The advertising efforts in social networks grow every year. Since their appearance in the late 1990s Social Network Web Sites were considered as a uniform group. The only differentiation factors were the number of users and the amount of traffic passed through the site. This paper classifies the...

Virtual Worlds seem to offer firms new opportunities for managing the convergence among technology, organization and business. The complex relation between people and their avatars and the capability to engage users into active participation yielded relevant insights in marketing and business...

In recent years, with the movement of vacation planning to the online setting, a segment that has emerged is the vacation rental-by-owner lodging market. Vacation property owners are now often renting their property on their own through the virtual marketplace. Accordingly, this study proposes...

Motivated by the rise of social media platforms that achieve a fusion of content and community, we consider the role of word-of-mouth communications (WOM) structured through a network. Using a dataset from YouTube, we examine how cascades of WOM interactions enhance the popularity of videos. We...

Social media is currently an evolving “wave” in online business marketing. Marketers are beginning to drive the use of social media as a component in their marketing strategy and campaigns to reach out to customers and fans. Within the subdisciplines of marketing that may use social media...

With the proliferation of social media, questions have begun to emerge about its role in providing marketing insights. In this research, we investigate the potential to “listen in” on social media conversations as a means of inferring brand sentiment. Our analysis employs data collected from...

Models of distance education have evolved over decades, just in time to collide with modern pedagogies in which communication, interaction, student engagement, and active learning are of critical importance. The social media technologies encompass a wide variety of Web-based technologies such as...

A major challenge in many word-of-mouth marketing campaigns is the cost-effective identification of opinion leaders, consumers who exert disproportionate influence on the purchase decisions of other consumers. However, empirical studies agree on few consumer characteristics that are strong...

Members of online communities access consumption related information posted by several other members. Over time, members are influenced by some members of the community, and develop informal relationships with them. We propose a model for the timing of the establishment of relationships between...

Managers are very interested in word of mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one even gather the data?...