Anderson N H (1971) Integration Theory and Attitude Change Psychological Review 78 171-206

Citation

Roggeveen, A.50. and Grewal, D. (2016), "Editorial", Periodical of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 33 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCM-12-2015-1649

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Consumer Marketing, Volume 33, Consequence 2

Engaging customers: the bicycle of social media date

The top priority of every business firm is, or should be, to apply the power of social media to appoint customers. The abilities that social media provide firms, to target and participate in dynamic conversations with private customers, means that the return on investments in social media efforts can exist significantly greater than those earned from traditional media efforts. Firms recognize that posting information that customers relate to, or find engaging, means that customers will keep coming dorsum, liking or commenting on the posts and sharing them with friends. Non only practise these activities help keep the brand top-of-mind and enhance purchase intentions, but they also can turn consumers into active advocates. The growth in social media in plow has been driven by several related factors.

I such commuter is the innate need that people have to connect with other people. This connection is bidirectional; people larn what their friends are interested in, but they also circulate their own interests and opinions to those friends. Humans e'er demand to be connected to other people, and social media provide them with a new, piece of cake and engaging way to do so. In particular, people can connect by sharing different types of information, whether their location, the food they have consumed, exercises they have completed or a news item that they find interesting.

The revolutionary changes in how consumers interact with 1 some other, also as with firms and brands, provide enormous opportunities for marketers. Accordingly, these changes hope rich opportunities for researchers to derive and provide guidance to firms well-nigh how best to appoint with consumers. Role of the process of agreement what factors effectively bulldoze engagement with customers involves investigating the primal sociological and psychological shifts in behaviors that accept resulted from the growth of social media.

Another driver of social media is convenience or timeliness, as made possible by smartphones and tablets. The mobility of these devices provides constant access for consumers, fuelling a tremendous avalanche of applications, either for entertainment or for productivity. In the modernistic age of apps, there is an app for nearly every function or customer need, and many apps even prompt new business models. For case, Uber has upended the taxi manufacture, and Netflix is irresolute the cable television marketplace. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are just a few of the myriad of apps bachelor to help people brand expanded social connections. Beyond social network platforms, apps also brand it easier for customers to connect with and conduct business concern; Banking company of America enables business relationship holders to do all their online banking with its app, and JetBlue'due south app makes information technology easy for travelers to manage their flights. The list of apps and what they tin do is virtually endless. Fitness apps can record steps taken, calories consumed, eye rate or measurement of pulse. Apps let people to store a library of books read, a list of travel destinations or a summary of wines purchased. Each app then opens the door for a company to engage with customers in a dissimilar, specific manner.

These apps, thus, produce some other driver of social media date, namely, the ability to provide relevant information to and participate in dynamic conversations with customers. These factors also enhance consumers' desire to engage with the network. Apps can help make engagement more than focused by providing the desired data in a readily accessible portal.

With this special issue, we seek to shed light on five central drivers of the growing panorama of social media. Despite some early investigations into social media (see review by Grewal et al., 2016), the field remains in its infancy. This special upshot aims to highlight some of import drivers of social media appointment. In this introduction, we suggest a unifying framework, the "Wheel of Social Media Engagement", that highlights the fundamental drivers of social media date as five related effects: continued, network, information, dynamic and timeliness. In discussing the v spokes of this Cycle of Social Media Engagement, we specify how the insights from the five papers included in this special event resonate with this proposed model.

The bicycle of social media engagement

Researchers and marketers highlight the importance of engaging customers, and specifically cite social media date every bit a profitable fashion to engage customers by taking their electric current behavior into business relationship while also setting the stage for future behavior. This class of engagement acknowledges both consumers' own behavior and the influence of the overall network that surrounds them. In the Wheel of Social Media Engagement, we propose that the hub is a repository of past and current social media engagements, analogous to a comprehensive client relationship direction (CRM) data warehouse but unique to social media. The other 5 components, or the spokes of the wheel, are the five effects that drive usage of social media. We hash out each event in detail, and illustrate them in Figure i. For ease of exposition, we outset with these v spokes, earlier bringing them together in a word of the hub of date.

The bicycle of social media engagement

The connected effect

A powerful evolutionary strength throughout man history has been the need to connect with others. The connected upshot is the ability of consumers to connect with and receive information from others. This force drives communities and civilizations. In the xx-commencement century, with the age of engineering, humans have become steadily less physically connected; instead of shopping at the local market place, for instance, consumers take moved to online shopping and home delivery. Instead of working in an part, employees increasingly telecommute.

As a backdrop of these changes, social media has empowered humans to connect in novel ways. Some connections may involve existing friends and colleagues, but they also occur with acquaintances who might non have connected in an offline world as easily as they practise online. Similarly, consumers may connect more easily with firms, brands or news outlets that they would not have been aware of outside of the world of social media.

Social media has allowed users to both join and class vast numbers of such networks. Each dissimilar social network just keeps growing, ofttimes without actively seeking others. More than people continue to seek to opt in, as is evident past the many Facebook or LinkedIn requests sent. Hamilton et al. (2016) highlight consumers' various motives for connecting with their networks using social media. These motivations might include promotions and incentives, timely data and product information.

The connection allows the consumers to receive and express social approval of what others have posted. For example, consumers readily click to limited their liking of diverse posts ranging from descriptions of events important in their lives, to jokes, to pictures. This increased connection holds the run a risk of becoming a bane for consumers, many of whom are habituated to looking at their smartphones every bit soon they ding, causing them to lose focus on activities in the physical world.

We can envision filters being available to be practical to social network posts to categorize their types (e.g. informational, health, amusement) for different target groups (e.g. close friends, as is done on Facebook). Currently, multiple platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) provide singled-out services for different purposes. As these networks expand and grow, their goal will be to encourage users to visit their platform exclusively. One fashion this may be done is by creating appropriate sorting of purposes for viewing posts.

The network effect

The connected effect refers to data received from others; on the flip side, every time a consumer posts information, information technology is conveyed to his or her vast connections across social media. This is the network effect. Consumers mail to provide information or opinions that they desire others to be aware of. Network inquiry identifies the exponential influence of social networks. The network effect, thus, serves as an important source of information but also as a multiplier of influence, depending on what the person shares. Through the network issue, people tin widen their sphere of influence, though usually in a relatively less conspicuous fashion. Because information technology is less obtrusive only still directed to the connected network, this magnified influence can be more than persuasive for getting other members of the network to consider the expressed opinion or idea.

In this setting, nosotros note the need for research that explores the joint furnishings of the multiple networks that people bring together (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter). How do consumers post well-nigh brands, brand consumption by others in their expanded network, or their own consumption? A basic expectation is that people who discuss a production are more likely to buy it. Yuksel et al. (2016) also suggest that the influence of being part of a social network increases when the user connects using a smartphone. In a scenario-based experiment with a fantasy football game network, they investigate the joint effects of whether consumers are function of the network and whether they utilise a smartphone to access that network.

The data issue

Social connections are driven by the data being shared. Relevant information thus is the central to turning the bicycle, simply relevance is highly context dependent. Drivers of relevance might include humour, cuteness, budgetary savings, interesting offers, information nearly places to travel, news items, gossip well-nigh family and friends or brand communications. As in the maxim that "beauty is in the centre of the beholder", relevance is determined solely past the consumer, in the context in which it is considered. Marketers thus work hard to provide data that is contextually relevant in some style. A humorous advert generally is more constructive when interjected into posts by a group of friends who like to joke effectually together or share funny pictures or videos. This information effect highlights the need for marketers to participate actively in conversations, equally opposed to intruding on them. Marketers need to learn the art of subtly joining an interaction.

As we think farther virtually the information consequence and the incredible magnitude of information beingness conveyed through reviews, Facebook posts, tweets so on, information technology begs the question: what can we do with all of it? Ludwig and de Ruyter (2016) apply voice communication act theory to advise that the linguistic elements of the data being conveyed provide important insights, because they highlight the strength and conviction, quality and brownie of a message. All of these linguistic elements help inform readers about the overall message and thus are likely to bulldoze the bulletin'southward impact.

The dynamic issue

Building on the prior discussion, a marketer actively participating in the conversation through social media, such as Twitter, is engaging in a dynamic communication with back-and-along interactions. Traditional retailing research that demonstrates that when shoppers spend more fourth dimension in a shop, they buy more, we posit that when consumers collaborate more in a social media infinite with a brand, they buy it more. But as well many brands and firms still limit themselves to a one-way communication manner, akin to viewing an ad without a compelling call to activity.

Dynamic communication also brings the question of the advisable volume of communication to the fore. How much is information overload? Are the effects nonlinear? A possible means to offset the potential for negative consequences would be to change the topic, tone and tenor of the communication. Aguirre et al. (2016) showcase that dynamic communications permit marketers to interject highly personalized promotions that provide relevant information. However, overly personalized offers can also be perceived equally an invasion of privacy, such that marketers must discover ways to address this privacy personalization paradox (Aguirre et al., 2015).

The timeliness effect

Every bit discussed in the introduction, the convenience provided by smartphones and tablets makes it possible for consumers to admission their social networks. Posts tin can exist read at any time, ensuring that the connectedness can occur when it is user-friendly for the consumer. Smartphones and tablets have also spurred the development of apps which brand it very easy to access the specific information contained in the social network in an easy to admission and timely manner.

Beyond this, however, the timing of when data is presented in the network tin can touch on how the data is received. Research in the domain of primacy and recency highlights the importance of both initial information and the last piece of data received (Biswas et al., 2010). In support of recency furnishings, people exhibit greater remember for recent information as opposed to initial data (Howard and Kahana, 1999; Neath, 1993). Such findings are in line with data integration theory and diverse forms of averaging models (Anderson, 1971; Slovic and Lichtenstein, 1971). The recency of information in social media may be an especially powerful event, considering users generally are exposed to the almost recent posts offset, and then, make the determination whether to curlicue through other posts. Considering the substantial volume of posts that many consumers access regularly, they likely overweight the most electric current ones. However, more inquiry is needed to sympathize the lodge effects of posts and how sorting functions might impact people'south reading habits, such as when they read reviews.

Some related time effects should too exist explored. For case, are comments posted in the morning or the evening viewed as more or less credible or engaging? Inquiry into these questions would need to control for the gratuitous time that people have bachelor; if recipients only take time to review social media posts in the evenings, they likely focus more on comments posted in the evening, when they tin can view them in real time, which might reinforce the recency effect.

Engagement

Each of these five spokes – connectedness, network furnishings, information, dynamic communication and timeliness (which encompasses convenience) – relates to engagement. Appointment is divers equally the repository of past and current social media engagements, which involves consumer interactions with a product, brand or firm. Social media engagement creates a more intimate connexion between the house and the customer. Firms increasingly are investing fourth dimension and money in creating date but also in capturing engagement data. Social media posts comprise rich information that a well-equipped company can mine to understand its customers meliorate. It is analogous to a complete, effective CRM data warehouse that incorporates social media.

In this issue, Hofacker, Malthouse and Sultan showcase the importance of big data. Customer appointment in social media involves the creation of a multitude of interactions, all of which tin can serve every bit one type of large data. Hofacker et al. (2016) offer several provocative enquiry questions associated with big data about the number of letters sent, responses to those letters (due east.grand. click-through rates), posts, tweets, purchases and repurchases. Every bit a result, firms are striving to make assisting customers even more profitable through increased date. The power of the Internet, mobility, computing and analytics that harness the ability of social connections all have led to a leapfrog advance in the potential to create meaningful engagement with customers.

Conclusion

This article has focused on five drivers of social media date: continued effect, network event, information result, dynamic effect, and timeliness effect. Each outcome has been enhanced and expanded by the introduction of smartphones and tablets, either because the information has get more than accessible or by serving as a backdrop for apps that connect more relevant information with the consumer in a focused manner. Every bit the ease of sharing information has increased, the ability to connect with people and learn their opinions, besides as broadcast 1's own personal news or opinions, also has exploded. Nosotros propose the Cycle of Social Media Date in this article every bit a foundation on which enquiry efforts can expand. Agreement how to engage finer with consumers is of import for managers, but it also is critical for those consumers.

The rest of this special upshot focuses on understanding why people utilize social media, providing methods to clarify social media, exploring the impact of social media on behaviors, understanding the personalization privacy paradox, describing how social media serves as a basis for generating big data and detailing how big data is irresolute consumer behavior. We are grateful to all the following authors and reviewers for their fourth dimension and dedication in creating this special issue:

• Neeraj Bharadwaj, University of Tennessee

• Dipayan Biswas, University of South Florida*

• Adam Brasel, Boston College

• Geng Cui, Lingnan University

• Mike Friedman, Louvain Schoolhouse of Management

• Richard Hanna, Babson College

• Lauren Labrecque, Loyola University, Chicago

• Stephan Ludwig, University of Westminster

• Dominik Mahr, Maastricht Academy

• Ereni Markos, Suffolk University

• Andrew Rohm, Loyola Marymount Academy

• Francisco Villarroel, Maastricht University

• Bruce Weinberg, University of Massachusetts

*Served equally Editor for the Aguirre, Roggeveen, Grewal and Wetzels paper.

Anne L. Roggeveen and Dhruv Grewal

References

Aguirre, E.M., Mahr, D., Grewal, D., de Ruyter, G. and Wetzels, M. (2015), "Unraveling the personalization paradox: the event of information drove and trust-edifice strategies on online advertisement effectiveness", Periodical of Retailing, Vol. 91 No. one, pp. 34-49.

Aguirre, E.Thousand., Roggeveen, A.l., Grewal, D. and Wetzels, Yard. (2015), "The personalization-privacy paradox: implications for new media", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 33 No. 2.

Anderson, Due north.H. (1971), "Integration theory and mental attitude alter", Psychological Review, Vol. 78 (May), pp. 171-206.

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Yuksel, K., Milne, G. and Miller, E. (2016), "Social media as complementary consumption: the human relationship between consumer empowerment and social interaction in experiential and informative contexts", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 33 No. 2.

Near the authors

Anne L. Roggeveen is Professor of Marketing and Faculty Inquiry Scholar, Babson College, Babson Park, MA 02457. Anne 50. Roggeveen is the corresponding author and can exist contacted at: aroggeveen@babson.edu

Dhruv Grewal is Professor of Marketing and the Toyota Chair in E-Commerce and Electronic Business, Babson Higher, Babson Park, MA 02457.

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