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It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently enjoying a period of fast and stable growth. This is manifested by the growing number of both Internet users and companies which – to an ever-increasing extent – use the Internet as a form of communication (both internal and external), promotion, sales etc. Expenditures on Internet advertising are growing continuously and now constitute more than 25% of all advertising expenditure. A natural consequence of this development is the need for the standardisation and organisation of the world of the Internet. These activities will result in a greater awareness of the benefits which this medium provides, increasing the possibilities of its use, and – most importantly – the opportunity to evaluate the return on investments made on the Internet. Nowadays, it is clear that many companies are striving to increase the quality of their activities on the Internet or to improve the effectiveness of such activities. As a consequence, the number of companies that look for indices which would enable the making of more precise and effective decisions in the scope of online operations is growing.

This chapter is dedicated to the phenomenon of the increasing role of the Internet in business, including the scale of its use by Polish and international companies. We present the most commonly used measures of marketing activities on the Internet and in social media. This group includes the indices which make it possible to determine whether a company actually needs a website. Other measures allow for the improvement in the effectiveness of the activity on the Internet, whereas others specify the costs of activities on the Internet and often serve as the basis for settlements between a company and advertising agencies or companies specialising in website design. It is worth emphasising that the Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned (PESO) model, worked out by Don Bartholomew,¹ is the basis for creation and description of indices concerning social media. This model has gained certain popularity in the social media industry. It does not, however, specify how individual indices should be named and calculated. It maps already existing indices and adapts them to specific levels of marketing communication measurement. All the measures indicated by the author of the model have been grouped into five major areas: exposure, engagement, brand awareness, action and recommendations. This model– similarly to all models of performance measurement – inspired by the sales funnel concept, adjusts certain standard indices and proposals of measurements for specific levels. Additionally, the measures are divided into four types, depending on who the owner of the content is: Paid (P) – refers to all forms of paid content; Owned (O) – all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand; Earned (E) – the contents about a given brand created spontaneously by Internet users; and Shared (S) – the contents shared by Internet users.

This chapter addresses the dynamics in inter-organizational relations. The authors probe the value networks so prevalent within contemporary ­manufacturing to put forward that their basic cooperation/competition duality manifests itself in practical terms as capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes. The authors conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study aimed at capturing the process by which inter-organizational collabor­ation in ­manufacturing value networks is enacted. Our study finds that inter-organizational relations are “nested” in that a relationship plays out over an interpersonal network where the inter-organizational relationships are a framework for action, while simultaneously interpersonal interactions affect how the inter-organizational relationships take shape and evolve. Furthermore, we found that inter-organizational dynamics is essentially a stratified process. Solving particular and concrete problems at the surface level, with regard to specific collaboration issues between organizations, simultaneously shapes truces with regard to the underlying capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes.

This study examines the empirical relationship between four broad antecedents of brand equity (branding strategy, brand structure, brand positioning and target market) and two separate dimensions of revenue premium: price premium and volume premium. Our modeling framework aims to explain how different antecedents of brand equity influence the realized velocity and margin of branded product sales, key drivers of operating cash flow. Our generalizable empirical analyses are based on a representative dataset of over 6,500 brands, across 200 consumer-packaged goods categories, spanning three years. We find that only 20% of brands command revenue premiums, for which volume premiums are the critical determinant. Branding strategies and brand structure primarily impact volume premium. In contrast, brand positioning has little effect. Target market substantially affects both premiums. Overall, these four elements account for 73% and 69% of the explained variations in price and volume premiums, respectively. This study provides generalizable, important, and novel insights for the theory and practice of brand management regarding price positioning and extending brands into new categories.

Peer review has been with humans for a long time. Its effective inception dates back to World War II resulting information overload, which imposed a quantitative and qualitative screening of publications. Peer review was beset by a number of accusations and critics largely from the biases and subjective aspects of the process including the secrecy in which the processes became standard. Advent of the Internet in the early 1990s provided a manner to open peer review up to make it more transparent, less iniquitous, and more objective. This chapter investigates whether this openness led to a more objective manner of judging scientific publications. Three sites are examined: Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP), and Faculty of 1000 (F1000). These sites practice open peer review wherein reviewers and authors and their reviews and rebuttals are available for all to see. The chapter examines the different steps taken to allow reviewers and authors to interact and how this allows for the entire community to participate. This new prepublication reviewing of papers has to some extent, alleviated the biases that were previously preponderant and, furthermore, seems to give positive results and feedback. Although recent, experiences seem to have elicited scientists’ acceptance because openness allows for a more objective and fair judgment of research and scholarship. Yet, it will undoubtedly lead to new questions which are examined in this chapter.