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What Makes Online Content Viral?
Abstract
Why are certain pieces of online content more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique dataset of all the New York Times articles published over a three month period, the authors examine the link between integral affect (i.e., the emotion evoked) and whether content is highly shared. Results suggest a strong relationship between emotion and virality, but indicate that this link is more complex than mere valence alone. Positive content is more viral (than negative content), as is content that inspires awe. But while sad content is less viral, anger or anxiety inducing articles are both more likely to make the paper’s most emailed list. These results hold controlling for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently articles were featured). The findings shed light on why people share online content, provide insight into how to design effective viral marketing campaigns, and underscore the importance of individual-level psychological processes in shaping collective outcomes.
... The majority of emotional contagion research (in face-to-face contexts) posit that nonverbal behavioral cues convey greater emotionality than linguistic cues (Hatfield et al., 1993b). In recent times, however, a handful of Internet-based research has shed necessary light on the neglected role of textual messages in signaling emotional states (Berger and Milkman, 2012;Kramer et al., 2014;Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013). Other studies have suggested that the online public's emotional commentaries are contagious enough to facilitate participatory democracy, often assisting mobilization of sympathizers for social movements (Papacharissi, 2015). ...
... In the online context, the mixed results seem even more common. For example, some studies found either no valence difference (Steiglitz and Dong-Xuan, 2013) or a positivity bias in online viral diffusion (Berger and Milkman, 2012;Gruzd et al., 2011;Gruzd, 2013); while in their study of Internet advertising videos containing depression prevention messages, Tseng and Huang (2016) found a direct link between both positive and negative emotion of the narrator and the audiences' intention to adopt health risk-reducing behaviors. Moreover, Lee et al.'s study (2013) showed that message senders' emotional valence (signalled by a profile avatar) had only a moderating effect on the product review based-purchase intention. ...
... Another important dimension of interest is the level of arousal in emotion, also known as "emotional energy" (Barsade, 2002) or "emotional activation" (Berger and Milkman, 2012). ...
p> Purpose:
The current study explores the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing –a linguistic mannerism that conveys high arousal emotion –based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect.
Design/methodology/approach:
The study performs a series of mixed-effect logistic regressions to investigate the contagious potential of offensive comments collected from YouTube in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign videos posted between January and April 2016.
Findings:
The study examines non-random incidences of two types of swearing online: public and interpersonal. Findings suggest that a first-level (a.k.a. parent) comment’s public swearing tends to trigger chains of interpersonal swearing in the second-level (a.k.a. child) comments. Meanwhile, among the child-comments, a sequentially preceding comment’s swearing is contagious to the following comment only across the same swearing type. Based on the findings, the study concludes that offensive comments are contagious and have impact on shaping the community-wide linguistic norms of online user interactions.
Originality/value:
The study discusses the ways in which an individual’s display of offensiveness may influence and shape discursive cultures on the Internet. This study delves into the mechanisms of text-based contagion by differentiating between mimicry effect and social interaction effect. While online emotional contagion research to this date has focused on the difference between positive and negative valence, Internet research that specifically look at the contagious potential of offensive expressions remain sparse.</p
... A substantial amount of research on social media sharing focuses on how emotions drive sharing behavior. One study found that New York Times articles that evoke high-arousal positive emotions (awe) or high-arousal negative emotions (anger or anxiety) tend to be shared more (Berger & Milkman, 2012). An experimental study found that putting people into a state of arousal increases the propensity to share information with others (Berger, 2011). ...
... However, it should be noted that negativity does not go viral in all contexts: some work has argued that positive content tends to achieve more virality than negative content (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Kraft et al., 2020a;Milkman & Berger, 2014). But, interestingly, these studies did not look at social media, and instead looked at the spread of New York Times articles (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Kraft et al., 2020b) or science articles (Milkman & Berger, 2014). ...
... However, it should be noted that negativity does not go viral in all contexts: some work has argued that positive content tends to achieve more virality than negative content (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Kraft et al., 2020a;Milkman & Berger, 2014). But, interestingly, these studies did not look at social media, and instead looked at the spread of New York Times articles (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Kraft et al., 2020b) or science articles (Milkman & Berger, 2014). ...
Why do people believe in and share misinformation? Some theories focus on social identity and politically motivated reasoning, arguing that people are motivated to believe and share identity-congruent news. Other theories suggest that belief in misinformation is not shaped by motivated reasoning, but is instead shaped by other factors, such as prior knowledge, lack of reflection, or inattention to accuracy. Integrating multiple perspectives, this thesis argues that the spread of (mis)information is shaped by two (often competing) motivations: accuracy and social motivations, in combination with other factors, such as personality variables and information exposure. Through a variety of methods, including analyses of large-scale social media datasets, online experiments, network analysis, and a digital field experiment, this thesis illustrates how accuracy motivations, social motivations, and other variables shape the belief and spread of (mis)information. Chapter 2 takes a big data approach to test whether online content that fulfills political identity motivations, such as out-group derogation and in-group favoritism, tends to receive more engagement online across eight large-scale datasets containing a total of 2.7 million tweets and Facebook posts. Chapter 3 experimentally manipulates accuracy and social motivations for believing in and sharing true and false news headlines in a series of four online experiments with 3,364 participants. Chapter 4 examines partisan asymmetries in the effectiveness of a popular misinformation intervention, the accuracy nudge. Chapter 5 links survey data to the Twitter data of 2,064 participants to examine how beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine and politics are associated with following political elites online and interacting with low-quality news sources. Finally, Chapter 6 examines how manipulating participants’ online social networks in a naturalistic setting (e.g., incentivizing people to follow and unfollow specific accounts on Twitter in a randomized controlled trial) influences beliefs about the opposing political party and the sharing of misinformation.
... Such statements exemplify that entrepreneurs of varying statuses share perceptions of intense competition for attention on social media platforms (Gelper et al., 2021;Iyer & Katona, 2016), which puts pressure on their posts to stand out. The pressure is due to the vast content shared on social media, only a fraction of which attracts substantial audience engagement (e.g., Berger & Milkman, 2012;Weng et al., 2012). ...
... Echoing these examples, research found that emotion-provoking communication generally affects audience engagement more than content targeting reasoning and cognition does (Nabi, 2010). Accordingly, social media audiences engage more with and pay more attention to emotional content (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Heimbach & Hinz, 2016;Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017) or to content framed to provoke emotions, such as fake news (Clarke et al., 2020) or racist and sexist tweets (Inara Rodis, 2021). In line with this rationale, provocation through advertising controversial content (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011;Sabri, 2017) or politicians' attacks on opponents on social media (Boulianne & Larsson, 2021;Fine & Hunt, 2021;Meeks, 2020) was also found to increase audience engagement online. ...
... Given the importance of the language used in social media posts for audience engagement (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Heimbach & Hinz, 2016), we also adopt a linguistic perspective to examine whether the language in social media posts can increase a post's audience engagement and how this relationship might depend on a new venture's status. More specifically, we build on the linguistic framing literature that suggests that entrepreneurs and firms carefully choose their words to frame their communication (e.g., Rhee & Fiss, 2014;Snihur et al., 2021) in order to shape audience perceptions (Emrich et al., 2001) and reactions (Cornelissen & Werner, 2014;Entman, 1993;Pan et al., 2020). ...
This article theorizes and empirically investigates how status and provocative language influence audience engagement with new-venture posts on social media platforms. Using venture capital funding as a status proxy, we analyzed 369,142 Twitter posts by 268 new ventures. We found that status (1) increases engagement with ventures’ tweets, and that it (2) moderates the effect of provocative language on audience engagement so that provocative language has a negative effect for low-status ventures but a positive effect for high-status ventures. Post-hoc analyses provide a basis for pragmatic theorizing and explore the effects of status tiers and subdimensions of provocative language.
... Using a data set of the New York Times articles published over three months, Berger and Milkman (2012) examined how emotion shapes virality (i.e. a number of comments and shares), and their results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Thus, we hypothesize: ...
... Â 10 À5 ) times. These results are in accordance with Berger and Milkman's (2012) findings in that the relationship between emotion and social transmission is also in part driven by arousal. ...
... So, we perceive the behaviour as a direct consequence of the dissonance between the expected and observed, and an action of commenting, sharing or choosing a particular reaction (in this case, from a class of negatives) is the act of actual reduction of such conflict. In addition, both angry and surprise emotions include much of the arousal substance of the emotion Berger and Milkman (2012), which complements the finding of dissonance reduction by exhibiting negative emotions. According to the factorization of the r.Haha reaction, it can be observed that humour is only present in four factors (at ABC, CBS, NYT and Wallstreet pages), indicating that such reaction is not a very common reaction on news pages. ...
Purpose
Social media allow for observing different aspects of human behaviour, in particular, those that can be evaluated from explicit user expressions. Based on a data set of posts with user opinions collected from social media, this paper aims to show an insight into how the readers of different news portals react to online content. The focus is on users’ emotions about the content, so the findings of the analysis provide a further understanding of how marketers should structure and deliver communication content such that it promotes positive engagement behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach
More than 5.5 million user comments to posted messages from 15 worldwide popular news portals were collected and analysed, where each post was evaluated based on a set of variables that represent either structural (e.g. embedded in intra- or inter-message structure) or behavioural (e.g. exhibiting a certain behavioural pattern that appeared in response to a posted message) component of expressions. The conclusions are based on a set of regression models and exploratory factor analysis.
Findings
The findings show and theorise the influence of social media content on emotional user engagement. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the engagement attributed to social media content and, consequently, could be a better predictor of future behaviour.
Originality/value
This paper provides original data analysis of user comments and emotional reactions that appeared on social media news websites in 2018.
... It might be assumed that any interesting content that generates a strong emotional response is enough to achieve viral status. Indeed, research (Berger, 2011;Berger & Milkman, 2011) has identified emotional arousal intensity as the motivation for news content sharing, with higher arousal emotions more strongly linked to sharing (Berger, 2011). Berger and Milkman (2011) also find that the emotional responses of positivity, awe, anger, sadness, and anxiety all predict sharing. ...
... Indeed, research (Berger, 2011;Berger & Milkman, 2011) has identified emotional arousal intensity as the motivation for news content sharing, with higher arousal emotions more strongly linked to sharing (Berger, 2011). Berger and Milkman (2011) also find that the emotional responses of positivity, awe, anger, sadness, and anxiety all predict sharing. ...
... Consequently, humorous content may be shared more both because negative information attracts more attention than positive information (Baumeister et al., 2001) and because consumers are more likely to share content that elicits positive rather than negative emotions (Berger & Milkman, 2011). But how appropriate is it when the humour shared is on such a 'serious' and negatively charged issue such as the case of Israel-Palestine conflict? ...
... High arousal emotions [t(89) = 2.30, p = .02] (Berger, 2011) or positive emotions (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Tellis et al. 2019) such as (awe, anxiety etc) tend to spread more (Berger & Milkman, 2013). Physiological arousal is somewhat related to information diffusion, high-arousal positives ( Guadagno et al. 2013;Guede et al. 2017;Nelson-Feld et al, 2013) such as affection, awe (Nikolinakou & King 2018), or negative such as anger, or anxiety emotions is more viral than the content that provokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions such as sadness (Berger, 2011). ...
... It is surprising to see that type of user triggers the spread of content/news. Based on gender, content by female or female authors tend to be more viral (Berger & Milkman, 2013;Milkman and Berger, 2012). Meanwhile posts spread fastly, widely, and farther which are generated by the hateful users compared to normal users (Mathew et al. 2019 ...
... One of them is how connected a user can feel with the content, it is obvious that people would definitely not share content if they do not feel any connection with it. Knossenburg et al. (2016) proves the previous research of ( Dobele et al., 2005;Milkman and Berger, 2012), that connectivity helps content to go viral. Connectivity with videos is quite important before forwarding it to someone according to research implemented on the Millennials or Generation Y (Botha & Reyneke, 2013). ...
Online information is now going viral in an exponential fashion. However, information spread suddenly. Often there are movies, memes, news, or videos that go viral suddenly. For example, in any kind of pandemic, various kinds of news (true or fake) go viral which are correlated with that particular situation. Did you ponder what makes them go viral?. To find the answer of the question above and have a better understanding of online virality a systematic literature review is conducted. Included papers were between the span 2004-2020. Based on our outcomes, we found that several factors like type of emotion, news, content characteristics, attachments impact virality. Lastly, we suggest possible tactics for influencers, politicians, and marketers to make their contents or posts go viral.
... Belarmino and Koh (2018) evaluate both from an equity perspective, suggesting that WOM can be a means to balance inequitable relationships, either through providing more outputs for an excellent experience or to negate a negative relationship. The former, emotional regulation, includes motives such as sharing arousing information (Berger and Milkman, 2012), venting or taking revenge (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004;Ward and Ostrom, 2006) and eliminating anxiety (Fu et al., 2015). For instance, individuals are more likely to spread WOM in more emotionally charged situations, such as when a firm is undergoing a crisis or individuals experience greater anxiety surrounding decision-making (Heath et al., 2001). ...
... Additionally, positive emotional experiences involve evaluation of expectations and experience (Banerjee and Chai, 2019;Tellis et al., 2019) and positive emotions (Darley and Lim, 2018;Jalilvand et al., 2017). Specifically, sharing positive information is more likely to occur because it sheds a positive light on the sharer (Berger and Milkman, 2012;Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006;East et al., 2007). Despite these factors, research considers emotional messages more relevant for B2C than B2B (Lothia et al., 2003). ...
... We do comparisons and produce a pricing index. A), this was rarely the case as highlighted in prior research (Berger and Milkman, 2012;Heath et al., 2001;Swani et al., 2014). The findings offer support that status, independence and bonding motives are the primary motives, as described next. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to address these questions. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is increasingly important in business-to-business (B2B) decision-making. Yet, research on this topic is rather limited, and often borrows from business-to-consumer (B2C) WOM literature. The question remains as to whether these assumptions realistically occur in B2B WOM. Specifically, this study explores the following questions: What value does B2B WOM have? Why do social media influencers in B2B engage in WOM? What type(s) of social media influencers spread WOM in B2B?
Design/methodology/approach
To address these questions, this study adopts a qualitative research strategy. This study focuses on industry analysts in information technology markets who often influence the buying decisions of customers through their expertise and recommendations of technology solutions. Based on interviews with these influencers, this study explicates B2B WOM, an area the authors know much less of in comparison to B2C WOM.
Findings
This study reveals differences in who spreads WOM within B2B, their roles, key features of their content and how they spread WOM. Second, this study demonstrates the types of actors spreading WOM in B2B in relation to the type of WOM and how it actually influences B2B markets.
Originality/value
This study broadens the current definition of WOM and, specifically, showcases WOM not only as amplifying messages but as a means to co-create the market itself with vendors and clients. This research offers several contributions to the B2B WOM literature and influencer practice.
... According to one viewpoint, consumers spread NWOM simply to talk about the negative consumption experiences of others (Richins, 1984). The literature discusses that this logic is problematic and that individual antecedents should be further explored (Richins, 1984;Sundaram et al., 1998;Berger & Milkman, 2012;De Angelis et al., 2012). Recent research on this topic suggests that there may be an individual antecedent, such as self-enhancement (Wien & Olsen, 2014;Berger, 2014;Philp et al., 2018;Krishna & Kim, 2020). ...
... According to this approach, consumers spread only PWOM to enhance their self. The literature argues that this logic is incorrect (Richins, 1984;Sundaram et al., 1998;Berger & Milkman, 2012), but there has been no empirical research to prove otherwise. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that this logic is false. ...
The aims of this study were (a) to investigate the mediating role of vengeance in the relationship between self-enhancement and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intention, (b) to examine the moderated mediation role of helping other consumers, and (c) to test moderated moderation role of gender. The study employs Process Macro software to achieve research aims with the sample of 767 consumers. The results show that (a) vengeance has a partial mediating role in the relationship between self-enhancement and NWOM intention, (b) helping other consumers has a moderated mediation role in this indirect relationship, and (c) the moderated mediation role of helping other consumers is moderated by gender (difference for females) only in the effect of self-enhancement on vengeance. Research is important to understand the antecedents of NWOM.
... In today's information-saturated society, the effective use of images when sharing online content can have a strong influence in whether content will catch people's attention and go viral [4,19,21]. Users often feel overwhelmed with how much content they are exposed to [23], and pay attention to each piece of information for short amounts of time, with repercussion to their attention span [36]. In fact, previous research showed that 60% of social network users re-share articles on social media without reading them, basing their decision on limited cues such as the title of the article or the thumbnail image associated with it [14]. ...
... We use a publicly available dataset consisting of 160M pHashes and image URLs for all the images posted on Twitter (using 1% Streaming API), Reddit, 4chan's /pol/, and Gab, between July 2016 and July 2017. 4 Then, we select the images that have the same pHashes with the ones shared by Russian state-sponsored accounts on Twitter. For each one of these images, we find all their occurrences on Reddit, /pol/, Gab, and Twitter. ...
State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control, aka trolls, that post and interact with other users disguised as “regular” users. These accounts often use images and memes, along with textual content, in order to increase the engagement and the credibility of their posts.In this paper, we present the first study of images shared by state-sponsored accounts by analyzing a ground truth dataset of 1.8M images posted to Twitter by accounts controlled by the Russian Internet Research Agency. First, we analyze the content of the images as well as their posting activity. Then, using Hawkes Processes, we quantify their influence on popular Web communities like Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, with respect to the dissemination of images. We find that the extensive image posting activity of Russian trolls coincides with real-world events (e.g., the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), and shed light on their targets as well as the content disseminated via images. Finally, we show that the trolls were more effective in disseminating politics-related imagery than other images.
... We were guided by several previous studies in our choice of features of discussion posts. We use a broad set of features, including the topic of conversation [Gonzalez-Bailon et al., 2010, Romero et al., 2011, the age of the online community, the type of content [Cha et al., 2012], emotional valence [Berger andMilkman, 2012, Stieglitz andDang-Xuan, 2013], and several textual features of the post. ...
... This result suggests that emotionally charged content posts and posts with high arousal involve more participants and many back-and-forth conversations. Researchers have reached similar conclusions on the potential of emotionally charged tweets to be more likely to be retweeted [Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013] and on the ability of news with high emotional valence to spread wider [Berger and Milkman, 2012]. We live in a digital age and are inundated with information, so content high in arousal and emotion can catch our attention and make us engage. ...
The Internet has made it easier for social scientists to study human behavior by analyzing their interactions on social media platforms. Many of these platforms characterize conversations among users via threads, which induce a tree-like structure. The structural properties of these discussion trees, such as their width, depth, and size, can be used to make inferences regarding user discussion patterns and conversation dynamics. In this paper, we seek to understand the structure of these online discussions on Reddit. We characterize the structure of these discussions via a set of global and local discussion-tree properties. The global features constitute information regarding the community/subreddit of a given post, whereas the local features are comprised of the properties of the post itself. We perform various statistical analyses on a year's worth of Reddit data containing a quarter of a million posts and several million comments. These analyses allow us to tease apart the relative contribution of a discussion post's global and local properties and characterize the importance of specific individual features in determining the discussions' structural patterns. Our results indicate that both local and global features explain a significant amount of structural variation. Local features are collectively more important as they explain significantly more variation in the discussion trees' structural properties than global features. However, there is significant heterogeneity in the impact of the various features. Several global features, e.g., the topic, age, popularity, and the redundancy of content in a subreddit, also play a crucial role in understanding the specific properties of discussion trees.
... Previous research proposes that customer motivation for referring is not limited to financial or time costs and often includes social motives (Xiao, Tang, and Wirtz (2011)). That is, consumers are motivated to shape how others perceive them through what they say, share, and recommend (Berger and Milkman (2012), Chung and Darke (2006)). When offered a referral incentive, individuals may worry about social costs, such as being perceived as having ulterior motives beyond helping their friend make good product decisions (Jin and Huang (2014)). ...
... Several factors drive the desire to spread positive wordof-mouth, such as delight with a brand or referral incentives (Biyalogorsky, Gerstner, and Libai (2001), Kornish and Li (2010)). Product characteristics, such as usefulness, originality, interest, and public visibility have also been shown to increase WOM behaviors (Berger and Milkman (2012), Moldovan, Goldenberg, and Chattopadhyay (2011)). However, there are also social and psychological barriers deterring customers from encouraging their friends to try new products. ...
... Moreover, CM can be described as a managing process through which, an organization defines, analyses, and meets the consumer demands for profiting by using digital content delivered via digital platforms (Rowley, 2008;Rancati, 2014). In general, customer-to-customer experiences, in either offline or online contexts, influence people's behaviours, preferences, and, ultimately, purchasing attitudes (Berger & Milkman, 2012). ...
... Locher and Bolander (2015) in a focus group-based study found that prevalence of humour on text-based Facebook status updates was around 20%. Humorous content and content that evokes emotions has been identified in the past as a significant driver of virality (Porter and Golan, 2006;Berger, 2014;Berger and Milkman, 2012) and identifying such content automatically has important applications in social media marketing (e.g., Nikolinakou and King, 2018). Interestingly, some evidence indicates that humour on Twitter tends to be relatively widespread even during times of crises (Guskin and Hitlin, 2012;Jong and Dückers, 2016), but Jong and Dückers (2016) also point out that it can be the cause of misunderstandings and emergence of rumours. ...
... most viewers neither liked nor disliked the video), or simply lack of motivation to respond to the video, is not clear. In this context, for example, it is well known that viewers are more likely to comment on videos or other social media posts that they feel strongly about (e.g.Berger & Milkman, 2012;France et al., 2016). ...
Animal‐related content on social media is hugely popular but is not always appropriate in terms of how animals are portrayed or how they are treated. This has potential implications beyond the individual animals involved, for viewers, for wild animal populations, and for societies and their interactions with animals. Whilst social media platforms usually publish guidelines for permitted content, enforcement relies at least in part on viewers reporting inappropriate posts. Currently, there is no external regulation of social media platforms. Based on a set of 241 ‘fake animal rescue’ videos that exhibited clear signs of animal cruelty and strong evidence of being deliberately staged (i.e. fake), we found little evidence that viewers disliked the videos and an overall mixed response in terms of awareness of the fake nature of the videos, and their attitudes towards the welfare of the animals involved. Our findings suggest, firstly, that, despite the narrowly defined nature of the videos used in this case study, exposure rates can be extremely high (one of the videos had been viewed over 100 million times), and, secondly, that many YouTube viewers cannot identify (or are not concerned by) animal welfare or conservation issues within a social media context. In terms of the current policy approach of social media platforms, our findings raise questions regarding the value of their current reliance on consumers as watch dogs. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
... Sixth, some posts mention brands or the accounts of people that appear in the photos, which could boost visibility and thus engagement, so we control for the number of mentions. Seventh, arousal and valence can affect engagement(Berger and Milkman 2012), so we control for both aspects using the Mohammad's (2018) VAD (Valence, Arousal, Dominance) lexicon. Eighth, easy-to-read posts might be easier to process, which may increase engagement(Pancer et al. ...
In the midst of the influencer marketing boom, more and more companies are shifting resources from real to virtual (or computer-generated) influencers. But while virtual influencers have the potential to engage consumers and drive action, some posts resonate and boost sales, while others do not. What makes some virtual influencer posts more impactful? This work examines how including someone else in photos shapes consumer responses to virtual influencers' posts. A multimethod investigation, combining automated image and text analysis of thousands of social media posts with controlled experiments, demonstrates that companion presence boosts impact. These effects are driven by trust. Companion presence makes virtual influencers seem more human, which makes them seem more trustworthy, and thus increases the impact of their posts. Taken together, the findings shed light on how others' presence shapes responses to virtual influencer content, reveal a psychological mechanism through which companions affect consumer perceptions, and provide actionable insights for designing more impactful social media content.
... A moderate proportion of positive evaluative statementswas associated with helpful reviews, but too much positive information might lead the reader to question the reviewer's motives(Schindler & Bickart, 2012). This suggests that social transmission may be more about the transmitter's internal states(Berger & Milkman, 2012). ...
Digital influencers are omnipresent in this new age of influence on social media, high demand for advertising campaigns, and viral marketing strategies. The author propose a conceptual framework to explain the digital influencer phenomenon and how it affects the consumers’ decision-making. The author explore the influencer marketing and diffusion information literature, through a narrative review, to identify the key factors affecting the efficacy of information diffusion from digital influencers: social network, message elements, emotional appeal, and personal traits. Thus, it is presented the relevant changes (attitudinal, intentional, behavioral) in consumer decision-making promoted by these influencers. And as mechanisms to explain social influence triggered through influencers in the consumer, it is given attention on social norms, conformity, and compliance. The study brings a new comprehension to favor the use of influencers in digital marketing strategies. At last, it is proposed future research based on the gaps observed from the reviewed literature involving digital influencers and the factors that affect the information diffusion on social media.
... Then, after identifying vulnerable individuals, their weaknesses, and how to exploit those weaknesses. They are willing to spread the disease [16]. Viral marketing needs to master a large amount of information about target consumers. ...
In the era of big data, all traditional companies will carry out digital transformation under the leadership of managers. From a macro perspective, standing at the forefront of the development of the times, this paper proposes the concept of combining cloud database and management. On this basis, managers can become the pioneers of business in the new era and bring long-term sustainable development benefits to the company. Taking Alibaba cloud as a case, it is found that its biggest advantage is its far-sighted operation plan. Alibaba cloud helps managers make the most efficient transformation plan with sophisticated analysis and calculation logic and forecasts the potential market with the grasp of big data consumer data; all of these can help management to get a head start in the information age. In addition, this paper also proposes that Alibaba cloud management information base is suitable for discovering viral marketing dishes and cooperating with management for win-win results. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of corporation management.
... This suggests that negative information may be an important antecedent to participation, given that voters weigh it more heavily than positive information (Garramone et al. 1990), and negativity may be more likely to break through voters' persistent inattention (Soroka 2014). Beyond motivating action, negativity also can produce more emotional or affective responses that stay with voters over time and induce content sharing across social media (Berger and Milkman 2012). This emotional activation is particularly poignant when linked with social media networks designed to capitalize on the weak connections among users. ...
Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To fully comprehend the impact of these online political messages, we use a dictionary-based computational approach to catalog the tone of US House of Representatives candidates’ messages on Facebook and the user responses they elicit during the 2020 election. This research speaks to the power of elite rhetoric to shape political climates and pairs candidate strategies with user responses—contributing new insights into the mechanisms for voter engagement.
... In many socially oriented studies, sharing behavior has been a permanent topic in an offline (Fiske, 1991) as well as in an online context (Milkman & Berger, 2012). Some research claims that sharing takes place solely with the idea of an outcome expectancy -to get something desired in return for action -as the Social Cognitive Theory implies (Bandura, 1997). ...
Covid-19 pandemic has hit the entire world creating in numerous challenges across sectors. There is happening a structural transformation in the world of work and Indian labour market is not different. India has been witnessing this transformation due to three revolution 1.Globalisation 2. Demographical dividend and 3. Influence of the 4IR. Even though India enjoys the opportunity of having the youngest population, projected as the largest contributor of the world’s workforce, it still lacks ‘the right and the relevant skill’ for reaping the opportunity. From time to time countries have implemented policy strategies for skilling its workforce, India not behind the race. This pandemic has forced countries to take implement policies of reskilling and up skilling its workforce to face the new normal. Most of the policies gave importance to digital technology/4IR , experienced based learning , transversal skills and life-long learning. India’s policy of mass scaling up skill aligned with the industry 4.0; creating an eco-system of technology start-ups is the right direction to achieve the goal of skilling its workforce by 2030. This paper is a review on this background. The paper makes an attempt to identify the various skilling policies adopted by selected countries and what policy initiative India has taken to ramp up this
challenge. The paper is an attempt to find out the thrust area of policies in terms of the skill development of workforce.
Keyword: Covid-19; Future workforce; Government policy; Industry 4.0; Skill development.
... Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral (2018) found that falsehood spreads on the internet faster than the truth, possibly because the interesting falsehoods have a greater capacity to produce emotional arousal. Similarly, Berger and Milkman (2012) claim that "content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral." ...
... Thus, the measure of creative performance here is different from that in Study 1. Finally, after the submission, the experiment participants were asked to answer a short questionnaire to measure their perceived arousal and the constraint on idea expression in the creative task as well as their perception of the activity's popularity and their own contributions. To measure arousal, we adapted the scale from Berger and Milkman (2012) and asked participants, "How do you feel when you are in this activity?", after which we rated their level of arousal using three items (anchored at "very passive/very active", "very mellow/very fired up" and "very low energy/very high energy"; a = 0.683. ...
Purpose
Prosumers’ creative performance in a co-creation activity is greatly affected by the disclosure of activity information. Extant research has separately examined the impact of participant numbers and the impact of platform transparency, but there is a lack of research on the interaction between the two. However, testing the joint effect of the two sources of information can provide a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ co-creation behaviour. This paper aims to fill the gap and further reveal the psychological mechanism behind the behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach
Three experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The results show that a large number of participants will stimulate and inhibit creative performances on untransparent and transparent co-creation platforms, respectively. Moreover, this study found that the effect of the number of participants on creative performance is mediated by arousal on untransparent platforms and by the constraint on idea expression on transparent platforms.
Research limitations/implications
This study advances knowledge of how the number of participants in an activity and platform transparency jointly influence prosumers’ creative performance and the corresponding mechanism. However, the main limitation of the study is that the findings are from scenario-based experiments.
Practical implications
This study provides a more comprehensive understanding of prosumers’ creative performance under the influence of the number of activity participants and platform transparency. The findings can help co-creation sponsoring companies and co-creation platforms improve activity performance by designing better information disclosure strategies, thereby enhancing platform value.
Originality/value
The findings enrich the literature on platform ecosystem and co-creation by integrating previously separate knowledge on the effects of participant numbers and platform transparency. In addition, the findings deepen the overall understanding of prosumers’ behaviour.
... Privacy concerns can also negatively influence customer engagement behaviors, because they reduce their intention to share information on social media(Mosteller & Poddar, 2017).6.2 | Social media as a communication and branding channelSocial media content has been a key research area in social media marketing studies, mainly because social media can help increase brand awareness and popularity in a less expensive and faster way than traditional advertising (Liu-Thompkins, 2012). Content characteristics that positively affect customer referral behaviors include: emotional rather than informational appeals(Akpinar & Berger, 2017); emphasis on specific emotions (e.g., awe, anger, anxiety)(Berger & Milkman, 2012); vividness (e.g., presenting colorful pictures)(Colicev et al., 2019) and interactivity (e.g., raising challenging questions)(De Vries et al., 2012); persuasiveness, demonstrated by argument quality, postpopularity, and postattractiveness; ...
The widespread use of social media as a marketing tool during the last decade has been responsible for attracting a significant volume of academic research, which, however, can be described as highly fragmented to yield clear directions and insights. We systematically synthesize and critically evaluate extant knowledge of social media marketing extracted from 418 articles published during the period 2009–2021. In doing so, we use an organizing framework focusing on five key areas of social media marketing research, namely, social media as a promotion and selling outlet, social media as a communication and branding channel, social media as a monitoring and intelligence source, social media as a customer relationship management and value cocreation platform, and social media as a general marketing and strategic tool. Within each of these areas, we provide important theoretical, methodological, and thematic insights, as well as future research directions. We also offer useful managerial implications derived from the articles reviewed.
... Despite its potential importance, limited research has investigated how social engagement motives influence online content-sharing decisions. Adjacent literature investigating information sharing and social connections found that when people seek to create social connections, they are more likely to share content that generates high arousal emotions (Berger, 2011;Berger & Milkman, 2012;Fast, Heath, & Wu, 2009). Building on this work, we argue that people will perceive the sharing of high emotion-arousing content to generate greater social engagement. ...
Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news, but they were also more willing to share conspiracy theories when they expected such theories, compared to factual news, to generate sufficiently greater levels of social engagement. In an interactive, multi-round, content-sharing paradigm, we found that people were very sensitive to the social feedback they received. When they received greater social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories than factual news, participants were significantly more likely to share conspiracy theories, even when they knew these theories to be false. Our findings advance our understanding of why and when individuals are likely to share conspiracy theories and identify important prescriptions for curbing the spread of conspiracy theories.
... Digital content farms may begin publishing large amounts of predominantly AI-generated text content (articles, blogs, posts, tweets, etc.) and targeting this content towards the audience most likely to engage with it. Without oversight, this would include highly optimized content that caters to an audience's worst biases and fears -likely a profitable strategy, as anger and anxiety have a strong link with online virality [19]. Moderation strategies for AI-generated content may include limitations to its use, or notifying readers that they are engaging with AI-generated content to allow them to reconsider how much trust they place in what they are reading. ...
Advances in natural language generation (NLG) have resulted in machine generated text that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from human authored text. Powerful open-source models are freely available, and user-friendly tools democratizing access to generative models are proliferating. The great potential of state-of-the-art NLG systems is tempered by the multitude of avenues for abuse. Detection of machine generated text is a key countermeasure for reducing abuse of NLG models, with significant technical challenges and numerous open problems. We provide a survey that includes both 1) an extensive analysis of threat models posed by contemporary NLG systems, and 2) the most complete review of machine generated text detection methods to date. This survey places machine generated text within its cybersecurity and social context, and provides strong guidance for future work addressing the most critical threat models, and ensuring detection systems themselves demonstrate trustworthiness through fairness, robustness, and accountability.
... To identify generic frames, we coded for items validated by previous framing research (Burscher et al., 2014;Valenzuela et al., 2017) and described them in Table 1. As some stories aimed to provide the public with practical, useful information (e.g., subway stations not working), we also coded for public service (Berger & Milkman, 2012). Some stories did not fit into the five generic frames, so we created the option Other. ...
This study assesses the relationship between two well-established sets of frames to better understand the news coverage of massive political protests. By relying on Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic frames and McLeod and Hertog’s protest frames, this study aims to identify whether certain generic frames emphasized in news stories increase the tendency to delegitimize protest movements. To this end, we analyzed the news coverage of Chile’s Estallido Social, a series of massive political demonstrations that developed across the country from October to December 2019. Data for this study come from stories published by Radio Bío Bío, the most trusted news outlet in the country, according to Reuters Institute. By analyzing a sample of 417 stories, we found the coverage replicated patterns that usually delegitimize protest movements, as many of the stories focused on violent acts and depicted demonstrators as deviant from the status quo. We also found a direct relationship between generic frames and protest frames, in which the presence of the former determines that of the latter. Generic frames provide information about how the news media interpret and package the news, which in turn affects demonstration-related features that the news media pay attention to. As such, we argue that combining both generic and issue-specific frames is a helpful approach to understanding the complexities of protest news coverage.
... The current context characterised by the absence "of a business and professional model" and by the dynamics of "trial and error", represents a serious threat to quality journalism, according to the President of the Prisa Group that publishes El País, Juan Luis Cebrián 5 . Additional to the resort of quoting essays, one should add the adoption of initiatives that have enjoyed audience success in other media -beyond consistency with the editorial line -which has led to the proliferation of structured texts in the form of lists; to the BuzzFeed style; and the decisive move towards viral issues 6 , and to surprising, interesting and practical contents, or those which convey positive emotions (Berger & Milkman, 2012) susceptible to being shared on social networks. These viral strategies developed in the field of marketing, are an important resource to boost digital traffic and to the media's ability to attract more advertising revenue (Newman, 2012). ...
En un contexto marcado por la incertidumbre tecnológica y la búsqueda de un modelo de negocio viable, los medios digitales han sucumbido a diversas estrategias para captar audiencia, reflejada en los clicks que genera cada titular. Este artículo centra la atención en un medio de referencia como El País para analizar qué opciones ha incorporado para atraer visitas a la web. A partir de una metodología cuantitativa y cualitativa, se estudian los contenidos de cuatro secciones que ha sumado Elpais.com en los últimos dos años (SModa, Icon, BuenaVida y Verne), que han logrado generar –en especial la última– un tráfico importante. Las conclusiones del análisis muestran una apuesta por la tabloidización, con contenidos anecdóticos y curiosos o de estilos de vida, mientras que las llamadas hard news están ausentes de estas nuevas secciones. Esta circunstancia coincide con titulares que presentan rasgos característicos de la prensa popular, que actúan más como anzuelo para captar la curiosidad –y de paso producir ingresos cada vez que se pincha sobre ellos– que como elementos informativos. La fragmentación de los textos y su estructura en listas imita el éxito cosechado por medios nativos digitales, al tiempo que se aleja de los estándares de la prensa de calidad.
... (Dost et al., 2018). The development of social media such as Facebook and Twitter has increased interest in WoM and Viral Marketing to optimize the business through online channels (Berger & Milkman, 2012;Yu-Jia, 2012). Richer content allows messages to be made in various variations. ...
This research was conducted to examine the mediating role of information dissemination (seeding) in the relation between marketing campaigns (content feeding) and electronic word of mouth (eWOM). The research object is three marketing campaigns from three online marketplaces in Indonesia, named: Shopee, Tokopedia, and Bukalapak. A model was built to test and evaluate and test the mediation effect existence. The number of participants was involved in this research is 200 participants, and they answer the specific question related to the research. We found that all regression path in the models is significant, that indicate direct and indirect effect happened simultaneously. Our conclusion is information dissemination (seeding activity) playing an important role as a partial mediating variable. Other implications and future research discussed. Keywords — E-WoM, Marketing Campaign, Content Feeding, Content Seeding
... These metrics include the popularity prediction [3,4], the fake users [5], the number of likes [6][7][8][9], the engagement rate [10], the intrinsic popularity [11,12], and virality [13]. Numerous factors, including hashtags [14], metadata, visuals [7,9], and sentiments [15], were considered during the analysis. The engagement rate, which is the number of likes per follower, is the most popular metric for measuring popularity. ...
Advertising has been one of the most effective and valuable marketing tools for many years. Utilizing social media networks to market and sell products is becoming increasingly prevalent. The greatest challenges in this industry are the high cost of providing content and posting it on social networks, maximizing ad efficiency, and limiting spam advertisements. User engagement rate is one of the most frequently employed metrics for measuring the effectiveness of social media advertisements. Previous research has not comprehensively analyzed the factors influencing engagement rate. To this end, it is necessary to investigate the impact of various factors (such as user characteristics, posts, emotions, relationships, images, and backgrounds, among others) on engagement rate because assessing these influential factors in different networks can increase the engagement of users with advertising posts and thereby increase the success rate of targeted advertising. To predict the user engagement rate, we extract the significant attributes of posts and introduce an adaptive hybrid convolutional model based on FW-CNN-LSTM. We cluster the selected data based on the weight and significance of their attributes using the FCM and XGBoost algorithms and then apply CNN- and LSTM-based methods to select similar features. Using accuracy, recall, F-measure, and precision metrics, we compared our algorithm to standard techniques such as SVM, Logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, and CNN. According to the findings, hashtag, brand ID, movie title, and actors achieve the highest scores, and the values for actual training time in various data ratios are relatively linear, which confirms the scalability of the proposed model for large datasets. The results also demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms others and can lead to targeted ads on social media.
... Online social networks afford continuous real-time discussions which impose high levels of information diffusion (Colleoni et al. 2014). While conversations occur in real-time across longer time horizons (Leonardi and Vaast 2017), increasingly people share their opinions, experiences and knowledge about various ongoing topics to inform, help or entertain others (Berger and Milkman 2012;Colleoni et al. 2014). People tend to respond to each other immediately by adding different perspectives, experiences and opinions. ...
New information technologies are changing the outcomes and process of innovation due to their increasing availability and use by individuals and organizations. There is a need to better understand how information systems (IS) innovations come about in terms of the socio-cognitive sensemaking through computer-mediated discourse. Yet, there is limited knowledge on how socio-cognitive sensemaking develops and influences IS innovations with organizing vision theory being a notable exception. Online social networks (OSN) is one of the primary new tools that is accelerating innovation due to its capacity for discursive social engagement. It is important for joint sensemaking which can influence diffusion and adoption of IS innovations. To date, past organizing vision research has mainly focused on traditional discursive channels. Therefore, the knowledge about how organizing visions develop within more contemporary channels such as OSNs is very limited so far. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of OSNs as a contemporary discourse channel and discuss how heterogeneity of communities, real-time engagement, and platform characteristics and practices impact organizing visions. We contribute to IS literature by offering a preliminary conceptual framework for organizing visions in OSNs and then suggesting possible opportunities to integrate social networks and big data analytics with organizing vision theory.
... But what is it that generates the most engagement? Some data analyzed by Facebook have highlighted how "moving, exciting, and motivational stories" and "provocative and passionate debates" generate double or triple the engagement compared to other stories (Osofsky, 2010;van Dijck et al., 2018) and it seems to apply in different cultural contexts and on other social platforms (Berger and Milkman, 2012;Chen and Sakamoto, 2014). ...
... In fact, innovations in technology have already transformed the overall structure of organizations and the relation with their environment. It has driven a new way of managing information, and this represents both a challenge and an immense opportunity for organizations (Berger and Milkman, 2012). Thus, IT, as a key part of technological innovations, has become ubiquitous in business activities, disrupting and affecting all core business operation. ...
The study investigated the relationship between digital marketing strategies and customer fulfillment of airlines in Nigeria. The aim was to examine the influence of digital marketing strategies on customer fulfillment. With respect to the theoretical underpinning, this research used Diffusion of Innovation Theory. The paper revealed that digital marketing strategies has influence on customer fulfillment. It was concluded that the dimensions of digital marketing strategies (social media marketing, content marketing, mobile application, search engine optimization) influence the measures of customer fulfillment (Customer engagement, electronic loyalty, and electronic word-of-mouth). Specifically, social media marketing has been confirmed to be a veritable business tool to not just create fellowship, but also improve customer engagement and e-loyalty. More so, digital contents on social media and other digital platforms are huge determinants to enhancing e-WOM referral. We therefore, recommends that, owners and managers of airlines in Nigeria should understand and develop a holistic approach of implementing an overall social media programme, as this research has confirmed its strategic importance in improving customer fulfillment. They should also coordinate and synchronise various social media platforms with traditional promotional activities for the purpose of achieving a successful integrated marketing communication. This research has proffered solution to contemporary issues confronting the aviation industry.
... Elementary School Kids Deserve More!!! OUR AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM INTRODUCES THEM TO THE JOYS OF RUNNING AND PARTICIPATING IN A 5 K WALK/RUN After training all year long, it's RACE DAY!!!!!".In addition to collecting the language used in each campaign, we also recorded the goal amount of the campaign, the amount raised by the campaign, the number of likes posted for each campaign (i.e. social media support for the campaign), the number of comments posted for each campaign (also a measure of support, but importantly, is also reflective of the response elicited by the campaign), and the number of shares (another measure of support, but one that captures the intended virality of the campaign;Berger & Milkman, 2012). ...
This paper investigates the influence of language style (formal vs. colloquial) on the effectiveness of charitable appeals. Although prior research has found persuasive effects associated with colloquial language style, we propose that the influence of language style is context dependent. Charitable appeals generally address relatively serious topics. Since formal language style is more context congruent in communicating this seriousness, it should be more effective in expressing the emotional arousal or the effort of the communicator, which we expected to result in greater charitable support. Across four studies, we provide important insights on how charitable organizations can better align language style to increase donor support. We find that formal language style (vs. colloquial) results in greater charitable support. We also find evidence for the underlying role of perceptions of emotional arousal, as in indication of effort, in this relationship. Lastly, we find support for a moderator related to one's prior beliefs. Since individuals with high just‐world beliefs are motivated to vary their prosocial behaviors, we find a moderating effect of just‐world beliefs, but only when the belief is high, that is, when individuals seek accountability.
... We found user engagement is particularly large for posts with a negative sentiment. This finding is in line with prior theory from the negativity bias, according to which negativity draws attention and thus drives user behavior (Berger and Milkman 2012;Berger 2011;Soroka, Fournier, and Nir 2019). Similar observations have been made by prior research in the case of news where negative language increases consumption (Robertson et al. 2022) and sharing (Hansen et al. 2011;Jenders, Kasneci, and Naumann 2013;Naveed et al. 2011;Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan 2013). ...
Open-source journalism emerged as a new phenomenon in the media ecosystem, which uses crowdsourcing to fact-check and generate investigative reports for world events using open sources (e.g., social media). A particularly prominent example is Bellingcat. Bellingcat is known for its investigations on the illegal use of chemical weapons during the Syrian war, the Russian responsibility for downing flight MH17, the identification of the perpetrators in the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny, and war crimes in the Russo-Ukraine war. Crucial for this is social media in order to disseminate findings and crowdsource fact-checks. In this work, we characterize the social media activities at Bellingcat on Twitter. For this, we built a comprehensive dataset of all N = 24,682 tweets posted by Bellingcat on Twitter since its inception in January 2014. Our analysis is three-fold: (1) We analyze how Bellingcat uses Twitter to disseminate information and collect information from its follower base. Here, we find a steady increase in both posts and replies over time, particularly during the Russo-Ukrainian war, which is in line with the growing importance of Bellingcat for the traditional media ecosystem. (2) We identify characteristics of posts that are successful in eliciting user engagement. User engagement is particularly large for posts embedding additional media items and with a more negative sentiment. (3) We examine how the follower base has responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here, we find that the sentiment has become more polarized and negative. We attribute this to a ~13-fold increase in bots interacting with the Bellingcat account. Overall, our findings provide recommendations for how open-source journalism such as Bellingcat can successfully operate on social media.
This study examines consumer-generated advertising (CGA) impacts on consumer attitudes, and behaviors for interacting with social media features and passing along electronic word-of-mouth. Participants viewed a video advertisement on YouTube, framed as either a consumer-generated or firm-generated advertisement, to determine effects of source credibility with different levels of product involvement. Need for cognition (NFC) also was examined. Analysis revealed consumers as source significantly enhanced advertising attitudes and interactivity behaviors
Este artigo investiga as práticas discursivas de apoiadores do presidente Bolsonaro no Twitter durante a CPI da Pandemia. A análise é fundamentada teoricamente por Chouliaraki e Fairclough (1999) e Fairclough (2003), em diálogo com discussões interdisciplinares sobre o debate político nas mídias sociais (CESARINO, 2020; KHOSRAVINIK, 2017a, 2017b). O estudo é qualitativo, realizado através das hashtags #RenanVagabundo e #CPIdoCirco. Identificamos diferentes práticas discursivas que foram agrupadas em duas categorias: a deslegitimação da CPI através da representação negativa dos senadores e uma representação do processo da CPI enquanto uma tentativa de autopromoção de opositores do presidente.
Bài nghiên cứu này được thực hiện nhằm xác định các yếu tố của Tiếp thị nội dung (Content Marketing) tác động đến ý định mua của khách hàng Gen Z tại Tp. Hồ Chí Minh. Tác giả tiến hành phát 312 bảng khảo sát trực tuyến, thu về 305 câu trả lời hợp lệ. Sau đó, tác giả tiến hành phân tích dữ liệu với phương pháp thống kê mô tả, kiểm định độ tin cậy Cronbach’s Alpha, phân tích nhân tố khám phá (EFA), phân tích Person, phân tích hồi quy bằng phần mềm SPSS 20.0. Từ kết quả nghiên cứu, đề xuất một số hàm ý quản trị góp phần tăng cường ý định mua của khách hàng Gen Z và giúp doanh nghiệp xây dựng, nâng cao hiệu quả kinh doanh từ hoạt động Tiếp thị nội dung (Content Marketing).
Paralelamente às intensas mudanças físicas, biológicas e comportamentais, os adolescentes experimentam significativas transformações emocionais à medida que constroem novas relações interpessoais. As redes sociais se tornam grandes aliadas na manifestação de sentimentos, atitudes e decisões a respeito da vida particular que emergem nessa fase da vida. A preocupação com a abordagem do tema sexualidade nas escolas é recorrente, visto que a instituição escolar visa o desenvolvimento do indivíduo como um todo. O presente trabalho propõe uma metodologia que tem o intuito de auxiliar os estudantes, na compreensão do funcionamento do aparelho genital humano a partir de estudos de casos de adolescentes fictícios que relatam situações vividas por eles ou pensamentos em relação aos conceitos: ciclo reprodutivo, puberdade e idade reprodutiva. Dentro da proposta, os estudos de caso são apresentados aos estudantes na forma de relatos ou afirmações, simulando postagens em redes sociais. Infere-se a necessidade de permitir que os estudantes conheçam a linguagem científica, enxergando essa área da Ciência como uma atividade relacionada ao seu bem estar, à sua saúde, e que tem implicações diretas para sociedade. Como forma de sustentar o Ensino por Investigação, a proposta apresenta alguns elementos para que o estudante raciocine cientificamente, adotando uma postura investigativa para a resolução dos casos.
Chapter 4, “Worldwide Fungi,” examines how stupidity diverts. Networking is traced to an evolutionary lineage of assembling for problem-solving, stretching back to slime molds and fungal mycorrhiza. The chapter reconceptualizes the worldwide web into the worldwide fungi. With intelligence characterized by efficiency in problem-solving, fungi is argued here as opening evolution to the immense differentiation potential of stupidity. Empirical material is analyzed to uncover how stupidity proliferates online, as ways to solving the problem of gaining attention. Populations browsing websites are shown to regularly follow clickbait directed to base desires, drawn to the secrets of good health and easy wealth, beauty, fame, and sexual promiscuity. The chapter tests what might be learned from such stupidity, in particular how clickbait reveals the potency of foolishness for a range of human social fields. This includes the technological development of artificial stupidity (rather than artificial intelligence), economic reliance on greater fools, art as abbreviation for artificial stupidity, and philosophy as a form of morosophy (a love of stupidity rather than knowledge).
Las tendencias de comportamiento de los jóvenes en el uso de las redes sociales derivan en ocasiones hacia una determinada asunción de roles. Sobre ello existen diversos estudios que lo atestiguan. El ámbito audiovisual, como eco de los acontecimientos de la sociedad, provoca la reflexión y en ocasiones alerta sobre la invasión del entorno digital en los jóvenes. El análisis de esta situación, desde un punto de vista comunicativo, es el objetivo de este artículo, en el que se toma como ejemplo la película norteamericana Nerve (2016) basada en la novela “Nerve, un juego sin regla” de Jeanne Ryan.
The present study was conducted in the state of Chhattisgarh to identify the pace of Tourism development, sustainability and its awareness among the tourist visiting the state, the study tries to develop a model to determine the important variables which can contribute towards the development of sustainable tourism at Chhattisgarh state. The tourism industry is helping nations to become economically strong and the growth of this industry is remarkable in last two decades but there are some big threats associated with the unprecedented development of this industry across the globe. Today India and especially Chhattisgarh is rich in every sense be it infrastructure, connectivity, flora and fauna, preserved ancient architect or culture, the shrine places etc bound to attract domestic and global tourists. As a new state Chhattisgarh is trying to explore the developmental possibilities of this industry & it become important to think about the sustainable options to minimize the negative impact of this industry? A tourism strategy is essential which is ecological, economical & socially feasible for long term. A research model was developed and examined with a questionnaire designed using 5-point likert scale. The questionnaire was administered using survey method from tourists of different destinations of Chhattisgarh.
En este Volumen I se incluyen los trabajos relativos a los campos de Antropología-
Sociología, Educación-Alfabetización Digital y Comunicación-Divulgación-Social Media.
El criterio seguido ha sido agrupar las materias que en el campo de las Ciencias tienen
como foco principal no el desarrollo de actividades económicas, sino el estudio de las
actividades sociales.
En el campo de la Antropología-Sociología hemos incluido diez trabajos de
investigación que tratan desde aspectos concretos del individuo y por tanto pertenecen
al campo de la Antropología hasta aquellos ligados con el análisis de las sociedades y que
por tanto entendemos estarían más ligados con la Sociología.
En el campo de la Educación-Alfabetización Digital hemos incluido catorce
trabajos agrupados bajo el criterio de análisis y propuestas de mejora del proceso
educativo y alfabetizador.
Cierran este volumen seis trabajos propios del campo de la Comunicación-
Divulgación y Medios Sociales. En este campo el criterio de agrupación seguido ha
sido recoger propuestas y reflexiones cuyo eje central es el proceso de transmisión,
comunicación y divulgación de mensajes entre la comunidad ciudadana. Por tanto, son
trabajos cuyo objeto de estudio primordial es el mensaje informativo.
Esperamos que el presente volumen de Ciências Socialmente Aplicáveis:
Integrando Saberes e Abrindo Caminhos les resulten de interés pues busca
proporcionar una foto fija del estado de la investigación a través de un grupo heterogéneo
de trabajos aplicados y previamente evaluados sobre distintos temas comprendidos en
este campo. Con ello procuramos al mismo tiempo sugerir futuras líneas de investigación
a desarrollar a partir de los textos aquí publicados para todas aquellas personas ligadas
a la actividad académica.
Marketing is defined Marketing is the management process that identifies, anticipates, and satisfies customers’ requirements profitably. Language enables Marketers to deliver valuable messages about their products and services to consumers. This paper aims to analyse the linguistic and persuasive strategies used in content marketing of health care products on Facebook. The study employed a descriptive design to highlight the linguistic features used in Facebook’s Content Marketing to influence consumers. The study used a document analysis method in selecting healthcare content from Facebook, which consisted of excerpts of written content purposively selected from healthcare Facebook pages. The sample included 11 Facebook pages from which four excerpts were drawn to make 44 content items. Simple random sampling was then performed to select 23 content items. The analysis involved a qualitative categorisation of the various themes of language used by Facebook users. The study established that features such as pronouns, repetitions, translations, colloquial language, and parallelism were found to play a significant role in enhancing CM efficacy by making the content captivating, memorable, readable, and persuasive. The study recommends that for marketers to create a strong presence in Facebook content marketing, they should use linguistic features that can make them stand out among the thousands of messages that the consumers are exposed to daily.
With the advancements in user-generated content sites, their prominence for multimedia information dissemination is increasing on a rapid scale. An information about which content is going to be popular and to what extent has a big set of application area including load balancing of servers, online marketing strategy decisions, recommendation systems, disaster management, etc. Big tech-giants, to gain a competitive advantage for strategic decision making, are employing various techniques for an accurate and efficient popularity prediction mechanism based on past trends and current scenario. Thus, there is a need for a detailed and comprehensive study in the field of popularity prediction so as to identify the current trends, in order to tap benefits from the huge potential the field offers. This paper deals with a detailed survey of the literature of popularity prediction of online content covering all the aspects of popularity and the interplay between the contents at various platforms, relationship between the granularity levels and various feature selection methods used for different approaches to prediction. A bibliometrics analysis of the selected approaches is also conducted with a discussion of their advantages and limitations. This will help the researchers to focus on emerging trends of online content popularity prediction algorithms.
This feasibility study was conducted for Sybrid Pvt. Ltd. in Karachi as a final year ELP project by students at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. It determines the viability of launching natural and organic self-care products for skincare, haircare, eye care, and lip care categories and the cosmetics line as well. This study further evaluates the best strategy for a launch and defines the customers for segmentation, identifies the personas targeting, and highlights the positioning strategy for the success of the highlighted marketing mix in this report.
The electrically conductive textiles market expands every year because of its broader applications. Especially in electromagnetic shielding applications, textile materials are widely used. There have been many studies on the development and manufacturing of conductive textiles, but there are very few studies related to their deformation performance. In this work, the rib knitted fabric sample is developed with silver-coated polyamide yarn and stretched using the biaxial device. During biaxial extension, the sample is tested for electromagnetic shielding, electrical resistance, and porosity as per the standards. There is a significant change in electromagnetic shielding effectiveness during fabric stretching. The fabric's electrical resistance and porosity were also changed during fabric stretching. The deformation performance knowledge of the conductive fabric is essential for developing samples for wireless strain sensing and motion-detecting applications.
The problem of automatically determining the gender of a document's author would appear to be a more subtle problem than those of categorization by topic or authorship attribution. Nevertheless, it is shown that automated text categorization techniques can exploit combinations of simple lexical and syntactic features to infer the gender of the author of an unseen formal written document with approximately 80 per cent accuracy. The same techniques can be used to determine if a document is fiction or non-fiction with approximately 98 per cent accuracy.
We argue that emotion cannot only be conceived of as a short-lived and intrapersonal phenomenon. Rather, based on five theoretical arguments, we propose that the social sharing of an emotional experience forms an integral part of the emotional processes. A series of six studies investigated different aspects of this hypothesis. Study 1 showed that an overwhelming majority of people reported sharing their emotional experiences and that the memories of these experiences tended to come back spontaneously to their consciousness. No difference was found among emotions. Using a different procedure, Studies 2 and 3 replicated these findings in two different populations. In addition, these studies provided indications that women share their experiences with a wider array of individuals than do men. The first three studies did not find any differences among emotions, but they did not include shame. It could be argued that people are less inclined to socially share shame experiences which are typically elicited by breaking social rules. Study 4 specifically investigated this hypothesis. No differences among shame and other emotions were found except for the delay of the first sharing of the experience. Study 5 constituted a first investigation of whether the social sharing of emotion is also a significant process in now Western cultures. A comparison between Dutch and Surinamese people failed to reveal any significant difference. Based on the findings of the first five studies, a correlational model was designed in Study 6. It tested the interrelationships among disruptiveness of the emotion, social sharing, mental rumination, and recovery from the emotion disruption. A coherent pattern of findings emerged, showing that social sharing can be conceived as a bi-dimensional concept defined by features of amount and delay of sharing. In addition, both social sharing and mental rumination varied according to the disruptiveness of the emotion. Surprisingly, however, recovery could not be related to social sharing, mental rumination, or to the time elapsed since the episode.
Creative ideation is a highly complex process, which is difficult to formalize and control. Evidently, even in a complex thinking context certain patterns of creativity may emerge. Relying on such observed patterns may help in “organizing” the creative process by promoting routes that have been proven to lead to productive ideas and avoiding those that do not.
The present research suggests that successful advertisements share and are characterized by such abstract patterns termed creativity templates. The theoretical rationale for the emergence of such templates and the empirical studies that detect the key creativity templates underlying quality ads indicate that the templates are identifiable, objectively verifiable, and generalizable across multiple categories. Studies 1 and 2 were designed to identify and describe the templates. Six major creativity templates were derived by inference from a sample of 200 highly evaluated print ads drawn from award-winning ad contests such as The One Show (Study 1). Judges found that 89% of the ads could be explained by the six creativity templates. Following a formal description of the templates and their versions, a study comparing 200 award-winning and 200 nonwinning ads (Study 2) is reported. It was found that the two groups differed systematically in the number and distribution of creativity templates: 50% of the award-winning ads as opposed to only 2.5% of the nonwinning ads could be explained by the templates. Further validation of the template approach was obtained by manipulating presence or absence of templates in an experimental setting. In Study 3 groups of individuals were trained in template-based idea generation, an association technique, or not trained at all, prior to an ad-ideation task. Another group subsequently rated the ideas. Findings indicate that a priori knowledge of the templates was associated with the generation of higher quality ads in terms of creativity, brand attitude judgments, and recall (Study 4), with some variation in terms of feeling responses which included humor, emotion, and annoyance.
The findings of the reported studies and several real-life applications conducted in leading ad agencies, indicate that the template taxonomy is a trainable, resource-saving, and effective tool. It simplifies and improves the decision-making process involved in designing advertising strategies. It can be applied either by hiring trained personnel employed by consulting firms, or by training the agency's own personnel to routinely evaluate past and current ads, and engage in creative activity.
The template approach represents a step forward in defining a comprehensive model of the antecedents of outcome reactions to advertising stimuli. Improved understanding of the wide spectrum of reactions connecting the basic templates with end-user reactions is likely to be beneficial both for academicians and for practitioners. Such a framework can serve as a basis for a synthesis between the activity of creative professionals whose focal interest is the generation of ads, managers, whose main responsibility is strategy formulation, and academic activity, which focuses mainly on the consumer reaction-end of the advertising process. Hence, in addition to academicians, the relevant target audience is likely to include a wide array of communication-related personnel such as creative professionals and planners in advertising agencies, consultants, and brand managers.
In addition, it is postulated that the template taxonomy provides the means to achieve “creativity expertise”. Unlike the divergent thinking approaches, in which the required expertise is not necessarily related to the creativity process itself (e.g. individuals can be trained to be better moderators in brainstorming), the creativity template approach is trainable and has the capacity to measure and directly improve creativity outcomes. The template taxonomy facilitates the focused cognitive effort involved in generating new ideas, the capacity to access relevant information, and enables high memorability of the reduced set of information needed to perform the tasks.
The fact that templates are less transient than the ideas produced does not mean that templates are permanent or that they are insensitive to changes over long term frameworks. Indeed, advertising reflects social norms and trends, and as such, long term social trends are expected to reshape the templates and provide conditions for the evolution of new templates. Nonetheless, the dynamics of template changes are expected to be much slower than the dynamics of changes in ad hoc idea generation.
In this paper we investigate the attributes and relative influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events that took place on the Twitter follower graph over a two month interval in 2009. Unsurprisingly, we find that the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been influential in the past and who have a large number of followers. We also find that URLs that were rated more interesting and/or elicited more positive feelings by workers on Mechanical Turk were more likely to spread. In spite of these intuitive results, however, we find that predictions of which particular user or URL will generate large cascades are relatively unreliable. We conclude, therefore, that word-of-mouth diffusion can only be harnessed reliably by targeting large numbers of potential influencers, thereby capturing average effects. Finally, we consider a family of hypothetical marketing strategies, defined by the relative cost of identifying versus compensating potential "influencers." We find that although under some circumstances, the most influential users are also the most cost-effective, under a wide range of plausible assumptions the most cost-effective performance can be realized using "ordinary influencers"---individuals who exert average or even less-than-average influence.
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.
We present a quantitative analysis of 442 pieces of fiction published between 5 October 1992 and 17 September 2001 in the
New Yorker magazine. We address two independent questions using the same data set. First, we examine whether changes in the Executive
Editor or Fiction Editor are associated with significant changes in the type of fiction published at the New Yorker. Second, we examine whether New Yorker authors write fiction more often than not about characters with whom they share demographic traits. We find that changes
in Fiction Editor at the New Yorker are associated with numerous significant, quantifiable changes in the magazine's fiction and that these effects are greater
than those associated with a change in the New Yorker's Executive Editor. We also find that authors of New Yorker fiction write significantly more often than not about protagonists who share their race, gender, and country of origin and
who are within or below their age range. The same is true of secondary characters except in the case of gender.
In the latest decades, emotions have become an important research topic in all behavioral sciences, and not the least in advertising. Yet, advertising literature on how to measure emotions is not straightforward. The major aim of this article is to give an update on the different methods used for measuring emotions in advertising and to discuss their validity and applicability. We further draw conclusions on the relation between emotions and traditional measures of advertising effectiveness. We finally formulate recommendations on the use of the different methods and make suggestions for future research.
Mediating transactions through the Internet removes important cues that salespeople can use to assess a consumer's willingness to pay. We analyze whether dealers' difficulty in identifying consumer characteristics on the Internet and consumers' ease in finding information affect race and gender discrimination in car retailing. Using a large dataset of transaction prices for new automobiles, the first part of the paper analyzes the relationship between car prices and demographics. We find that offline African-American and Hispanic consumers pay approximately 2% more than do other consumers; however, we can explain 65% of this price premium with differences in income, education, and search costs; we find no evidence of statistical race discrimination. The second part of the paper turns to the role of the Internet. Online minority buyers who use the Internet Referral Service we study, Autobytel.com, pay nearly the same prices as do whites, irrespective of their income, education, and search costs. Since members of minority groups who use the Internet may not be representative, we control for selection. The combination of our results suggests that price discrimination in car buying has a "disparate impact" on minorities and whites rather than being evidence of a "disparate treatment" of these groups. This is because Autobytel.com dealers are very likely to know an Internet consumer's race. We conclude that the Internet is disproportionately beneficial to those who have personal characteristics that put them at a disadvantage in negotiating. African-American and Hispanic individuals, who are least likely to use the Internet, are the ones who benefit the most from it.
There has long been interest in describing emotional experience in terms of underlying dimensions, but traditionally only two dimensions, pleasantness and arousal, have been reliably found. The reasons for these findings are reviewed, and integrating this review with two recent theories of emotions (Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1982), we propose eight cognitive appraisal dimensions to differentiate emotional experience. In an investigation of this model, subjects recalled past experiences associated with each of 15 emotions, and rated them along the proposed dimensions. Six orthogonal dimensions, pleasantness, anticipated effort, certainty, attentional activity, self-other responsibility/control, and situational control, were recovered, and the emotions varied systematically along each of these dimensions, indicating a strong relation between the appraisal of one's circumstances and one's emotional state. The patterns of appraisal for the different emotions, and the role of each of the dimensions in differentiating emotional experience are discussed.
This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.
Prior studies on the association between weather and psychological changes have produced mixed results. In part, this inconsistency may be because weather's psychological effects are moderated by two important factors: the season and time spent outside. In two correlational studies and an experiment manipulating participants' time outdoors (total N = 605), pleasant weather (higher temperature or barometric pressure) was related to higher mood, better memory, and "broadened" cognitive style during the spring as time spent outside increased. The same relationships between mood and weather were not observed during other times of year, and indeed hotter weather was associated with lower mood in the summer. These results are consistent with findings on seasonal affective disorder, and suggest that pleasant weather improves mood and broadens cognition in the spring because people have been deprived of such weather during the winter.
Seemingly trivial social talk provides fertile ground for emotion sharing (a narrator and audience's realization that they experience the same emotional response toward a target), which in turn creates a coalition between the narrator and the audience, configures the narrator and audience's relationship with the target, and coordinates their target-directed action. In this article, the authors use 4 studies to investigate this thesis. In Studies 1 and 2--where participants rated scenarios in which narrators told them anecdotes--the authors found that when there was emotion sharing (a) participants were more bonded with narrators, (b) the narrator and audience's relationship with the target (as reflected in action tendencies) was determined by the emotionality of the anecdotes, and (c) they coordinated their target-directed actions. Study 3 demonstrated that this effect was indeed due to emotion sharing. Study 4 provided behavioral evidence for the effects of emotion sharing using a 2-person trust game. Together, these studies reveal that the everyday act of social talk is a powerful act that is able to shape the social triad of the narrator, the audience, and the social target, with powerful consequences for social structure and group action.
Consumer choice is influenced in a direct and meaningful way by the actions taken by others. These “actions” range from face-to-face recommendations from a friend to the passive observation of what a stranger is wearing. We refer to the set of such contexts as “social interactions” (SI). We believe that at least some of the SI effects are partially within the firm's control and that this represents an exciting research opportunity. We present an agenda that identifies a list of unanswered questions of potential interest to both researchers and managers.
In order to appreciate the firm's choices with respect to its management of SI, it is important to first evaluate where we are in terms of understanding the phenomena themselves. We highlight five questions in this regard: (1) What are the antecedents of word of mouth (WOM)? (2) How does the transmission of positive WOM differ from that of negative WOM? (3) How does online WOM differ from offline WOM? (4) What is the impact of WOM? (5) How can we measure WOM? Finally, we identify and discuss four principal, non-mutually exclusive, roles that the firm might play: (1) observer, (2) moderator, (3) mediator, and (4) participant.
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Tested 2 hypotheses: (a) White bystanders are more likely to discriminate against Black victims in situations in which failure to intervene could be attributable to factors other than the victim's race. (b) There is a causal relationship between arousal induced by witnessing an emergency and bystander responsiveness, as proposed by I. M. Piliavin et al (see record
1970-03549-001). A total of 260 female undergraduates served as Ss. Results of Study 1 support the 1st hypothesis; however, Blacks and Whites were helped equally when the S was the only bystander. Study 2 failed to demonstrate a predicted interaction between the victim's race and the ambiguity of the emergency. Nevertheless, when arousal due to the unambiguous emergency could be misattributed to the effects of a placebo, Blacks were helped less than Whites. In Study 1, cardiac measures of arousal were correlated (.61) with latency to intervene in an emergency. The more arousal Ss experienced, the more quickly they helped. In addition, consistent with the proposed causal relationship, Study 2 demonstrated that bystanders given the opportunity to misattribute emergency-generated arousal to an "arousing" placebo helped the victim more slowly than did Ss administered a "nonarousing" placebo. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Little empirical research has examined the implicit effects of environmental cues on consumer behavior. Across six studies using a combination of field and laboratory methods, the authors find that products are more accessible, evaluated more favorably, and chosen more frequently when the surrounding environment contains more perceptually or conceptually related cues. The findings highlight the impact of frequent-in addition to recent-priming in shaping product evaluation and choice: More frequent exposure to perceptually or conceptually related cues increases product accessibility and makes the product easier to process. In turn, this increased accessibility influences product evaluation and choice, which are found to vary directly with the frequency of exposure to conceptually related cues. These results support the hypothesis that conceptual priming effects can have a strong impact on real-world consumer judgments.
(This article originally appeared in Management Science, January 1969, Volume 15, Number 5, pp. 215–227, published by The Institute of Management Sciences.)
A growth model for the timing of initial purchase of new products is developed and tested empirically against data for eleven consumer durables. The basic assumption of the model is that the timing of a consumer's initial purchase is related to the number of previous buyers. A behavioral rationale for the model is offered in terms of innovative and imitative behavior. The model yields good predictions of the sales peak and the timing of the peak when applied to historical data. A long-range forecast is developed for the sales of color television sets.
One of the outstanding results of three decades of laboratory market research is that under rather weak conditions prices and quantities in competitive experimental markets converge to the competitive equilibrium. Yet, the design of these experiments ruled out gift exchange or reciprocity motives, that is, subjects could not reciprocate for a gift. This paper reports the results of experiments which do not rule out reciprocal interactions between buyers and sellers. Sellers have the opportunity to choose quality levels which are above the levels enforceable by buyers. In principle they can, therefore, reward buyers who offer them high prices. Yet, such reciprocating behaviour lowers sellers' monetary payoff and is, hence, not subgame perfect. The data reveal that many sellers behave reciprocally. This generates a positive relation between prices and quality at the aggregate level which is anticipated by the buyers. As a result, buyers are willing to pay prices which are substantially above sellers' reservation prices. These results indicate that reciprocity motives may indeed be capable of driving a competitive experimental market permanently away from the competitive outcome. The data, therefore, support the gift exchange approach to the explanation of involuntary unemployment.
Abstract In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the firm’s proactive management of customer-to-customer communication. We are particularly interested in understanding how, if at all, the firm should go about effecting meaningful word-of-mouth. To tackle this problem, we collect data from two sources: 1) We implemented,a large-scale field test in which a national firm created word of mouth,through,two populations: customers and non-customers, 2) We collected data from an online experiment. We break our theoretical problem into two subproblems. First, we ask, “What kind of WOM drives sales?” Motivated by previous research, we hypothesize that for a product with a low initial awareness level, the WOM that is most effective at driving sales is created by less-loyal (not highly-loyal) customers, and occurs between acquaintances (not friends). We find support for this in the field test as well as in an experimental,setting. Hence we demonstrate the potential usefulness of exogenously-created WOM: conversations,are created where,none would naturally have occured otherwise. Then, we ask, “Which agents are most effective at creating this kind of WOM?” In particular, we are interested in evaluating the effectiveness of the commonly-used opinion leader designation. We find that while opinion leadership is useful in identifying potentially effective spreaders of WOM among very loyal customers, it is less useful for the sample of less loyal customers. Keywords: Word of Mouth, Promotion, Advertising 1I ntroduction
An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area, of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object. This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include material on summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.
Do dissatisfied customers engage in more or less word of mouth than satisfied customers? There is theoretical and empirical support for both possibilities. To better understand this issue, the authors developed a utility-based model of the relationship between customer satisfaction and word of mouth. The hypothesized functional form-an asymmetric U-shape-cannot be rejected based on data from the United States and Sweden. In addition, the estimation results based on the two samples are similar, suggesting that the proposed relationship is generalizable. The findings also indicate that although dissatisfied customers do engage in greater word of mouth than satisfied ones, common suppositions concerning the size of this difference appear to be exaggerated. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68654/2/10.1177_109467059800100102.pdf
This article focuses on memory-based choice situations where changes in a brand's accessibility may affect the probability that it is retrieved and considered for choice. In such instances, factors other than evaluation may affect which brands are brought to mind at purchase. Two experiments are described that manipulate the determinants of brand accessibility and measure consequent effects on retrieval, consideration, choice, and evaluation. Results provide evidence for the influence of memory during the brand-choice process. For a brand to be selected in memory-based choice, the consumer must recall that brand and fail to recall other brands that might otherwise be preferred. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.
The creation of online consumer communities to provide product reviews and advice has been touted as an important, albeit somewhat expensive component of Internet retail strategies. In this paper, we characterize reviewer behavior at two popular Internet sites and examine the effect of consumer reviews on firms' sales. We use publicly available data from the two leading online booksellers, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, to construct measures of each firm's sales of individual books. We also gather extensive consumer review data at the two sites. First, we characterize the reviewer behavior on the two sites such as the distribution of the number of ratings and the valence and length of ratings, as well as ratings across different subject categories. Second, we measure the effect of individual reviews on the relative shares of books across the two sites. We argue that our methodology of comparing the sales and reviews of a given book across Internet retailers allows us to improve on the existing literature by better capturing a causal relationship between word of mouth (reviews) and sales since we are able to difference out factors that affect the sales and word of mouth of both retailers, such as the book's quality. We examine the incremental sales effects of having reviews for a particular book versus not having reviews and also the differential sales effects of positive and negative reviews. Our large database of books also allows us to control for other important confounding factors such as differences across the sites in prices and shipping times.
Managers are very interested in word-of-mouth communication because it can have a tremendous impact on a product's sales. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. It is our primary objective in this paper to address these challenges. First and foremost, how does one even gather the data? Since the information is exchanged in private conversations, direct observation is (or at least has traditionally been) quite difficult. Second, even if one could observe the conversations, what aspect of them should one measure? The third challenge comes from the fact that word of mouth is not exogenous. While the mapping from word of mouth to future sales is of great interest to the firm, we must also recognize that word of mouth is at the same time an outcome of past sales. Our core result is that on-line conversations may offer an easy and cost-effective opportunity to measure word-of-mouth. However, simply counting on-line conversations may not be informative. On the other hand, measuring the "dispersion" of these conversations across communities is. Specifically, we show that a measure of dispersion has explanatory power in a dynamic model of sales, while pure counts do not. As a context for our study, we have chosen new TV shows during the 1999/2000 seasons. Our source of word-of-mouth conversations is Usenet, a collection of thousands of newsgroups with very diverse topics.
We propose that consumers often make choices that diverge from those of others to ensure that they effectively communicate desired identities. Consistent with this identity-signaling perspective, four studies illustrate that consumers are more likely to diverge from majorities, or members of other social groups, in product domains that are seen as symbolic of identity (e.g., music or hairstyles, rather than backpacks or stereos). In identity domains, participants avoided options preferred by majorities and abandoned preferences shared with majorities. The social group associated with a product influenced choice more in identity domains and when a given product was framed as identity relevant. People diverge, in part, to avoid communicating undesired identities. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
The author discusses a neurological model of a modular network that mediates emotional experience. According to this theory, emotional experience has three components: valence (positive and negative), arousal, and motor activation (approach, avoid, neither). In this model, the cortex is critical in regulating activities of the limbic system, basal ganglia, and reticular system. The frontal lobes are important for valence: the left mediates positive emotions, the right negative emotions. The right hemisphere, especially the parietal lobe, is important in activating arousal systems, and the left hemisphere modulates inhibition of these systems. The right hemisphere is also critical in motor activation. The frontal lobes, especially the orbitofrontal portions, mediate avoidance behaviors, and the parietal lobes mediate approach behaviors. The cortical areas discussed have rich interconnections and are also closely connected with the limbic system, basal ganglia, and reticular systems. Emotional experience may depend on the patterns of neural activation in this modular network.
Creativity Templates: Towards Identifying the Fundamental Schemes of Quality AdvertisementsThe Role of Hubs in the Adoption Process
- Goldenberg
- David Jacob
- Mazursky
- Solomon
Goldenberg, Jacob, David Mazursky, and Sorin Solomon (1999), “Creativity Templates: Towards Identifying the Fundamental Schemes of Quality Advertisements,” Marketing Science, 18 (3), 333–51. — — —, Han Sangman, Donald R. Lehmann, and Jae W. Hong (2009), “The Role of Hubs in the Adoption Process,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (March), 1–13
Using Online Conversa-tions to Study Word-of-Mouth CommunicationFirm-Created Word-of-Mouth Commu-nication: Evidence from a Field TestThe Firm’s Management of Social Interactions
- Godes
- Dina David
Godes, David and Dina Mayzlin (2004), “Using Online Conversa-tions to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication,” Marketing Sci-ence, 23 (4), 545–60. — — — and — — — (2009), “Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Commu-nication: Evidence from a Field Test,” Marketing Science, 28 (4), 721–39. — — —, — — —, Yubo Chen, Sanjiv Das, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Bruce Pfeiffer, et al. (2005), “The Firm’s Management of Social Interactions,” Marketing Letters, 16 (3/4), 415–28