How motivational feedback increases user’s benefits and continued use: A study on gamification,quantified-self and social networking

With the increasing provenance of hedonic and social information systems, systems are observed to employ other forms of feedback and design than purely informational in order to increase user engagement and motivation. Three principle classes of motivational design pursuing user engagement have become increasingly established; gamification, quantified-self and social networking. This study investigates how the perceived prominence of these three design classes in users’ use of information system facilitate experiences of affective, informational and social feedback as well as user’s perceived benefits from a system and their continued use intentions. We employ survey data (N = 167) gathered from users of HeiaHeia; an exercise encouragement system that employs features belonging to the three design classes. The results indicate that gamification is positively associated with experiences of affective feedback, quantified-self with experiences of both affective and informational feedback and social networking with experiences of social feedback. Experiences of affective feedback are further strongly associated with user perceived benefits and continued use intentions, whereas experiences of informational feedback are only associated with continued use intentions. Experiences of social feedback had no significant relationship with neither. The findings provide practical insights into how systems can be designed to facilitate different types of feedback that increases users’ engagement, benefits and intentions to continue the use of a system.     

Social commerce research: Definition,research themes and the trends

Social commerce, an emerging phenomenon rooted in social media and Web 2.0 technologies, has attracted the attention of many researchers. The number of publications on social commerce has grown exponentially in the past 10 years. Now, social commerce has become a significant emerging research area. In this paper, we first define the boundary of social commerce research and then attempt to review the extant literature in this area comprehensively and systematically. Based on the definition, this study surveyed 1369 peer-reviewed academic publications in the social media, Web 2.0, and other related areas. Following the survey, 418 of the publications were identified as social commerce research. Then, latent semantic analysis (LSA), a text mining approach, was applied to summarize the current state of social commerce research. LSA results show that there are three major research themes in the current social commerce research: organization, advertisement, and word-of-mouth. Each theme discusses topics such as innovation, user-generated content, and reputation, among others. In addition, we identify some interesting trends. The first main trend is that innovation, corporate reputation, and user-generated content remain the major research topics, although they are experiencing a slight decline. The second main trend is that online reviews, trust, and e-word-of-mouth are attracting more attention from researchers.     

Creating value from Social Big Data: Implications for Smart Tourism Destinations

This paper aims to demonstrate how the huge amount of Social Big Data available from tourists can nurture the value creation process for a Smart Tourism Destination. Applying a multiple-case study analysis, the paper explores a set of regional tourist experiences related to a Southern European region and destination, to derive patterns and opportunities of value creation generated by Big Data in tourism. Findings present and discuss evidence in terms of improving decision-making, creating marketing strategies with more personalized offerings, transparency and trust in dialogue with customers and stakeholders, and emergence of new business models. Finally, implications are presented for researchers and practitioners interested in the managerial exploitation of Big Data in the context of information-intensive industries and mainly in Tourism.