Investigation of electronic-word-of-mouth on online social networking sites written by authors with commercial interest

A social media engagement framework for applicant attraction and retention: #SocialMediaCongruence

Purpose

The social media (SM) engagement framework consists of dimensions of employee privacy expectations and organizations' social media orientation. Further, the social media privacy orientation model provides better understanding of complexities of selection and retention created by the social media landscape.

Design/methodology/approach

Organizations are increasingly seeking talent to support burgeoning social media strategies. Qualified employees may be expected to have related professional experience and an active personal social media presence. In contrast to this evolving demand, prevailing guidelines suggest applicants minimize their social media activity altogether. These restrictive guidelines may be better suited for organizations that prefer or require high levels of discretion on social media given the differing engagement expectations across firms and among individuals.

Findings

How the congruence between an employee's expectations of privacy on SM and the organization's expectation of employees' SM usage affects applicant attraction to organizations and employee retention is outlined. Propositions are offered to foster research in this area.

Practical implications

Social media congruence is an important consideration for human resource (HR) policies and associated training.

Social implications

Public policies toward the use of social media in recruitment and privacy should consider social media congruence.

Originality/value

The model advanced in the paper provides organizations and applicants with a stronger understanding of the complexities surrounding the use of SM in selection and retention decisions.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2021-0260

Modelling the Service Experience Encounters Using User-Generated Content: A Text Mining Approach

Among services, the immense growth of Indian tourism in the last years has attracted the interest of practitioners, researchers, and governments. Service experiences at the point of encounter can impact the consumption of these tourism services extensively. However, measuring the service experience at the point of service encounter becomes a bit difficult. The tourists who visit India often share their experiences immediately regarding their service encounter in social media. These tweets often have high sentiments and emotional content. In this study, we attempt to identify factors which impact customer service experience, at the point of service encounter, by mining social media discussions. After removing spurious tweets, 7,91,804 tweets were identified and analysed in this study. Factors such as accessibility, accommodation, assurance, cultural attraction, Jugaadu service flexibility, cleanliness, hospitality, price, restaurant, and security were identified using topic modelling, topic association mining, and sentiment analysis. We attempt to model these experiences and their drivers across five zones of India, namely North, South, East, West, and North-East India. Our inferential analysis highlights that the importance and impact of these factors differ significantly zone wise across India, which indicates high location specificity of factors which impact the customer service experience. The study elaborates implications for theory and practice based on our findings.

What Affects Usage Satisfaction in Mobile Payments? Modelling User Generated Content to Develop the "Digital Service Usage Satisfaction Model"

Mobile payment services have become increasingly important in daily lives in India due to multiple planned and unplanned events. The objective of this study is to identify the determinants of usage satisfaction of mobile payments which could enhance service adoption. The "Digital Service Usage Satisfaction Model" has been proposed and validated by combining technology adoption and service science literature. First the data was extracted from Twitter based on hashtags and keywords. Then using sentiment mining and topic modelling the large volumes of text were analysed. Then network science was also used for identifying clusters among associated topics. Then, using content analysis methodology, a theoretical model was developed based on literature. Finally using multiple regression analysis, we validated the proposed model. The study establishes that cost, usefulness, trust, social influence, credibility, information privacy and responsiveness factors are more important to increase the usage satisfaction of mobile payments services. Also methodologically, this is an endeavour to validate a new approach which uses social media data for developing a inferential theoretical model.

eWOM credibility: a comprehensive framework and literature review

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) credibility. Further, the authors propose a comprehensive and integrated model on eWOM credibility.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a systematic review of the extant literature on marketing, sociology and psychology to identify the factors that affect eWOM credibility. Further, the authors developed themes and identified factors which lead to eWOM credibility.

Findings

Four factors were identified, i.e. content, communicator, context and consumer, which affect eWOM credibility. Several variables associated with these four factors were identified, which result in eWOM credibility. Further, the authors developed 22 propositions to explain the causal relationship between these variables and eWOM credibility.

Research limitations/implications

The conceptual model needs empirical validation across various eWOM platforms, i.e. social networking websites, e-commerce websites, etc.

Practical implications

Managers and e-commerce vendors can use these inputs to develop specific design elements and assessment tools which can help consumers to identify credible eWOM messages. Credible eWOM messages, in turn, will increase the “trust” and “loyalty” of the customers on e-commerce vendors.

Originality/value

This paper provides a conclusive takeaway of eWOM credibility literature by integrating multiple perspectives and arguments from the extant literature. This study also presents an integrated model, which provides a theoretical framework for researchers to further examine the interaction effect of various variables, which results in eWOM credibility.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0263