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This study examined consumers’ motivations for participating in market research online communities (MROCs) and an integrative role of community identification in explaining its motivational antecedents and consequences. Online survey data (n = 1,461) were collected from various company-sponsored MROCs, which were run by a leading online community service provider in the United States. The findings showed that several motivations underlying MROC participation had an influence on members’ sense of identification with MROCs. Furthermore, members’ identification with MROCs was found to contribute to enhancing their feeling heard by the sponsoring company, which in turn affected their intention to continually participate in communities and trust in the sponsoring company’s brand. Theoretical and managerial implications were discussed in relation to the value that listening to consumers has for market research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary society, many people move away from their personal networks for extended periods to reach professional and/or educational goals. This separation can often lead to feelings of loneliness, which can be stressful and sometimes debilitating for the individual. We seek to understand how a person’s use of online social networks (OSNs)—technology-enabled tools that assist users with creating and maintaining their relationships—might affect their perceptions of loneliness. Prior research has offered mixed results about how OSNs affect loneliness—reporting both positive and negative effects. We argue in this study that a clearer perspective can be gained by taking a closer look at how individuals approach their relationship management in OSNs. Building on theoretical works on loneliness, we develop a model to explain the effects of relationship characteristics (i.e., relationship orientation, self-disclosure, and networking ability) and OSN features (i.e., active or passive) on perceived loneliness. Our findings show that OSN can be linked to both more and less perceived loneliness, that is, individuals’ relationship orientation significantly affects their feelings of loneliness, which are further moderated by their degree of self-disclosure within the OSN. Furthermore, how users engage in the OSN (either actively or passively) influences their perceptions of loneliness. Practical implications regarding perceived loneliness include recommendations for firms to encourage mobile workers to utilize OSNs when separated from others, for education providers to connect with their new students before they arrive, and for users to utilize OSNs as a social bridge to others they feel close with. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although understanding the role of users’ overall active behavior on a social networking site (SNS) is of significant importance for both theory and practice, the complexity and difficulty involved in measuring such behavior has inhibited research attention. To understand users’ active behaviors on an SNS, it is important that we identify and classify various types of online behaviors before measuring them. In this paper we holistically examine users’ active behaviors on an SNS. Toward this end, we conduct three studies. First, we classify active behaviors on an SNS into four categories using the Delphi method. Then, we develop a measurement model and validate it using the data collected from an online survey of 477 SNS users. The measures of the developed instrument exhibit satisfactory reliability and validity and are used as indicators of the latent constructs. This instrument is then used in a predictive model based on commitment theory and tested using data from 1,242 responses. The results of data analysis suggest that affective commitment and continuance commitment are good predictors of overall active behavior on an SNS. This study complements the existing research on social media, cocreation, and social commerce. Most important, this study provides a theoretically sound measurement instrument that addresses the complex characteristic of overall active behavior on an SNS and which should be useful for future research. The findings of this study have important implications for practice as they highlight managing and stimulating users’ active behaviors on an SNS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New media platforms including social networking sites (SNS) have changed the media landscape and enabled many-to-many communication practices that have increased youth exposure to pro-alcohol consumption messages exponentially, blurring the lines between content generated by alcohol brands, nightclubs and consumers. This study uses qualitative methods to explore the use of Facebook to promote drinking among young consumers. Focus groups with a sample of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, and a netnographic study investigating alcohol brands, alcohol groups and nightclubs on Facebook were conducted. Findings indicate that alcohol brands and nightclubs use Facebook as a tool to communicate, co-produce and generate alcohol-related content with young adults, which encourages drinking. Findings suggest that SNS such as Facebook are changing the roles of, and inter-relationships between, advertisers and how consumers process media content, including drinking-related marketing communications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the effects of online gossip propensity in social networking sites (SNSs). We posit that online gossip propensity affects SNS identification, which in turn determines normative pressure and SNS engagement. The ultimate outcome is electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) intention. We also explore the impact of two types of SNS communication channel, i.e. handheld (mobile devices and tablets) and traditional (desktop PCs and laptops) computing devices. The data were collected from a questionnaire survey with 400 general consumers. Using a scenario approach, we asked the respondents how they would react to a special discount campaign for a popular beer brand ad posted on an SNS. Our structural equation modelling results indicate that online gossip propensity is indeed a significant driver of SNS identification. All hypothesised paths are supported, except the one from normative pressure to eWOM intention. Furthermore, SNS communication channels had a clear impact, since the latent means are greater for most of the constructs in the handheld computing device group than in the traditional computing device group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to examine consumer motivations to use social networking sites (SNSs) for three distinct activities: (1) general SNS usage, (2) the joining of a business’s SNS page and (3) clicking on an advertisement on a SNS. To assist with this exploration we draw upon the decomposed theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical lens and conduct a mixed-method study that utilises both an empirical investigation as well as qualitative focus group interviews in order to delve deeper into specific reasons why individuals engage in SNS activities. Results show that a number of antecedents such as attitude, compatibility, relative advantage, complexity, normative influences and self-efficacy come into play when determining SNS usage activities. However, specific antecedents may vary according to the explicit activity under investigation. This study’s main contribution involves advancing our understanding of consumer behaviour as it relates to SNS activities by examining not only antecedents to intention but also attitude, subjective norms and behavioural control. Other contributions include additional development of the SNS literature, integrating SNSs into a classical theoretical framework and providing valuable insights and implications for both practitioners and researchers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the effect of a social network on prediction markets using a controlled laboratory experiment that allows us to identify causal relationships between a social network and the performance of an individual participant, as well as the performance of the prediction market as a whole. Through a randomized experiment, we first confirm the theoretical predictions that participants with more social connections are less likely to invest in information acquisition from outside information sources, but perform significantly better than other participants in prediction markets. We further show that when the cost of information acquisition is low, a social network-embedded prediction market outperforms a nonnetworked prediction market. We find strong support for peer effects in prediction accuracy among participants. These results have direct managerial implications for the business practice of prediction markets and are critical to understanding how to use social networks to improve the performance of prediction markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sports teams are increasingly using social networks to better connect their sports and businesses to fans and the general public with the aim of providing team-related information, fostering fandom, and building team reputation. However, few, if any, studies have been done that analyze and evaluate the efficacy of this important portion of the professional sports business model from an information-management perspective. This study employs the Facebook Assessment Index (FAI) to effectively compare, assess, and rank the Facebook sites of top European and North American professional teams. The study also shows how information artifacts in sports can be systematically analyzed, evaluated, and compared. In more general terms, the findings and analysis demonstrate how the information perspective can serve as a novel theoretical lens and important dimension in sport management. The results of the study show large differences between teams in the 3 FAI dimensions and a great improvement opportunity in the use of Facebook as a marketing tool. These results not only serve to create a ranking of sport teams but also can be used by sport managers for social-media-benchmarking analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bulletin board methodology emerged at the end of the 1990s and is becoming the most frequently used qualitative study technique. This interactive approach groups a community of participants in a private or public online forum for a duration that varies from several days to several months. Discoveries, exchanges of view, personal opinions and group reactions are all part of the power and interest of the internet in this era of social media. This article presents the principles of bulletin board development, and specifics to aid understanding of this tool within social networks and to help organisations adapt to a paradigm shift in marketing in which consumer-respondents are co-creators of meaning and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been stellar growth of location-based/enabled social networks in which people can "check in" to physical venues they are visiting and share with friends. In this paper, we hypothesize that the "check-ins" made by friends help users learn the potential payoff of visiting a venue. We argue that this learning-in-a-network process differs from the classic observational learning model in a subtle yet important way: Rather than from anonymous others, the agents learn from their network friends, about whose tastes in experience goods the agents are better informed. The empirical analyses are conducted on a unique data set in which we observe both the explicit interpersonal relationships and their ensuing check-ins. The key result is that the proportion of checked-in friends is not positively associated with the likelihood of a new visit, rejecting the prediction of the conventional observational learning model. Drawing on the literature in sociology and computer science, we show that weighting the friends' check-ins by a parsimonious proximity measure can yield a more intuitive result than the plain proportion does. Repeated check-ins by friends are found to have a pronounced effect. Our empirical result calls for the revisiting of observational learning in a social network setting. It also suggests that practitioners should incorporate network proximity when designing social recommendation products and conducting promotional campaigns in a social network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social networks are used by hundreds of millions of people every day, but little is known about their effect on behavior. In five experiments, the authors demonstrate that social network use enhances self-esteem in users who are focused on close friends (i.e., strong ties) while browsing their social network. This momentary increase in self-esteem reduces self-control, leading those focused on strong ties to display less self-control after browsing a social network. Additionally, the authors present evidence suggesting that greater social network use is associated with a higher body mass index and higher levels of credit card debt for individuals with strong ties to their social network. This research extends previous findings by demonstrating that social networks primarily enhance self-esteem for those focused on strong ties during social network use. Additionally, this research has implications for policy makers because self-control is an important mechanism for maintaining social order and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic word of mouth (eWoM) has been adopted by Internet users as a way of communicating their consumption preferences and experiences. Consumers are able to reach out to others, unknown to them, and have online conversations that can influence their behaviour. Organisations need to understand how to respond to these brand-related conversations conducted via social media. By looking through the lens of social capital, this paper contributes to social media and social capital research by studying the perceptions that 44 social media users have of companies that interact with them online. The users value social networks and support as part of their online relationships. However, several new value categories are identified when compared to previous research. Further research is required to investigate possible segmentation approaches and alternative methodological choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing popularity of online social networks, it is becoming more important for marketing researchers to understand and measure social intercorrelations among consumers. The authors show that the estimation of consumers' social intercorrelations can be significantly affected by the sampling method used in the study and the topology of the social network. Through a series of simulation studies using a spatial model, the authors find that the magnitude of social intercorrelations in consumer networks tends to be underestimated if samples of the networks are used (rather than using the entire population of the network). The authors further demonstrate that sampling methods that better preserve the network structure perform best in recovering the social intercorrelations. However, this advantage decreases in networks characterized by the scale-free power-law distribution for the number of connections of each member. The authors discuss the insights they glean from these findings and propose a method to obtain unbiased estimation of the magnitude of social intercorrelations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the debate over standards and guidelines for online social media listening methods in market research. She notes the challenges in developing systems for sentiment analysis of brand opinions with high validity results. She argues that research standards are necessary to ensure disclosure of opinion data sources, reduce the negative impacts of computer spam, and provide greater vendor-client transparency.

Online social networks (OSNs), comprised of varying types of relations among actors that interact through social technologies, are widespread in today's media environment. However, questions remain whether we are moving towards convergence within the sub-disciplines of communication and with other disciplines in OSN research. This article pursues two interrelated goals. First, it performs a bibliometric analysis of existing scholarship on OSNs in the past 20 years, highlighting both the convergence and divergence of inquiry on OSNs in computer-mediated communication (CMC) research. Second, based on the results of the bibliometric analysis, it articulates an agenda for future CMC research. Specifically, we advocate for a social network approach that will bridge various theoretical frameworks and disciplinary/sub-disciplinary boundaries, for employing the communication network taxonomy, for greater effort to integrate traditional and computational approaches within and beyond social network analysis, and for addressing a greater diversity of institutional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities offer attractive opportunities and challenges to advertisers. Using a revised source credibility framework, this study proposes that interpersonal trust and platform credibility are core to consumer search and consumption behaviors that allow advertisers to harvest value from online communities. We postulate that (1) quality Web features, and user instrumental and relational need fulfillment are antecedents of interpersonal trust and platform credibility; (2) interpersonal trust is distinct from, and an important driver of, platform credibility; and (3) both constructs drive a user's online community usage and brand variety seeking behavior. An online survey of 899 consumers in China supports these propositions and offers both research and managerial implications for this new media platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring peer influence in social networks is an important business and policy question that has become increasingly salient with the development of globally interconnected information and communication technology networks. However, in spite of the new data sources available today, researchers still face many of the same measurement challenges that have been present in the literature for over four decades: homophily, reflection and selection problems, identifying the source of influence, and determining preexisting knowledge. The goal of this paper is to develop an empirical approach for measuring information diffusion and discovery in online social networks that have these measurement challenges. We develop such an approach and apply it to data collected from 4,000 users of an online music community. We show that peers on such networks significantly increase music discovery. Moreover, we demonstrate how future research can use this method to measure information discovery and diffusion using data from other online social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities provide a social sphere for people to share information and knowledge. While information sharing is becoming a ubiquitous online phenomenon, how to ensure information quality or induce quality content remains a challenge because of the anonymity of commentators. This paper introduces moderation into reputation systems. We show that moderation directly affects strategic commentators' incentive to generate useful information, and moderation is generally desirable to improve information quality. We find that when being moderated with different probabilities based on their reputations, commentators might display a pattern of reputation oscillation, in which they generate useful content to build up high reputation and then exploit their reputation. As a result, the expected performance from high-reputation commentators can be inferior to that from low-reputation commentators (reverse reputation). We then investigate the optimal moderation resource allocation and conclude that the seemingly abnormal reverse reputation could arise as an optimal result. Our study underscores the importance of moderation and highlights that the frequency of moderation should be properly chosen for better performance of online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the use of social media in corporate customer relations and marketing. The creation and management of so-called virtual communities, online social networks created by companies for consumers, is discussed. A three-stage plan through which management can successfully engage with consumers through such an online social network is presented. This involves research on consumer needs and motivations related to their participation, promotion of participation in the network by consumers and motivating cooperation within the network with the company's aims.

In this paper, we explore the opportunities and possibilities of Web 2.0 through the theoretical lens of tribes and fandom, arguing that social-networking sites centring on iconic celebrities provide a rich context to explore notions of tribal identities and their forms of interaction, connectivity, and creativity. Employing what we term a Netnographic Imagination, we seek to explore the nature and character of this tribal context to provide insights into the tribal mattering spaces that are constructed around celebrity brands. Our analysis highlights the passions and enthusiasms within such emotional communities and the investments they make in celebrity brands, along with the forms of critique they construct around their associated marketing practices. Finally, we draw attention to the tribal innovations that emerge from the sense of togetherness and belonging made explicit through such tribal affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media increases opportunities to glimpse celebrities’ glamorous lifestyles and to interact with celebrities. This study examines how the use of social networking sites (SNSs) for celebrity-related information and interactions influences users’ life satisfaction. Data analysis demonstrates that celebrity-related SNS activities decrease users’ life satisfaction by increasing relative deprivation through comparison with celebrities. However, the comparison also leads to system justification, serving a palliative function to cope with the potentially negative consequences of such comparisons, which in turn increases life satisfaction. Interestingly, materialism moderates the relationship such that the effects of comparison with celebrities on system justification are observed only among SNS users who hold high materialism values. Also, the direct positive effects of celebrity-related SNS use on life satisfaction are stronger for those with high materialistic values than for those with low materialistic values. The multifaceted functions of celebrity-related SNS activities for life satisfaction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an efficient media to disseminate content like news and advertisements. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the open problem of how does the content popularity influence the information coverage exactly. Specifically, we assume that each user has $q$ friends and forwards the received content to each of his friends with the forwarding probability $p$ , where $p$ is only determined by the content popularity. Based on a geography-aware social model leveraging the forwarding behavior of OSNs users, we explore the exact relationship between the content popularity and the information coverage by the method of network partitions. Then, we mainly have the following observations: 1) The information coverage is only related to $p$ and $q$ ; 2) In order to disseminate the content to a constant portion of all users within the network, the forwarding probability $p$ should be no less than $\Theta \left(\frac{1}{q}\right)$. Extensive evaluations on both the generated data and the real OSN topology validate our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study users behavior in online social networks (OSN) as a means to preserve privacy. People widely use OSN for a variety of objectives and fields. Each OSN has different characteristics, requirements, and vulnerabilities of the private data shared. Sharing-habits refers to users' patterns of sharing information. Sharing-habits are implied by the communication between users and their peers. While social networks allow users to have some control over the dissemination of their information, most users are not aware that the private information they share might leak to users with whom they do not wish to share it. In this paper we address the growing need of social network users to share information with close fiends while hiding it from others. We apply several different well-known strategies from graph-flow theory to an OSN graph with sharing-habits insights, to control the information flow among OSN users. The goal of the method we present is to allow maximum information sharing while enforcing a user's pre-defined privacy criteria. Our method is evaluated using real data from well known social networks and the results are analyzed in terms of accuracy and run-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive presence of online media in our society has transferred a significant part of political deliberation to online forums and social networking sites. This article examines popularity, reputation, and social influence on Twitter using large-scale digital traces from 2009 to 2016. We process network information on more than 40 million users, calculating new global measures of reputation that build on the D-core decomposition and the bow-tie structure of the Twitter follower network. We integrate our measurements of popularity, reputation, and social influence to evaluate what keeps users active, what makes them more popular, and what determines their influence. We find that there is a range of values in which the risk of a user becoming inactive grows with popularity and reputation. Popularity in Twitter resembles a proportional growth process that is faster in its strongly connected component, and that can be accelerated by reputation when users are already popular. We find that social influence on Twitter is mainly related to popularity rather than reputation, but that this growth of influence with popularity is sublinear. The explanatory and predictive power of our method shows that global network metrics are better predictors of inactivity and social influence, calling for analyses that go beyond local metrics like the number of followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreement persists as to whether social networking sites (SNSs) are used more frequently to facilitate cross-cutting or like-minded discussions. We examine the relationship between the use of SNSs and involvement in discussions with politically similar and dissimilar others among a sample of US Democrats and Republicans. Affective polarization is negatively related to involvement in cross-cutting discussions, suggesting that individuals extend their dislike of the opposing political party to out-party members within their online social networks. Moreover, political discussion with one’s friends on SNSs plays a mediating role in involvement in both cross-cutting and like-minded discussions. Finally, party identification moderates the relationship between SNS use and involvement in cross-cutting discussions, indicating that Republicans participate more frequently than Democrats in cross-cutting exchanges on SNSs. In the light of these findings, we discuss the contribution of SNSs to the ideals of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what the author refers to as the risks that are associated with the use of online social media and Internet research as a means of screening potential job candidates, and it mentions how employers might be able to gain access to information such as a job seeker's age, race, and religion which cannot legally be considered when making hiring decisions. Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a prohibition against discrimination in employment are assessed.

People recommenders are a widespread feature of social networking sites and educational social learning platforms alike. However, when these systems are used to extend learners' Personal Learning Networks, they often fall short of providing recommendations of learning value to their users. This paper proposes a design of a people recommender based on content-based user profiles, and a matching method based on dissimilarity therein. It presents the results of an experiment conducted with curators of the content curation site Scoop.it!, where curators rated personalized recommendations for contacts. The study showed that matching dissimilarity of interpretations of shared interests is more successful in providing positive experiences of breakdown for the curator than is matching on similarity. The main conclusion of this paper is that people recommenders should aim to trigger constructive experiences of breakdown for their users, as the prospect and potential of such experiences encourage learners to connect to their recommended peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online support groups are attractive to individuals suffering from various types of mental and physical illness due to their accessibility, convenience, and comfort level. Individuals coping with depression, in particular, may seek social support online to avoid the stigma that accompanies face-to-face support groups. We explored how task and relational messages created social support in online depression support groups using Cutrona and Suhr’s social support coding scheme and Bales’s Interaction Process Analysis coding scheme. A content analysis revealed emotional support as the most common type of social support within the group, although the majority of messages were task rather than relational. Informational support consisted primarily of task messages, whereas network and esteem support were primarily relational messages. Specific types of task and relational messages were associated with different support types. Results indicate task messages dominated online depression support groups, suggesting the individuals who participate in these groups are interested in solving problems but may also experience emotional support when their uncertainty is reduced via task messages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The directionality is a significant but inherent property of social ties, though usually ignored in undirected social networks due to its invisibility. However, we believe most social ties are natively directed, and the perception of directionality can improve our understanding about the network structures and further benefit other tasks upon social networks. In this study, we address the latent tie direction inference problem in undirected social networks. We engage in the investigation of directionality on real-world large-scale directed social networks and summarize our findings using four patterns. Upon that we propose a family of ReDirect approaches, including ReDirect-N, ReDirect-T and ReDirect-One, to inferring the hidden directions of undirected social ties based on the network topology only. ReDirect can incorporate with other predictive tasks, and introduce supervision to improve performance. We also present a simple but effective strategy to construct self-labeled data. Experimental results show that even without external information, our approach can recover the directions of networks effectively. Moreover, we find the ReDirect approaches can benefit the predictive tasks remarkably in an experimental study on link prediction. The ReDirect family can be a beneficial general data preprocess tool for various network analysis tasks by uncovering the hidden directions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study clarifies the role of the informational use of media in facilitating citizens' political participation by focusing on three distinctive modes of news experience (i.e., news reading, posting, and endorsing) within the context of online social networking sites ( SNSs). The findings show that news posting contributes to greater participation in politics by positively mediating the relationship between the use of SNSs and participatory activities. In contrast, news reading and endorsing were not significantly associated with political participation. In addition, the study found that the indirect effects of SNS use on participation via news posting are highest among those with a high degree of network political expertise and lower among those with an average level of such expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Creative performance relies on the capability of developing and presenting an original concept or idea, and the collaborative production of creative content which enhances feeling of connection with others and formation of strong community. The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory of work performance containing four dimensions (capacity, opportunities, willingness, and performance) to investigate how the capabilities of social network sites enhance user creative performance through collective social capital and information capital (opportunities) for and individual habit of use (willingness) of the user to engage in social learning process. Design/methodology/approach – Many measurement items are adapted from the literature, except those measuring the constructs of social media capabilities (i.e. transmission velocity (TV), parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability) and user creative performance. The study uses survey method to collect data from social media network (SMN) users in Taiwan. Facebook is chosen as the source because it is the most prevalent and sophisticated social media platform that provides a home for users to interact and communicate. Structural equation modeling with partial least square is used to analyze the usable data collected from 533 Facebook users. Findings – The results show that the constructs are significantly and positively correlated, meaning that social media capabilities enable social capital, information capital, and habit of use to improve user creative performance in SMNs. Three out of five social media capabilities (i.e. TV, parallelism, and rehearsability) are identified as the key enablers. Research limitations/implications – Because of the sampled surveyed subjects and the single research method, there are some limitations in this study. The research results may lack generalizability that should be taken into account when they are interpreted. The authors encourage researchers to test the proposed theoretical model further with additional subjects, variables, and linkages. Practical implications – The findings of this research shed light for managers of SMN platforms on how to manage the platforms more effectively. A healthy SMN platform must implement at least these three media capabilities: the functions of news feed (i.e. TV), chat (i.e. parallelism), edit (i.e. rehearsability), in order to sustain its service. Social implications – This study confirmed that user creative performance can be increased in various ways through social capital, information capital, and habit of use. Company management should use SMNs (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) to enable employees to interact and exchange ideas and promote “coopetition” among employees across the company. If the organizational culture supports free expression of ideas and sharing of opinions, the development and robustness of group creativity can be enhanced, leading to higher competitive advantage for a company against its competitors. Originality/value – Past studies related to individual creativity have mostly discussed it as a personality trait or talent; yet, personality trait or talent is implicit until it is shown by one’s behavior. Thus, for the collective performance of user creativity on SMNs, the authors elicit individual creativity through the creative performance manifested by user behavior. Furthermore, the authors confirm that social capital, information capital, and habit of use are the critical antecedents of user creative performance, and that the five social media capabilities are the enablers of social capital, information capital, and habit of use on SMNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Social capital has been identified as a valuable resource that can lead to various positive outcomes of social activities in both online and offline communities. The purpose of this paper is to argue that social capital can also be an important ingredient in the development of adverse outcomes, such as technology addiction. Design/methodology/approach – Based on social capital theory and prior research related to perceived integration, a research model that reflects the effects of online and offline social capitals as well as perceived integration on mobile social networking service (SNS) addiction was developed and empirically examined based on data collected from 458 mobile SNS users in China. Findings – The structural equation modeling analysis shows that online social interaction ties and online social supports positively affect mobile SNS addiction, whereas offline social supports and online social identification negatively affect mobile SNS addiction. In addition, perceived integration between online and offline channels by using mobile SNS positively influences online social interaction ties, offline social interaction ties, and mobile SNS addiction. Practical implications – From the practical perspective, the results of the study offer interesting implications for managing mobile SNS addiction. The study found that online social interaction ties and online social support positively influence mobile SNS addiction, whereas offline social support negatively influence mobile SNS addiction. Social implications – The mobile SNS users should invest more time to participate in offline social activities and maintain good social relationships with their family, colleagues, and friends in the real world. Originality/value – The present study has both theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical perspective, unlike many previous studies tend to regard social capital as the predictor of positive outcomes of users’ social activities, the study contributes to the extant information systems literature by exploring the potential negative consequences of social capital on users’ social lives. The results of the study indicate that social capital is a significant predictor of mobile SNS addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sample of 488 male and female young adults completed an online survey in effort to explore whether social networking sites (SNSs) are a way in which sociocultural influences regarding body image are propagated. Negative body talk was predicted as an outcome to frequent exposure to friends’ fitness posts (e.g. pictures and status updates about working out, fitness inspiration quotations/images, etc.); we also explored whether this relationship was moderated by body surveillance and social comparison. Results revealed that friends’ fitness posts were positively associated with negative body talk, and this relationship was strongest for individuals who reported a higher tendency to compare themselves to others – even after controlling for body satisfaction, healthy eating and exercise behaviors, and frequency of SNS use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Past studies have shown positive relationships between use of social network sites (SNSs) and political engagement, but an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the relationship is limited because the studies often did not take into account the diverse affordances of SNSs that can influence participation in different ways. Adopting the O-S-R-O-R (Orientation–Stimulus–Reasoning–Orientation–Response) model of political communication effects, this study examined the roles of Facebook network size, connections with public political actors, use for news, and political expression on political attitudes, protest, and participation. Structural equation analyses were conducted based on data from a national sample in Hong Kong, a city-state with one of the world’s highest Facebook penetration rates. Results showed that Facebook network size and connections with public political actors exhibit both direct and indirect effects on participation through Facebook news, expression, and efficacy. Facebook news exhibited indirect effects primarily though political expression. A discriminant function analysis also showed that age, education, and online news exposure were the most influential variables for distinguishing Facebook users and nonusers. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on the recent trend that social network sites (SNSs) have been replacing traditional sources of information, this study seeks to examine the representative characteristics of pictorial information in both destination marketing organizations’ (DMOs) websites and SNSs (i.e. Pinterest.com), focusing on three major cities in Japan. Analyzing photos in terms of 13 categories, this study revealed that differences exist between two channels indicating an inconsistency between travelers’ interests and marketers’ projections. Based on the results, the study suggests possible DMOs’ marketing strategies utilizing SNSs to facilitate and reinforce favorable destination images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of social media is a societal trend influencing the way that individuals communicate with and relate to one another. Moreover, Facebook use may facilitate or hinder individuals' relationship growth and development. The purpose of this article is to (a) review research examining Facebook usage and interpersonal relationships, (b) present qualitative insight into the Facebook experiences of college students ( N = 16) from a large southeastern university, and (c) offer implications for college counselors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facebook is a frequently accessed social networking site with more than one billion active users worldwide. Although there are numerous studies on its impact on teenagers, none have investigated its impact on gifted and talented girls. This study’s aim was to understand the social media experiences of talented female student leaders. A qualitative approach, underpinned by the principles of phenomenology, was used. Individual semistructured, in-depth interviews were conducted with five participants. A modified method for phenomenological analysis was then used to distill the key essence of their experiences. This New Zealand study describes the complex challenges the participants face as users of Facebook and also argues for the value of the phenomenological method as a powerful research tool in such a study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sentiment analysis of microblog texts has drawn lots of attention in both the academic and industrial fields. However, most of the current work only focuses on polarity classification. In this paper, we present an opinion mining system for Chinese microblogs called CMiner. Instead of polarity classification, CMiner focuses on more complicated opinion mining tasks - opinion target extraction and opinion summarization. Novel algorithms are developed for the two tasks and integrated into the end-to-end system. CMiner can help to effectively understand the users’ opinion towards different opinion targets in a microblog topic. Specially, we develop an unsupervised label propagation algorithm for opinion target extraction. The opinion targets of all messages in a topic are collectively extracted based on the assumption that similar messages may focus on similar opinion targets. In addition, we build an aspect-based opinion summarization framework for microblog topics. After getting the opinion targets of all the microblog messages in a topic, we cluster the opinion targets into several groups and extract representative targets and summaries for each group. A co-ranking algorithm is proposed to rank both the opinion targets and microblog sentences simultaneously. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of our system and the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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One of the most significant current challenges in large-scale online social networks, is to establish a concise and coherent method aimed to collect and summarize data. Sampling the content of an Online Social Network (OSN) plays an important role as a knowledge discovery tool. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that current sampling methods must cope with a lack of a full sampling frame i.e., there is an imposed condition determined by a limited data access. In addition, another key aspect to take into account is the huge amount of data generated by users of social networking services such as Twitter, which is perhaps the most influential microblogging service producing approximately 500 million tweets per day. In this context, due to the size of Twitter, which is problematic to be measured, the analysis of the entire network is infeasible and sampling is unavoidable. In addition, we strongly believe that there is a clear need to develop a new methodology to collect information on social networks (social mining). In this regard, we think that this paper introduces a set of random strategies that could be considered as a reliable alternative to gather global trends on Twitter. It is important to note that this research pretends to show some initial ideas in how convenient are random walks to extract information or global trends. The main purpose of this study, is to propose a suitable methodology to carry out an efficient collecting process via three random strategies: Brownian, Illusion and Reservoir. These random strategies will be applied through a Metropolis-Hastings Random Walk (MHRW). We show that interesting insights can be obtained by sampling emerging global trends on Twitter. The study also offers some important insights providing descriptive statistics and graphical description from the preliminary experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly all of today's Western teenagers have a profile on a social network site (SNS). As many risks have been reported, researchers and governments have emphasized the role of school education to teach teenagers how to deal safely with SNSs. However, little is known about the specific characteristics which would make interventions effective. Therefore, the overall objective of this research aims to propose a list of validated theoretical design principles for future development of educational materials about risks on SNSs. This research goal was pursued through a design-based research procedure. Thereby targeting teenagers of secondary education in eight separate studies, the different steps of the design-based research procedure have iteratively been completed. Firstly, a problem analysis was executed through three explorative studies, including an observational study, a theoretical evaluation of existing materials and a survey study. Secondly, initial solutions were developed and evaluated in practice through five quasi-experimental intervention studies. Thirdly, we reflected upon all the previous results to produce design principles. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of the design-based research methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research problem: This study investigates the factors influencing students' intentions to use emergency notification services to receive news about campus emergencies through short-message systems (SMS) and social network sites (SNS). Research questions: (1) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SMS to receive emergency notifications? (2) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SNS to receive emergency notifications? Literature review: By adapting Media Richness theory and prior research on emergency notifications, we propose that perceived media richness, perceived trust in information, perceived risk, perceived benefit, and perceived social influence impact the intention to use SMS and SNS to receive emergency notifications. Methodology: We conducted a quantitative, survey-based study that tested our model in five different scenarios, using logistic regression to test the research hypotheses with 574 students of a large research university in the northeastern US. Results and discussion: Results suggest that students' intention to use SNS is impacted by media richness, perceived benefit, and social influence, while students' intention to use SMS is influenced by trust and perceived benefit. Implications to emergency managers suggest how to more effectively manage and market the service through both channels. The results also suggest using SNS as an additional means of providing emergency notifications at academic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Online social platforms, such as blogs, discussion forums and social networking sites, are increasingly explored as venues for user-centred evaluations; in particular, for design feedback from users. We present a multi-case study providing needed knowledge on such evaluations. Our findings are based on analyses of the design feedback and post-factum data collections with development team representatives and users. The development team representatives reported as key benefits that the evaluations provided insight into users' needs and competencies, input into ongoing design discussions and support for idea generation in the development team, but found the lack of direct contact and control with the users to be an important limitation. The users appreciated the opportunity to contribute to the design process, but the majority reported not to build on each other's contributions. Involving a relatively large number of users was found to be beneficial for generating constructive design suggestions. Practical implications and future research challenges are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of technology, writing in English is no longer confined to the classroom as nowadays students are exposed to various forms of writing on the Internet. Specifically with Generation Y in mind, online writing is a new method that needs to be implemented to enhance Malaysian students’ writing skills. This article aims at identifying what motivates English as a Second Language students to write in English on Facebook. Ten Chinese-speaking students from a private urban school were selected for this study. These students had just started secondary education after being educated in Chinese-vernacular elementary schools for six years. The students were required to participate in an ongoing discussion on their Facebook class page in order to complete a writing task. Data for this study comprised both online discussions and interviews. The findings suggest that peer influence and school surroundings motivated the students to write better in English on Facebook. The findings also imply that the use of technology in writing tasks made students write better in English owing to the exchanges of feedback and ideas that took place through this social networking site. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Large amount of personal social information is collected and published due to the rapid development of social network technologies and applications, and thus, it is quite essential to take privacy preservation and prevent sensitive information leakage. Most of current anonymizing techniques focus on the preservation to privacies, but cannot provide accurate answers to utility queries even at a high price. To solve the problem, a novel anonymizing approach, called splitting anonymization, is introduced in this paper to point against the contradiction of privacy and utility. This approach provides a high-level preservation to the privacy of social network data that is unknown to attackers, which avoids the low utility caused by the enforced noises on knowledge that is already known to the attackers. Social network processed by splitting anonymization can refuse any direct attack, and these strategies are also safe enough to indirect attacks which are usually more dangerous than direct attacks. Finally, strict theoretical analysis and large amount of evaluation results based on real data sets verified the design of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The vast amount of information available via online social networks (OSN) makes it a very good avenue for understanding human behavior. One of the human characteristics of interest to financial practitioners is an individual’s financial risk tolerance. The purpose of this paper is to look at the relationship between an individual’s OSN behavior and his/her financial risk tolerance. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses data collected from a sample of 220 university students and the backward variables selection ordinary least squares regression analysis technique to achieve its objective. Findings – The results of the study find that the frequency of logging on to social network sites indicates an individual who has higher financial risk tolerance. Additionally, the increasing use of social networks for social connection is found to be associated with lower financial risk tolerance. The results are mostly consistent when the sample is split based on prior financial knowledge. Originality/value – To the authors’ knowledge this is the first study which documents the possibility of understanding an individual’s financial risk tolerance via his/her social network activity. This provides investment/financial consultants with more avenues for gathering information in order to understand their current or potential clients hence providing better services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies on social networking sites (SNSs) reveal that users’ social background is not a significant predictor of participation in this type of social media. The broad user bases of Facebook and other social media platforms also appear to suggest that social background no longer affects access to SNSs. A small number of studies even claim that in the participatory web environment, social content is more likely to be created by non-elites, such as lower-income people or racial minorities [Blank, G. (2013). Who creates content? Stratification and content creation on the Internet.Information,Communication & Society,16(4), 590–612]. Nevertheless, engagement with SNSs also reproduces inequalities, for example via class- and ethnic-based ‘self-segregation’ [boyd, d. (2012). White flight in networked publics? How race and class shaped American teen engagement with MySpace and Facebook. In L. Nakamura & P. A. Chow-White (Eds.),Race after the internet(pp. 203–222). New York, NY: Routledge]. Drawing on a large-scale survey (N = 2327) and a set of 56 interviews with Italian teenagers, the current paper explores the persistent influence of socio-economic background and cultural capital in adolescents’ use of SNSs. The research findings show that, although structural variables inevitably influence their participation in social media, teenagers from ‘lower-income’ families are more enthusiastic about the communication and relational features of these sites. In contrast, their peers from ‘elite’ families focus on the capital-enhancing opportunities offered by SNSs and display a critical stance that leads them to limit their social activities on these platforms. Overall, the results suggest that SNSs are not exempt from digital inequalities, but nonetheless provide novel opportunities to lower-income teenagers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade, Internet and politics scholarship has been concerned with the effects of the Internet on forms of civic and political participation. Recent research has moved on to examine the effects of social networking sites like Facebook. Although past studies have generally found positive – albeit weak or moderate – relationships between social networking sites use and civic and political participation, reliance on cross-sectional surveys has not produced conclusive evidence of the direction of causality. We use a two-wave panel survey of 15- and 16-year-olds to examine how Facebook use affects various forms of political and non-political entertainment-oriented participation (both online and offline). We find that Facebook use is positively related to civic and entertainment-oriented, but not to online or offline political, participation. Further analysis using structural equation modelling shows that prior levels of civic participation have a stronger effect on Facebook use than Facebook use has on civic participation. Facebook use only leads clearly to entertainment-oriented participation. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social recommendation techniques have been developed to employ user׳s social connections for both rating prediction and Top-N recommendation. However, they are mostly using social network enhanced matrix factorization (MF) where the objective is to minimize the prediction error of rating scores, which makes it impractical and unsuccessful for Top-N recommendation. This paper thus focuses on developing more effective methods to utilize social network information for Top-N recommendation. Social network regularized Sparse LInear Model (SocSLIM) with its extensions incorporating local learning (LocSocSLIM) to improve efficiency are proposed. SocSLIM learns sparse coefficient matrix for users by solving a sparse representation problem over user-item rating/purchase matrix and user–user social network׳s adjacency matrix at the same time by sharing coefficient matrix. The coefficient matrix is used to predict the recommendation scores, which are then combined with a proposed item based Distance regularized Sparse LInear Model (DSLIM) to generate recommendations for the users. The experimental results demonstrate that SocSLIM effectively uses the social information to outperform the state-of-the-art methods by at least 12%. Moreover, the local weight learning extension LocSocSLIM significantly improves the efficiency up to 10 times as compared to SocSLIM as the original SLIM while achieving the close performance guarantees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential users play an important role in online social networks since users tend to have an impact on one other. Therefore, the proposed work analyzes users and their behavior in order to identify influential users and predict user participation. Normally, the success of a social media site is dependent on the activity level of the participating users. For both online social networking sites and individual users, it is of interest to find out if a topic will be interesting or not. In this article, we propose association learning to detect relationships between users. In order to verify the findings, several experiments were executed based on social network analysis, in which the most influential users identified from association rule learning were compared to the results from Degree Centrality and Page Rank Centrality. The results clearly indicate that it is possible to identify the most influential users using association rule learning. In addition, the results also indicate a lower execution time compared to state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]