On The Role Of Normative Influences In Commercial Virtual Communities

The potential to reconcile economic benefits to the firm with the social needs of customers has made commercial virtual communities a popular tool for companies to support their core products/service with a value-added service option. An important key to the success of such a virtual community is the behavior of its members. In this paper, we develop a framework of pro-social behavior (i.e., community citizenship behavior and contribution intentions) for understanding and explaining the motivation of virtual community members to actively participate in and care for the community. We show that the main determinants of pro-social behavior are the social norm of reciprocity and the personal norm of obligation. Reciprocity, in turn, is impacted by the value of the information and the socio-emotional support exchanged by the virtual community members.marketing ;

Advertising to Early Trend Propagators: Evidence from Twitter

In the digital economy, influencing and controlling the spread of information is a key concern for firms. One way firms try to achieve this is to target firm communications to consumers who embrace and propagate the spread of new information on emerging and `trending' topics on social media. However, little is known about whether early trend propagators are indeed responsive to firm-sponsored messages. To explore whether early propagators of trending topics respond to advertising messages, we use data from two field tests conducted by a charity and an emerging fashion firm on the micro-blogging service Twitter. On Twitter, 'promoted tweets' allow advertisers to target individuals based on the content of their recent postings. Twitter continuously identifies in real time which topics are newly popular among Twitter users. In the field tests, we collaborated with a charity and a fashion firm to target ads at consumers who embraced a Twitter trend early in its life-cycle by posting about it, and compared their behavior to that of consumers who posted about the same topic only later on. Throughout both field tests, we consistently find that early propagators of trends are less responsive to advertising than consumers who embrace trends later

Beyond the call of duty: Why customers contribute to firm-hosted commercial online communities

Firm-hosted commercial online communities, in which customers interact to solve each other's service problems, represent a fascinating context to study the motivations of collective action in the form of knowledge contribution to the community. We extend a model of social capital based on Wasko and Faraj (2005) to incorporate and contrast the direct impact of commitment to both the online community and the host firm, as well as reciprocity, on quality and quantity of knowledge contribution. In addition, we examine the moderating influence of three individual attributes that are particularly relevant to the firm-hosted community context: perceived informational value, sportsmanship, and online interaction propensity. We empirically test our framework using self-reported and objective data from 203 members of a firm-hosted technical support community. In addition to several interesting moderating effects, we find that a customer's online interaction propensity, commitment to the community, and the informational value s/he perceives in the community are the strongest drivers of knowledge contribution

Managing brands in the social media environment

The dynamic, ubiquitous, and often real-time interaction enabled by social media significantly changes the landscape for brand management. A deep understanding of this change is critical since it may affect a brand's performance substantially. Literature about social media's impact on brands is evolving, but lacks a systematic identification of key challenges related to managing brands in this new environment. This paper reviews existing research and introduces a framework of social media's impact on brand management. It argues that consumers are becoming pivotal authors of brand stories due to new dynamic networks of consumers and brands formed through social media and the easy sharing of brand experiences in such networks. Firms need to pay attention to such consumer-generated brand stories to ensure a brand's success in the marketplace. The authors identify key research questions related to the phenomenon and the challenges in coordinating consumer- and firm-generated brand stories

Toward a theory of repeat purchase drivers for consumer services

The marketing discipline’s knowledge about the drivers of service customers’ repeat purchase behavior is highly fragmented. This research attempts to overcome that fragmented state of knowledge by making major advances toward a theory of repeat purchase drivers for consumer services. Drawing on means–end theory, the authors develop a hierarchical classification scheme that organizes repeat purchase drivers into an integrative and comprehensive framework. They then identify drivers on the basis of 188 face-to-face laddering interviews in two countries (USA and Germany) and assess the drivers’ importance and interrelations through a national probability sample survey of 618 service customers. In addition to presenting an exhaustive and coherent set of hierarchical repeat-purchase drivers, the authors provide theoretical explanations for how and why drivers relate to one another and to repeat purchase behavior. This research also tests the boundary conditions of the proposed framework by accounting for different service types. In addition to its theoretical contribution, the framework provides companies with specific information about how to manage long-term customer relationships successfully