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The use of information and communication technologies to provide citizens with the opportunity to give the government their feedback on the rules currently under development is termed as e-rulemaking. Forums – as the main technological tool used for this – has shown many shortcomings and cannot satisfy all the demands of e-rulemaking. Because social networking sites have shown a political impact on ground, they also might have the ability to remedy these shortcomings. This study aims to investigate the possibility of the use of social networking sites in e-rulemaking.

This research reviews democratic deliberation theory and e-rulemaking in relation with social networks that are used to develop a proposed conceptual model. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches were used to test the proposed model. Semi-structured interviews for mangers and surveys for citizens were used for data collection and then analyzed to draw empirical conclusions.

Certain variable were found to have a statistically significant impact on the dependent variable of this study. The variables include information collection, user interface, privacy, security and use of emoticons in communications. Through this, the research provides an understanding of the variables that significantly and insignificantly affect the use of social networking sites in e-rulemaking.

This research contributes with a conceptual model that outlines the influence of different variables on e-rulemaking as well as an understanding of how social networking sites could be used to improve e-rulemaking practices and citizen inclusion.

The use of text‐based communications such as instant messaging or social media such as Twitter has been growing significantly as the use of mobile devices increases. Not only do people share information via mobile communication, there are significant implications for advertising and marketing. Due to display limitations, however, the message senders use various conventions in addition to the text‐based message to more clearly and richly express emotions. Since users use a range of expressions to convey these emotions, it would be very useful to verify the relationships between users' emotional expressions and receivers' perceptions of the expressions. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated model to examine the relationship between emotional expressions and the emotional intensity of the receivers.

The authors formulated a series of research hypotheses and tested them using empirical survey data. The research model used is based on regression analysis with dummy variables for statistical analyses.

First, emotional intensity had a closer relationship to user acceptance than was expected. Second, the use of exclamation marks and emotional messages are far less acceptable in negative messages. Third, the high formalisation group has a more positive emotional intensity in their basic expression.

The authors successfully determined that emotional expressions significantly affect the message receivers' emotional intensity and hence acceptance of the message.

It is important to measure the interaction between conversing in social media and searching on the web in order to understand the impact on electronic word-of-mouth marketing. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors research the relationship between social media conversing and web searching concerning brands on three major social soundtrack platforms (Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr) and on a major web search engine (Google). The authors examine the effects of changes in both volume and attitude of conversing and volume of searching for two phases (Pre and Post) concerning brands in commercials aired during Super Bowl XLIX. The authors perform Granger causality testing and panel data regression analysis to determine the causal relationship between social media conversing and web searching.

Results show that volume and attitude of social media conversing has a significant causality relationship to the volume of web searching. Each unit increase of volume on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr significantly increases Google search volume for the same brands by 4.7 times, 11.9 times, and 8.7 times, respectively. Each unit increase of attitude score on Twitter significantly increases web search volume 3.96 times, while for Tumblr, search volume significantly increases 0.95 times with each unit. Interestingly, search volume also has a significant causality relationship on the volume of social media postings.

This research seeks to understand the commercial impacts of the interaction among broadcast advertising, social media conversing, and web searching for which there is limited prior work, especially in the context of a major media event.

One of the contributions of artificial intelligent (AI) in modern technology is emotion recognition which is mostly based on facial expression and modification of its inference engine. The facial recognition scheme is mostly built to understand user expression in an online business webpage on a marketing site but has limited abilities to recognise elusive expressions. The basic emotions are expressed when interrelating and socialising with other personnel online. At most times, studying how to understand user expression is often a most tedious task, especially the subtle expressions. An emotion recognition system can be used to optimise and reduce complexity in understanding users' subconscious thoughts and reasoning through their pupil changes.

This paper demonstrates the use of personal computer (PC) webcam to read in eye movement data that includes pupil changes as part of distinct user attributes. A custom eye movement algorithm (CEMA) is used to capture users' activity and record the data which is served as an input model to an inference engine (artificial neural network (ANN)) that helps to predict user emotional response conveyed as emoticons on the webpage.

The result from the error in performance shows that ANN is most adaptable to user behaviour prediction and can be used for the system's modification paradigm.

One of the drawbacks of the analytical tool is its inability in some cases to set some of the emoticons within the boundaries of the visual field, this is a limitation to be tackled within subsequent runs with standard techniques.

The originality of the proposed model is its ability to predict basic user emotional response based on changes in pupil size between average recorded baseline boundaries and convey the emoticons chronologically with the gaze points.

Research has shown that the discursive patterns students use in their email interactions with their teachers are not linguistically and socio-culturally appropriate. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to try to explore how socio-cultural conventions influence the Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ choices of discourse strategies in their email communications within an academic context. The study, then, investigates the impact of social distance and gender on the stylistic features of students’ email texts.

The email texts written by 180 university students majoring in Applied Linguistics were systematically analyzed based on such patterns as opening and closing moves, reduced forms, text connectives, symbolization and emoticons. Alternatively, three semi-structured interviews were conducted to gauge the participants’ motives underlying the selection of particular discourse features.

The findings revealed that students, despite many statements to the contrary, were aware of the socio-cultural conventions governing email writing style and could write status-appropriate email messages, which rightly reflected the etiquette of email communication within an academic context.

The findings may offer certain benefits to EFL teachers and students.

The paper highlights understanding of a specific social group in relation to their interaction with different status social groups in the context of a specific communication technology and to some extent the perceived effectiveness of such approaches by those invoking them.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a new research model which includes both hedonic and utilitarian determinants that influence Line users’ attitudes toward hospitality companies that offer free Line stickers for potential users.

To target the right population, Line users who had used hospitality company-branded Line stickers are recruited as participants. Data from 372 usable questionnaires are tested against the research model by using the structural equation modeling approach.

The results show that all of the proposed variables, perceived usefulness, perceived social presence, perceived richness, perceived enjoyment, perceived novelty and perceived appeal, were found to be critical factors significantly influencing users’ attitudes.

This study targets Line users who had experiences in using hospitality company-branded Line stickers. Therefore, a validation using another large sample gathered elsewhere is required to generalize the findings.

The findings can give hospitality managers an increased understanding of the attitudes of Line users toward the companies providing stickers to them; the results may be used as a guideline to develop more appropriate business strategies for hospitality organizations with which to promote their products/services.

The proposed model is new; little research has been done on examining Line users’ attitudes toward hospitality companies that offer free Line stickers for users. This study contributes to an understanding of the factors that actually influence users’ attitudes toward those hospitality companies offering brand Line stickers.

Instant messaging and e‐mail are popular communication methods on college campuses. However, students' perceptions of the two technologies vary greatly. This study seeks to investigate the differences between instant messaging and e‐mail.

A survey was given to 545 college students.

Instant messaging is perceived as offering many advantages over e‐mail including conveying emotions, building relationships and ease of use (EU). Users are more likely to use symbols with their instant messages to help communicate. College students find both technologies to be easy to use, but show a preference for the EU of instant messaging. However, despite its perceived functional benefits, instant messaging is only the favored form of communication for personal and social relationships.

This paper builds on existing research by discussing information richness, EU, the use of emotions, multimedia, playfulness, flow, cognitive fit theory, bounded rationality, perceived commitment, and user satisfaction in the course of the study.

Nowadays, computer-mediated communication (CMC) is an inherent part of consumers’ daily interactions. That kind of communication, however, is associated with limited options to express emotions and, thus, impairs smooth interactions. Considering these shortcomings, existing research has paid attention to the use of smileys and examines their impacts on communication. Nevertheless, little is known about the effects of smileys on the receivers’ emotions as well as on the interaction between the communication partners. Against this background, the study aims to investigate the appropriateness of smileys in causing emotional contagion in CMC. That interpersonal mechanism fosters harmonic interactions and strengthens the relationship between interaction partners by sharing emotions.

Field data of 1,745 females were obtained through an online experiment applying two scenarios that only differ by the use of either a positive or a negative smiley. The appropriateness of both smileys to express positive or negative emotions was pretested in a study with 18 respondents.

The findings support the assumption that emotions expressed by smileys affect receivers’ emotions through the process of emotional contagion. Furthermore, the effects of the negative smiley on the emotions of the receivers are moderated by the receivers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion.

Findings contribute to current research on CMC by offering a deeper understanding of the impacts of smileys on interactions. In that way, the present study underlines the suitability of smileys to stimulate emotional contagion in a “cueless” environment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers’ reactions lead to anti-consumption (AC) behavior and provide some important clues for the practitioners in the Turkish food industry. The reactions are based on consumer complaining behavior in the Turkish food industry.

In total, 16 brands from the food industry with the highest complaint rates were selected as cases of the study. The consumer complaints from these brands were analyzed through a qualitative content analysis. In this analysis, four categories which are beverage group, food preparation group, junk food group, and delicatessen group were observed as the top complained sectors.

The authors made up five semantic categories and one emoticon category which are AC/boycott tendency discourse, bad hygiene, bad servicescape, deceptive advertisement and defective products based on consumer complaints and disappointed, astonished, devil, pouting, confounded, angel. The results imply that especially unfamiliar objects in food products, unconcerned customer services, deceptive campaigns and spoiled products make consumers exhibit AC behavior. In addition, consumers coded with emoticons as pouting, devil and disappointed are more inclined than others to stop purchasing, respectively.

Due to the qualitative nature of the study, the authors do not make a generalization for the field. AC behavior, deceptive campaign, spoiled products, brand lose confidence and children sensitivity can be investigated with a quantitative study. And a new scale for this field can be developed. Through this scale development, researchers can reach new dimensions and expand the literature about the AC behaviors.

An important implication which the authors got from the cases of the study is Hygiene. Although all cases have hygiene standards such as hazard analysis and critical control point, International Organization for Standardization (ISO 9001), etc., BH and spoiled products codes have high ranks among the cases. Due to this reason, companies should pay attention to their hygiene standards and increase the control period of the production process. Through the empowerment of the hygiene standards, they can fix their bad image on the customers and increase their dependability among the consumers.

In the context of this case study, customer service emerges as an important problem and concept. Insufficient customer service infrastructure should be developed and their institutionalization processes should be empowered by the firms. The authors believe that the deficiency of the institutionalization plays an important role on these problems. And the institutionalization level on the field among the cases of the firms particularly should be investigated by the researchers. Furthermore, companies can increase their complaint management efficiency by joining new complaint websites. Through this manner, they can learn how to deal with different problems and increase their problem-solving skills.

This study provides a comprehensive insight into consumers’ AC behavior. It reveals detailed drivers which may lead to AC behavior and contributes to the existing literature by determining the possible antecedents of AC behavior.