Social Media and e-Business Transformation

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Item
    Virtual Collaboration with Mobile Social Media in Multiple-Organization Projects
    ( 2018-01-03) Yang, Zhaojun ; Sun, Jun ; Zhang, Yali ; Wang, Ying
    This study investigates the use of mobile social media as emerging collaboration tools by virtual teams. Based on the construal level theory, it develops a research model hypothesizes that collaboration tool effectiveness influence contextual performance and task performance through the mediation of procedure agreeability. In addition, geographic dispersion, team size and project duration serve as moderators as they reflect virtual collaboration complexity. Empirical findings support most hypothesized relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
  • Item
    The Secret of Internet Celebrities: A Qualitative Study of Online Opinion Leaders on Weibo
    ( 2018-01-03) Li, Ruohan
    Internet celebrities are widely observable on social media platforms and are an essential component to a social media marketing program. Drawing on the media success literature and online influencer research, this study reflects Internet celebrities’ fame-seeking practices and discusses on three issues from literature: definition of Internet celebrities, Internet celebrities’ identification criteria and what factors can contribute to individual online influence. A series of interview from three Internet celebrities and three followers of each celebrity were conducted to enrich this study. The results show that Internet celebrities are people who have become famous by means of Internet, and have the ability to influence others. They are characterized as having a certain number of followers; high level of interactivity on their profile; and promising business value. Moreover, this study suggests a five-dimensional perspective to understand individual online influence. We believe that these findings provide new insights for interpretation of Internet celebrities and suggest a possible success formula for fame-seekers to achieve influence on the increasingly competitive social media platforms.
  • Item
    Classifying Motivations in Social Product Development Networks: a Discriminant Analysis of Actor Profiles
    ( 2018-01-03) Abhari, Kaveh ; Davidson, Elizabeth ; Xiao, Bo
    This study develops a classification model to predict social actors’ co-innovation behavior in social product development (SPD) networks based on motivational differences. The study first identifies motivations for actors to continuously participate in co-innovation activities. Then, three discriminant functions are developed and cross-validated to classify actor groups, based on their level of willingness to participate in three types of behaviors: ideation, collaboration, and socialization. The results indicate that financial gains, entrepreneurship, and learning are significant predictors of ideation behaviors. Enjoyment and learning are strong indicators of collaboration, whereas networking, enjoyment, and altruism are most strongly related to socialization behaviors. These findings highlight three classes of SPD actors (Ideators, Collaborators, and Networkers) based on motivational differences. These classes provide a theoretically parsimonious model to predict the co-innovation behaviors in SPD and highlight the importance of platform design to appeal to different classes of potential contributors.
  • Item
    Crisis Communication on Twitter during a Global Crisis of Volkswagen - The Case of "Dieselgate"
    ( 2018-01-03) Stieglitz, Stefan ; Mirbabaie, Milad ; Potthoff, Tobias
    In this study, we investigate the communication behaviour in Twitter during the rise of a corporate crisis. In September 2015, the emission scandal of Volkswagen (also known as "Dieselgate") became public. We collected Twitter data and analysed approximately 400,000 tweets regarding the Volkswagen crisis. We take different perspectives on the data, by 1) separating the overall communication in peak and quiet phases, 2) analysing the sentiment in each phase, 3) looking at specific tweet contents, and 4) using statistical analyses to determine the significance of differences. Furthermore, we mapped the publishing behaviour of official Volkswagen accounts to the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). The findings suggest that Volkswagen followed a strategy that is not covered by SCCT, i.e. keeping silent. Volkswagen’s tweets were not able to reduce the emotionality and sentiment of the ongoing Twitter discussion. Instead, even during quiet phases, the communication remained rather negative.
  • Item
    Digital Fluency and Social Media Use: An Empirical Investigation of WeChat Use
    ( 2018-01-03) Liu, Aoyan ; Li, Yan ; Ye, Hua
    Social media has increasingly been used to deal with personal and professional issues. Past studies note that individuals of different digital fluency present distinct technology use behaviors. Yet, limited research has explored how digital fluency affects individuals’ motivations and the use of social media tools. Based on uses and gratifications theory and digital fluency literature, we develop a model to explore the relationship between digital fluency and social media use. We tested our model by analyzing 262 responses from WeChat users. Results show that digital natives (individuals of high digital fluency) tend to use WeChat to broaden social network while digital immigrants (individuals of low digital fluency) tend to enjoy WeChat use and to use WeChat to maintain ties with friends and fulfill their information needs. Our findings contribute to the literature by identifying the theoretical and practical roles of digital fluency in social media use.
  • Item
    Differences in the Reasons of Intermittent versus Permanent Discontinuance in Social Media: An Exploratory Study in Weibo
    ( 2018-01-03) Zhou, Zhongyun ; Yang, Mingzhu ; Jin, Xiao-Ling
    Discontinued usage (or discontinuance) of social media has aroused extensive interests among researchers and practitioners. Existing research tends to view discontinuance as permanent, but pays little attention to intermittent discontinuance wherein individuals stop using a social medium for a certain period of time but eventually restart using afterwards. Specifically, little is known about the commonalities and differences in reasons underlying permanent and intermittent discontinuance. Addressing this research gap, this paper reports an exploratory field study using qualitative data collected by interviewing 96 users with discontinuance experiences in Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform. Results reveal four categories of reasons for discontinuance: user-, context-, function- and content-related. Comparative analysis shows that user discontinuance because of context-related factors is more likely to be intermittent, while user discontinuance due to function- and content-related factors are more likely to be permanent; results for user-related factors are complicated. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
  • Item
    Passive, Active, or Co-Active? The Link Between Synchronous User Participation and Willingness to Pay for Premium Options
    ( 2018-01-03) Bründl, Simon
    Social media-enabled business models have transformed the content industry. To increase users’ willingness to pay (WTP), many of today’s content providers have changed from mere content provision towards offering social content experiences. Recent research has confirmed that users’ participation activities, e.g. commenting on content, increase the WTP for social content services’ premium options. So far, social content has been available predominantly on-demand, only allowing asynchronous user participation. Recently, social live content services emerged, which facilitate synchronous user participation and enable so-called co-active behavior. With this study, we conceptualize co-active behavior as the interplay between users while co-experiencing content together, and empirically show that co-active behavior has a stronger effect on WTP for premium options than the classic forms of passive and active behavior. Our work provides theoretical contributions on the WTP for social content as well as implications for the management of social content services.
  • Item
    Introduction to the Minitrack on Social Media and e-Business Transformation
    ( 2018-01-03) Cheung, Christy ; Lee, Matthew K. O. ; Wagner, Christian