Cultural Values and Cross-cultural Video Consumption on YouTube

Video-sharing social media like YouTube provide access to diverse cultural products from all over the world, making it possible to test theories that the Web facilitates global cultural convergence. Drawing on a daily listing of YouTube's most popular videos across 58 countries, we investigate the consumption of popular videos in countries that differ in cultural values, language, gross domestic product, and Internet penetration rate. Although online social media facilitate global access to cultural products, we find this technological capability does not result in universal cultural convergence. Instead, consumption of popular videos in culturally different countries appears to be constrained by cultural values. Cross-cultural convergence is more advanced in cosmopolitan countries with cultural values that favor individualism and power inequality

Repurposing emoji for personalised communication::Why [pizza slice] means “I love you”

The use of emoji in digital communication can convey a wealth of emotions and concepts that otherwise would take many words to express. Emoji have become a popular form of communication, with researchers claiming emoji represent a type of “ubiquitous language” that can span different languages. In this paper however, we explore how emoji are also used in highly personalised and purposefully secretive ways. We show that emoji are repurposed for something other than their “intended” use between close partners, family members and friends. We present the range of reasons why certain emoji get chosen, including the concept of “emoji affordance” and explore why repurposing occurs. Normally used for speed, some emoji are instead used to convey intimate and personal sentiments that, for many reasons, their users cannot express in words. We discuss how this form of repurposing must be considered in tasks such as emoji-based sentiment analysis

Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

Managing Bad News in Social Media: A Case Study on Domino’s Pizza Crisis

Social media has become prominently popular. Tens of millions of users login to social media sites like Twitter to disseminate breaking news and share their opinions and thoughts. For businesses, social media is potentially useful for monitoring the public perception and the social reputation of companies and products. Despite great potential, how bad news about a company influences the public sentiments in social media has not been studied in depth. The aim of this study is to assess people’s sentiments in Twitter upon the spread of two types of information: corporate bad news and a CEO’s apology. We attempted to understand how sentiments on corporate bad news propagate in Twitter and whether any social network feature facilitates its spread. We investigated the Domino’s Pizza crisis in 2009, where bad news spread rapidly through social media followed by an official apology from the company. Our work shows that bad news spreads faster than other types of information, such as an apology, and sparks a great degree of negative sentiments in the network. However, when users converse about bad news repeatedly, their negative sentiments are softened. We discuss various reactions of users towards the bad news in social media such as negative purchase intent

Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures

Emoticons are a key aspect of text-based communication, and are the equivalent of nonverbal cues to the medium of online chat, forums, and social media like Twitter. As emoticons become more widespread in computer mediated communication, a vocabulary of different symbols with subtle emotional distinctions emerges especially across different cultures. In this paper, we investigate the semantic, cultural, and social aspects of emoticon usage on Twitter and show that emoticons are not limited to conveying a specific emotion or used as jokes, but rather are socio-cultural norms, whose meaning can vary depending on the identity of the speaker. We also demonstrate how these norms propagate through the Twitter @-reply network. We confirm our results on a large-scale dataset of over one billion Tweets from different time periods and countries

Voice of the Employees Resonated in Online Bamboo Forests

While employee voice has been realized a critical element of organizational success, many employees often remain silent and withdraw useful information and ideas. In this paper,we present how employees utilize existing social media platform in a creative, collective way to anonymously share their voices—a phenomenon called the bamboo forests in Korea. We present the key characteristics of bamboo forests including self-mention and connectivity, and discuss the main topics and sentiments of such bamboo forests. Our analysis indicates that employees find such anonymous platform useful. We provide insights on the potential for utilizing the voice ofthe employees online

The Effect of Bad News and CEO Apology of Corporate on User Responses in Social Media.

While social media has become an important platform for social reputation, the emotional responses of users toward bad news have not been investigated thoroughly. We analyzed a total of 20,773 Twitter messages by 15,513 users to assess the influence of bad news and public apology in social media. Based on both computerized, quantitative sentiment analysis and in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that rapid public apology effectively and immediately reduced the level of negative sentiment, where the degree of change in sentiments differed by the type of interactions users engaged in. The majority of users who directly conversed with corporate representatives on the new media were not typical consumers, but experts and practitioners. We extend the existing cognitive model and suggest the audiences' psychological reaction model to describe the information processing process during and after an organizational crisis and response. We also discuss various measures through which companies can respond to a crisis properly in social media in a fashion that is different from conventional mass media

Descriptive statistics of network structure by video category.

<p>Descriptive statistics of network structure by video category.</p

OLS regression model of cultural closeness among 58 countries.

<p>OLS regression model of cultural closeness among 58 countries.</p

OLS regression model of cultural betweenness among 58 countries.

<p>OLS regression model of cultural betweenness among 58 countries.</p