Interactivity in Society: Locating an Elusive Concept

Interactivity has been identified as a core concept of new media, yet despite nearly three decades of study and analysis, we scarcely know what interactivity is, let alone what it does, and have scant insight into the conditions in which interactive processes are likely to be consequential for members of a social system. This article attempts to address this deficiency by critiquing three self-defeating tendencies and an erroneous assumption of interactivity research, then proposes four basic propositions around which systematic knowledge regarding interactivity in society may be built. In the spirit of bridging mass and interpersonal processes, a model of interactivity is proposed to initiate discussion about the concept as a cross-level and multivalent phenomenon—one with both positive and negative consequences—and to spur more socially relevant research. For interactivity to succeed as a concept, it must have some meaningful social and psychological relevance beyond its technical status as a property of media systems or message exchanges.     

Interactivity in Society: Locating an Elusive Concept

Interactivity has been identified as a core concept of new media, yet despite nearly three decades of study and analysis, we scarcely know what interactivity is, let alone what it does, and have scant insight into the conditions in which interactive processes are likely to be consequential for members of a social system. This article attempts to address this deficiency by critiquing three self-defeating tendencies and an erroneous assumption of interactivity research, then proposes four basic propositions around which systematic knowledge regarding interactivity in society may be built. In the spirit of bridging mass and interpersonal processes, a model of interactivity is proposed to initiate discussion about the concept as a cross-level and multivalent phenomenon—one with both positive and negative consequences—and to spur more socially relevant research. For interactivity to succeed as a concept, it must have some meaningful social and psychological relevance beyond its technical status as a property of media systems or message exchanges.     

The impact of social media on consumer acculturation: Current challenges,opportunities, and an agenda for research and practice

The concept of acculturation has been based on the assumption of an adaptation process, whereby immigrants lose aspects of their heritage cultures in favour of aspects of a host culture (i.e. assimilation). Past research has shown that acculturation preferences result in various possibilities and influence consumption behaviour. However, the impact of social media on consumer acculturation is underexplored, although the social purpose and information sharing online is utilized for a variety of social purposes. Recent studies have shown the transformation from an offline to an online context, in which social networks play an integral part in immigrants’ communications, relationships and connections. This study merges the views from a number of leading contributors to highlight significant opportunities and challenges for future consumer acculturation research influenced by social media. The research provides insights into the impact of social media on consumer acculturation.     

What makes user-generated content more helpful on social media platforms? Insights from creator interactivity perspective

A growing number of enterprises begin to utilize user-generated content (UGC) to help build brand awareness and loyalty on social media platforms. Thus, it is important to investigate what makes UGC more helpful under the new social media environment. This study attempts to identify the influence mechanism of UGC helpfulness by examining the systematic impacts of argument quality and source reliability, especially considering the effects of creator interactivity. Using a dataset of product-related UGC in a popular social media app, our empirical study finds that the detailedness, readability, and objectivity of the content, as well as the social recognition and popularity of the creator, all have a significant impact on UGC helpfulness. Furthermore, the results indicate that creator interactivity plays a vital role in building UGC helpfulness by moderating other factors. This study contributes to both UGC and social media literature by proposing a comprehensive model to better understand UGC helpfulness. It also provides several practical insights for content creators to improve their online performances.     

Theorizing Interactivity's Effects

Noting that interactivity is often defined but seldom theorized in the literature, this article provides some pointers for developing theories about effects of interactivity, particularly as it applies to Web-based mass communication. It first makes the case that interactivity is an attribute of the technology and not that of the user. It exposes the tautology of studying the effects of perceived interactivity and calls for the consideration of ontological aspects that constitute interactivity while specifying its social and psychological effects. Theoretical explorations may be categorized in terms of three classes of outcome measures—behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive—as we investigate the role played by interactivity in initiating action, changing attitudes, and altering the nature of information processing. These would result in theories about technology rather than psychology in that they help us specify direct and combination effects of interactivity, modality, navigability, and other technological attributes of the Web medium.     

Influence of self-perceived creativity and social media use in predicting E-entrepreneurial intention

Entrepreneurship has gained widespread attention in the 21st century. This study aims to examine the direct effect of self-perceived creativity on e-entrepreneurship intention and the moderating effect of social media use on the relationship between self-perceived creativity and e-entrepreneurship intention. Data were gathered from 248 Omani entrepreneurs. The findings revealed that the direct effect of self-perceived creativity and social media use significantly influences e-entrepreneurship intention. Notably, the positive impact of self-perceived creativity on e-entrepreneurship intention was moderated by social media use. This study concluded that self-perceived creativity is a crucial factor at the start of the entrepreneurial process, as it contributes to designing new products and services. In addition, this study introduced social media use as a boundary condition on the relationship between self-perceived creativity and e-entrepreneurial intention. Therefore, this study differs from other studies, as it examines whether social media improves opportunities for entrepreneurs and works for discovering and generating opportunities.     

Theorizing Interactivity's Effects

Noting that interactivity is often defined but seldom theorized in the literature, this article provides some pointers for developing theories about effects of interactivity, particularly as it applies to Web-based mass communication. It first makes the case that interactivity is an attribute of the technology and not that of the user. It exposes the tautology of studying the effects of perceived interactivity and calls for the consideration of ontological aspects that constitute interactivity while specifying its social and psychological effects. Theoretical explorations may be categorized in terms of three classes of outcome measures—behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive—as we investigate the role played by interactivity in initiating action, changing attitudes, and altering the nature of information processing. These would result in theories about technology rather than psychology in that they help us specify direct and combination effects of interactivity, modality, navigability, and other technological attributes of the Web medium.     

Enhancing healthcare services and brand engagement through social media marketing: Integration of Kotler's 5A framework with IDEA process

Social media marketing can be an effective solution for healthcare organizations to build long-term relationships with patients. However, previous studies mainly focused on isolated aspects of social media marketing. This lack of integration has limited the development and adoption of social media marketing. This study proposes a social media marketing methodology (SMMM) that incorporates Kotler's 5A consumer experience path with the IDEA (identify, develop, engage, and assess) content marketing process and well-known social media design principles in providing marketing roadmap and content design guidance for implementing social media marketing. Two cases (one for a medical center with 56 posts reaching 101,342 potential clients and another for a postpartum nursing home with 52 posts reaching 61,245 potential clients) are used to examine and evaluate the usability of the methodology. The results show that the engagement rate in both cases is well above the average level in Taiwan, and all users have a positive response to the use of the methodology. These findings support that the methodology provides a nominal process model for implementing social media marketing, facilitates the design of post content, and enhances patient engagement with healthcare brands and services.     

The dual concept of consumer value in social media brand community: A trust transfer perspective

Companies are increasingly relying on social media brand communities to interact with consumers and achieve business values. Thus, it is essential to understand how companies can extract value from consumers in social media brand communities. We develop a model clarifying the dual concept of consumer value and illustrating how consumer-perceived value can be transformed into consumer-generated value from a trust transfer perspective. Specifically, we identify three types of consumer-perceived value: utilitarian, hedonic, and social. We capture consumer-generated value in terms of purchase intention and social media word of mouth. Using a two-wave survey, our results strongly support the research model. Specifically, the three types of consumer-perceived values positively affect consumer trust in social media brand communities, which in turn leads to trust in brand and in social media and, thereafter, consumers’ subsequent social media word of mouth and purchase intentions. Our study makes several contributions to the strategic information systems literature concerning leveraging social media brand communities into business strategies. Theoretically, our study expands the understanding of the dual concept of consumer value in social media brand communities through the trust transfer theory. Practically, our study delivers insights for companies into how social media brand communities can be used as a strategic tool for achieving business values.     

Exploring the influence of excessive social media use at work: A three-dimension usage perspective

Pervasive social media has resulted in technology dependency and excessive usage, which can lead to negative outcomes in organizations. This paper aims to investigate the effects of social media’s different excessive usage patterns on employee job performance and the corresponding underlying mechanism. Specifically, we propose three dimensions of excessive social media use at work (i.e., excessive social, hedonic, and cognitive). These dimensions are related to technology-work conflict and strain, which in turn decrease employee job performance. An empirical study of 305 social media users in organizations reveals that excessive social media use for socialization and entertainment can generate conflict between technology use and work demand, whereas excessive social media use for information-sharing reduces employees’ psychological strain. In addition, technology-work conflict and strain negatively influence job performance. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.     

Understanding the efficiency of social media based crisis communication during hurricane Sandy

Rapid communication during extreme events is one of the critical aspects of successful disaster management strategies. Due to their ubiquitous nature, social media platforms are expected to offer a unique opportunity for crisis communication. In this study, about 52.5 million tweets related to hurricane Sandy posted by 13.75 million users are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of social media communication during disasters and identify the contributing factors leading to effective crisis communication strategies. Efficiency of a social media user is defined as the ratio of attention gained over the number of tweets posted. A model is developed to identify more efficient users based on several relevant features. Results indicate that during a disaster event, only few social media users become highly efficient in gaining attention. In addition, efficiency does not depend on the frequency of tweeting activity only; instead it depends on the number of followers and friends, user category, bot score (controlled by a human or a machine), and activity patterns (predictability of activity frequency). Since the proposed efficiency metric is easy to evaluate, it can potentially detect effective social media users in real time to communicate information and awareness to vulnerable communities during a disaster.     

Analyzing the role of national culture on content creation and user engagement on Twitter: The case of Indian Premier League cricket franchises

The content generation strategy of a sports franchise determines whether the user engagement increases or decreases on social media platforms. Thus, the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) is profound who generally decides and governs social media policies of the franchises. We show that the cultural differences between local-COO vis-à-vis foreign-COO-governed sports franchises reflect in their content generation strategy and are also associated with user engagement. We use Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and extract relevant features from the tweets. Overall, the results show that user engagement is more when the content generation strategy is in alignment with fans’ national culture. The first contribution of our work is towards showing the incremental impact of power distance, individualism and collectivism on user engagement. The second contribution of our work is towards feature construction, feature selection and building authorship attribution classifiers to understand the content generation strategy. Prior literature shows that national culture impacts writing of online reviews. We investigate the role of national culture in social media content generation and user engagement and extend the literature. Our study is useful for organizations to understand the role of national culture in content generation and how it is related to user engagement.     

Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions

The use of the internet and social media have changed consumer behavior and the ways in which companies conduct their business. Social and digital marketing offers significant opportunities to organizations through lower costs, improved brand awareness and increased sales. However, significant challenges exist from negative electronic word-of-mouth as well as intrusive and irritating online brand presence. This article brings together the collective insight from several leading experts on issues relating to digital and social media marketing. The experts’ perspectives offer a detailed narrative on key aspects of this important topic as well as perspectives on more specific issues including artificial intelligence, augmented reality marketing, digital content management, mobile marketing and advertising, B2B marketing, electronic word of mouth and ethical issues therein. This research offers a significant and timely contribution to both researchers and practitioners in the form of challenges and opportunities where we highlight the limitations within the current research, outline the research gaps and develop the questions and propositions that can help advance knowledge within the domain of digital and social marketing.     

Social media use and consumer shopping preferences

We empirically explore the associations between social media use at home and shopping preferences using survey data. We focus on popular retail firms including brick-and-mortar firms such as Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, and Best Buy, and online retailers, such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. Social media use of popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and a general category Other Social Media are analyzed. We find that use of LinkedIn, Skype and Other Social Media at home, in the model without control variables, is associated with shopping at Nordstrom, Walmart and Target. Shopping online at Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, without control variables in the model specification, is associated with use of Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Other Social Media at home. We report additional insights using an alternative specification that includes social media use at work. Media Richness Theory (MRT) and Strength of Weak Ties from Social Network Analysis (SNA) and related theories help explain our results. Our results have important implications for social marketing campaigns and social media policies for consumer retail firms.     

Predicting positive user responses to social media advertising: The roles of emotional appeal,informativeness, and creativity

As social network services become more pervasive, social media advertising emerges as an attractive vehicle for augmenting advertising effectiveness. To leverage this new means of marketing, one must understand what engages SNS users in a favorable online behavior (i.e., overtly indicating personal interest in, or support for, the exposed message by clicking the Like or Share button in Facebook), thereby resulting in an effective advertising campaign. This research conceptualizes SNS ad effectiveness as a concept encompassing emotional appeal, informativeness and creativity that all have a potential to contribute to a positive online behavior. It empirically investigates the antecedents of positive user behavior for a SNS ad based on the theory of reasoned action, the social influence theory, and a persuasion theory. It proposes and tests a conceptual model of the formation of online user’s behavioral responses with regards to SNS advertising. The results of our empirical tests of the model reveal that informativeness and advertising creativity were key drivers of favorable behavioral responses to an SNS ad and that intention to engage in favorable user responses was positively associated with purchase intention. Based on these findings, the paper suggests further research directions and offers implications for harnessing the full potential of the new SNS advertising platform.     

Antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue

Prior literature suggests that social media users are increasingly experiencing social media fatigue. Only recently have scholars undertaken empirical studies to investigate its antecedents and outcomes to better understand the impact of fatigue on social media users. To further this understanding, the present study has conducted a cross-sectional survey with 1552 users. The Stress-Strain-Outcome (SSO) theoretical framework is applied to examine if privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental mediation strategies, and decrement in academic performance due to social media use correlate with social media fatigue. Two forms of fatigue are considered, namely, fatigue due to social networking site (SNS) and mobile instant messaging (MIM) use. The study results suggest that privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental encouragement and worry significantly and positively correlate with SNS and MIM fatigue. Parental permission and parental monitoring are either not or lowly associated with fatigue. In addition to this, SNS and MIM fatigue positively correlated with the tendency to experience academic decrement due to social media use. The antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue were similar for SNS and MIM users. Moreover, students perceived their parents to be more open to their MIM use, and they had higher self-disclosure in MIM than in SNS. The study concludes with significant implications for practitioners, policy makers as well as service designers.     

Social media and entrepreneurship research: A literature review

The rise of social media has led to changes in how entrepreneurs carry out their day-to-day activities. Studies on social media and entrepreneurship are relatively new and fragmented in their focus, however there is increasing interest from academia and practitioners for further research and investigation within this area. This study systematically reviews research carried out in the domain of social media and entrepreneurship. A total of 160 papers, published between 2002 and 2018 were synthesised to identify critical theories and research methods used in the domain. Based on the extent review, an integrative framework was developed to identify relationships amongst elucidated constructs. While most papers investigated the factors that drive social media adoption and use by entrepreneurs, it was found that the use of social media by entrepreneurs had transcended marketing and it is now used in business networking, information search and crowdfunding for their business. This has led to significant impact with improved firm performance and innovation enhancement being the essential outcomes. The literature review and framework further understanding of social media and entrepreneurship research, providing a useful basis for future studies and informs practice in this area.     

News media,social media,and hyperlink networks: An examination of integrated media effects

Research typically focuses on one medium. But in today's digital media environment, people use and are influenced by their experience with multiple systems. Building on media ecology research, we introduce the notion of integrated media effects. We draw on resource dependence and homophily theories to analyze the mechanisms that connect media systems. To test the integrated media effects, we examine the relationships between news media visibility and social media visibility and hyperlinking patterns among 410 nongovernmental organization (NGO) websites in China. NGOs with greater news media visibility and more social media followers receive significantly more hyperlinks. Further, NGOs with a similar number of social media followers prefer to hyperlink to each other. The results suggest that both news media and social media systems are related to the configuration of hyperlink networks, providing support for the integrated media effects described. Implications for the study of hyperlink networks, online behaviors of organizations, and public relations are drawn from the results.     

Enhancing team creative performance through social media and transactive memory system

Effective teamwork, knowledge coordination, and knowledge creation are recognized as essential sources of team effectiveness and creativity in modern organizations. Nowadays, social media is significantly modifying the patterns in the use of technology to support knowledge management practices in teams. At the same time, the literature shows that transactive memory system (TMS), which refers to how team members share their distributed knowledge and expertise, is an important factor affecting team performance. However, minimal effort has been made to elaborate on the precise role of social media in supporting TMS for enhancing absorptive capacity (ACAP) and knowledge creation capability (KCC) of the team, which in turn might influence team creative performance (TCP). Therefore, to address this gap in the literature, a theoretical model is developed and validated. Survey data collected from 334 members of 68 knowledge work teams indicated that social media use at work has a positive relationship with TMS and both social media use at work and TMS are positively related to ACAP and KCC of the team. Results further indicated that ACAP positively influenced KCC, and both have a direct relationship with TCP. This study shows that careful investment in social media by an organization can enhance meta-knowledge of “who knows what” within teams. Finally, exploring external knowledge alone is not enough. Instead, organizations must ensure external knowledge is utilized to create new knowledge to improve TCP.     

Mental disorders on online social media through the lens of language and behaviour: Analysis and visualisation

Due to the worldwide accessibility to the Internet along with the continuous advances in mobile technologies, physical and digital worlds have become completely blended, and the proliferation of social media platforms has taken a leading role over this evolution. In this paper, we undertake a thorough analysis towards better visualising and understanding the factors that characterise and differentiate social media users affected by mental disorders. We perform different experiments studying multiple dimensions of language, including vocabulary uniqueness, word usage, linguistic style, psychometric attributes, emotions’ co-occurrence patterns, and online behavioural traits, including social engagement and posting trends.Our findings reveal significant differences on the use of function words, such as adverbs and verb tense, and topic-specific vocabulary, such as biological processes. As for emotional expression, we observe that affected users tend to share emotions more regularly than control individuals on average. Overall, the monthly posting variance of the affected groups is higher than the control groups. Moreover, we found evidence suggesting that language use on micro-blogging platforms is less distinguishable for users who have a mental disorder than other less restrictive platforms. In particular, we observe on Twitter less quantifiable differences between affected and control groups compared to Reddit.