily and the ease of passing information along from one user to the next, businesses have begun to see their new found means of advertising on Twitter as the way to increase their revenues 140 characters at a time. This project highlights how the understanding of the benefits of social media marketing is essential to businesses venturing into the use of Twitter. This understanding allows businesses to frame the use of Twitter to successfully fit their business strategies, while the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) shows the connection between the use of social networking sites by businesses and how it relates to the manner in which consumers are receptive to the information such sites provide. Various studies conducted on the use of Twitter by companies along with a case study on FM Global, a mutual insurance company, highlight how Twitter can be used by businesses as a marketing tool for branding purposes and increasing revenues
A Crowdsourcing Based Framework for Sentiment Analysis: A Product Reputation
As social networking has spread, people started sharing their personal opinions and thoughts widely via these online platforms. The resulting vast valuable data represent a rich source for companies to deduct their productsâ reputation from both social media and crowdsâ judgments. To exploit this wealth of data, a framework was proposed to collect opinions and rating scores respectively from social media and crowdsourcing platform to perform sentiment analysis, provide insights about a product and give consumersâ tendencies. During the analysis process, a consumer category (strict) is excluded from the process of reaching a majority consensus. To overcome this, a fuzzy clustering is used to compute consumersâ credibility. The key novelty of our approach is the new layer of validity check using a crowdsourcing component that ensures that the results obtained from social media are supported by opinions extracted directly from real-life consumers. Finally, experiments are carried out to validate this model (Twitter and Facebook were used as data sources). The obtained results show that this approach is more efficient and accurate than existing solutions thanks to our two-layer validity check design
Exploring the eco-attitudes and buying behaviour of Facebook users
Eco-friendly consumersâ attitudes are becoming increasingly frequent, recent research
indicating that pro-environmental purchase behaviour not only lower costs on the long
term, but also enhance business stakeholdersâ and consumersâ confidence in high added
value products and services. This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary research on how
social media (i.e. Facebook) can influence usersâ perceptions and buying behaviour related
to five categories of ecological products and services (eco-food, eco-tourism, eco-housing,
eco-textiles and eco-beauty & cosmetics). This research investigates how ecological
products and services could gain popularity and overpass the identified purchasing barriers
(e.g. high prices, low awareness, low availability) via superior integration in consumersâ
daily experiences with Facebook. The research findings indicate that Facebook represents
an effective and innovative environment that could build the necessary links between green
attitudes and consumersâ hearts and minds
Measuring Social Well Being in The Big Data Era: Asking or Listening?
The literature on well being measurement seems to suggest that "asking" for a
self-evaluation is the only way to estimate a complete and reliable measure of
well being. At the same time "not asking" is the only way to avoid biased
evaluations due to self-reporting. Here we propose a method for estimating the
welfare perception of a community simply "listening" to the conversations on
Social Network Sites. The Social Well Being Index (SWBI) and its components are
proposed through to an innovative technique of supervised sentiment analysis
called iSA which scales to any language and big data. As main methodological
advantages, this approach can estimate several aspects of social well being
directly from self-declared perceptions, instead of approximating it through
objective (but partial) quantitative variables like GDP; moreover
self-perceptions of welfare are spontaneous and not obtained as answers to
explicit questions that are proved to bias the result. As an application we
evaluate the SWBI in Italy through the period 2012-2015 through the analysis of
more than 143 millions of tweets.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1512.0156
Social Media Influence: Metrics Matter
It is imperative for companies to engage in social media marketing as consumers are often dependent on online information and electronic word-of-mouth. Past literature claims that consumers evaluate the influence of communications differently on social media than they would in a traditional environment because of the nature of the internet. This study aims to analyze userâs perceptions of social media marketing influence and determines if userâs perception of influence changes based on the number of social media metrics (likes, comments, and shares) that accompany a Facebook post. The study also investigates if perceptions of influence vary depending on a userâs level of involvement in the situation. A 2x2 factorial design is utilized to manipulate both level of involvement and amount of likes, comments, and shares that accompany a Facebook post. The results contend that a high number of likes, comments, and shares on Facebook leads to increased perceptions of source credibility and information usefulness. In particular, the results prove that a high number of likes, comments, and shares on Facebook leads to increased purchase intention in a low-involvement situation. These results are essential to marketers as they prove the importance of curating engaging content on companyâs Facebook pages in order to generate high amounts of likes, comments, and shares. Increasing the amount of likes, comments, and shares on Facebook will make the post more influential to users
The Attributes of Social Media as a Strategic Marketing Communication Tool
New digital trends are transforming the media industry landscape, modifying elemental characteristics and attitudes of companies as well as of consumers. Firms often claim that their presence in social media (SM) is a key element to success. SM helps companies rethink the traditional one-way flow of their marketing messages and to incorporate a new interactive pattern into their communications. Nevertheless, these tendencies involve problems of strategic myopia for firms that do not structurally integrate these tools. One main problem is that institutions can rarely differentiate between the various types of SM and the attributes thereof, while the literature equally reveals a number of contradictions in the subject. The present conceptual paper lays the foundations of a strategic approach to SM and discusses its theoretical implications. Following an overview on the concept of SM, through a content analysis of the specialized management literature (n = 14), we present various best practices and reflect on the apparent lack of strategic thinking in using SM as a marketing application. Then, we compare these practical examples with general marketing strategy theory. By merging theory and practice, we aim to provide an insight towards a well-founded application of SM as a genuinely strategic marketing tool
Social Media in the SME Business to Business Environment and Toolkit
This report responds to the growing appetite for businesses to gain a better understanding of social media marketing and the associated benefits. Over the last twelve months, we have spent time exploring the concept of social media marketing and the impact it can have on B2B campaigns. Academics from Newcastle Business School have spent time talking to SMEs and their marketing teams to help identify and successfully navigate some of the most common challenges surrounding B2B social media marketing.
As a consequence of this study, we present a framework of integrated marketing communications (IMC), incorporating social media. This framework underpins the B2B Social Media Toolkit, which is the main outcome of this report.
The research findings have been presented using the Social Media Honeycomb developed by Kietzmann et al. (2011). This has allowed us to distil our findings into seven distinct themes, which are presented on the right.
The B2B social media toolkit is a practical and easy to follow guide for anyone wanting to improve the effectiveness of their social media activity or a good starting point for any business that has yet to incorporate social media into their wider marketing plan
- âŚ