Social media is a group of Internet-based applications that allows individuals to create, collaborate, and share content with one another. Practitioners can realize social media's untapped potential by incorporating it as part of the larger social marketing strategy, beyond promotion. Social media, if used correctly, may help organizations increase their capacity for putting the consumer at the...

As more and more marketers incorporate social media as an integral part of the promotional mix, rigorous investigation of the determinants that impact consumers’ engagement in eWOM via social networks is becoming critical. Given the social and communal characteristics of social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, this study examines how social relationship factors ...

A company can experience various benefits and effects on business performance from advertising on a social networking site, including an increase in its number of fans and advertisement views and/or an increase in sales and return on investment (ROI). While some companies find Facebook an effective platform for social networking advertisements, others deem it ineffective. These mixed results of...

Marketers leverage multiple media outlets to promote products. There are three media types: paid (e.g., advertising on TV), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., consumers’ word-of-mouth) media. The effects of individual media channels and the interrelationships within paid media have been examined by prior literature. However, little is known about interplay across different types o...

Social media has fundamentally changed our daily life and drawn many researchers’ attention to investigate the value and strategies of social media. Despite successful examples of social media marketing by firms in practice, there is little scholarly research that investigates whether individuals’ fan base in social media can be translated into real world monetary rewards. Also, most existing s...

Social media offer platforms that anyone can use, giving the opportunity to share information among networks in an easy and interactive way. It is not a surprise that social media marketing has become a primary focus on both digital and traditional revenue models of businesses. In this work, information sharing by users in the context of Twitter is studied, by modeling message’s characteristics...

This study evaluates the current status of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) research through an exhaustive literature review of relevant articles. We have identified a total of 83 eWOM research articles published from 2001 through 2010. Published research into eWOM first appeared in peerreviewed journals about ten years ago, and research has been steadily increasing. Among research topic area, t...

Interpersonal influence and word-of-mouth (WOM) are ranked the most important information source when a consumer is making a purchase decision. This influence may be especially important in the hospitality and tourism industry, whose intangible products are difficult to evaluate prior to their consumption. When WOM becomes digital, the largescale, anonymous, ephemeral nature of the Internet ind...

This study empirically examined the informational and normative based determinants of perceived credibility of online consumer recommendations in China. Past literature demonstrated that informational influence is important in affecting reader’s evaluation of incoming information and the effectiveness of a communication. This study extends from the previous Word-of-Mouth studies by including th...