The last decade has seen phenomenal growth of electronic commerce in Asia. An important driving force has been the parallel rise of social media, enabling pervasive interactions among consumers and ...between consumers and firms. This article provides an overview of the current state of development of social media in Asia. We also survey the literature on social media that has been produced by authors in this region. The research covers a variety of topics and issues, including: user behavior with social media, the impacts of social media, and the issues arising from its use. It also identifies a number of future research opportunities that fall into these areas. The Asia region is filled with high potential for promising research regarding how social media may be leveraged for e-commerce. This article calls for more research attention to be given to social media-related e-commerce research, and the discovery of new knowledge related to the connections between social media and e-commerce that are unique to the Asia region.
Advancements in Internet technologies have enabled firms to engage in contextual competitive targeting (CCT); that is, the targeted online advertising practice of contextually identifying and ...poaching prospective customers of competitors. On the basis of two field quasi-experiment studies conducted with Google's AdSense contextual targeting platform, this article shows that compared to generate targeting, CCT poaching is more effective in raising ad click-through rates (CTRs), but not in inducing conversion rates. Furthermore, promotional incentives can boost CCT's effects on CTRs, but not conversion rates. The article's follow-up laboratory survey reveals the reasons for the findings. That is, offering a promotional incentive in CCT ads can arouse customers' curiosity and thus strengthen the effects of CCT on CTRs. Yet this heightened curiosity does not expand CCT's effects on conversions because of customer loyalty to the competitor being poached. Collectively the findings suggest different strategies for firms contemplating CCT. When the objective is to attract competitors' customers to increase their chance of future defect, adding promotional incentives may enhance CCT effectiveness. But when conversion is the main concern, managers can save promotional dollars as CCT poaching induces more sales conversions with less of such incentives.
With the popularity of question-and-answer (Q&A) communities, widespread dissemination of scientific knowledge has become more viable than ever before. However, those contributing highquality ...professional scientific knowledge are confronted with the challenge of making their contributions popular, since nonexpert readers may not recognize the importance of their contributions given the massive amount of information available online. In this study, we show that nonexpert readers are capable of evaluating the professionalism of content contributed in such communities as well as experts. However, we discovered that a salient discrepancy exists between the content nonexperts favor and the content they perceive as professional. In line with studies that have suggested that writing techniques play an important role in how expert content is received by laypersons, we investigated how the use of linguistic devices affects both the perceived professionalism and the popularity of contributions in Q&A communities. Based on both secondary data and a scenario-based survey, we identified specific linguistic devices that can increase content popularity without reducing perceived professionalism. Additionally, we revealed linguistic devices that increase popularity at the expense of perceived professionalism in this context. Finally, we conducted a laboratory experiment to more firmly establish the causal effects of the linguistic device use. The triangulated findings have important implications for both research and practice on communicating scientific knowledge in Q&A communities.
Given the significant influence of online product reviews on consumer purchases, firms are trying to be more proactive in leveraging the influence of reviews. One way of doing this is to offer free ...product samples to consumers to incentivize product reviews, displaying them along with a disclosure in the existing pool of organic reviews in the hopes of stimulating sales. However, it is not clear whether such product sampling reviews are indeed beneficial to sales, considering that they may have a nontrivial influence on the generation of organic reviews. Based on data from a leading e-commerce platform in China, we found that sponsored product sampling reviews promoted product sales but also reduced the volume of organic reviews for the targeted product. However, the net effect on sales remained positive, suggesting that e-tailers may wish to utilize sponsored product sampling reviews. We also conducted a scenario-based experiment to reveal how the nature of product sampling reviews affects consumers’ brand quality and fairness perceptions. Based on our findings we offer future research directions to improve the understanding of how to better harness the power of sponsored reviews.
Twitter is an emerging form of news media with a wide spectrum of participants involving in news dissemination. Owing to their open and interactive nature, individuals, non-media, and non-commercial ...participants may play a greater role on this platform; thus, it is deemed to disrupt conventional media structures and introduce new ways of information flow. While this may be true in certain aspects in news dissemination such as allowing a broader range of participants, the authors' analysis of the involvement and influence of the different participant types, based on a large tweets dataset collected during the Ukraine's conflict event (2013-2014), portrays a different picture. Specifically, the results unveil that while non-commercial participants were the most “involved” in generating tweets about the news event, the retweets they attracted, a common measure of influence, were among the lowest. In contrast, mass media and sources related to journalists, professional associations and commercial organizations garnered the highest retweets.
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