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Social networking sites (SNS) are enjoying growing popularity and have triggered new ethical issues including risks of deception, social grooming, cyber-bullying and surveillance. This development along with the growing power of SNS providers calls for an investigation of the CSR engagement of SNS companies. The chapter examines to what extent three prominent providers – Google, Facebook and Twitter – fulfill their responsibilities.

The chapter draws heavily on a politicized concept of CSR, namely ‘corporate citizenship’ (Crane, Matten, & Moon, 2008a; Matten & Crane, 2005) and ‘political CSR’ (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011) and discusses the role SNS providers play in administering citizenship rights. The chapter takes a qualitative case study approach.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have not only made clear commitments to act responsibly, they actually enhance the citizenship status of their users in many ways, e.g. by offering a platform for democracy activists. Deficiencies and contradictions also become visible, e.g. SNS providers inhibit citizenship by failing to provide sufficient privacy protection.

The chapter is limited by its case study approach, but provides valuable insights to an industry with considerable influence. It contributes to CSR research by applying and testing the politicized concept of CSR in the context of SNS providers.

Although SNS have received appraisal as effective tools of CSR communication, there has been little attention to CSR policy and practice of the companies providing social networks. This is unfortunate since the activities of SNS providers directly impact on millions of users worldwide.

Prior research has documented that product failures can be among a firm's worst nightmares. In this research, we examine if retailers are also held accountable by consumers when products that they sold, but did not manufacture, fail. In two studies, we show that consumers not only blame multiple parties when product failures occur – including the retailer – but also that manufacturer brand equity and retailer store image serve as important contextual cues in the blame assignment process. Specifically, building on congruity theory, we show that retailers are especially susceptible to being held responsible for failure if the equity of the failed product and the retailer store image are incongruent. Our findings also indicate that value-oriented retailers are particularly vulnerable to being blamed when high-equity products fail. Our findings suggest measuring attribution of blame between the manufacturer and retailer involved in a product failure event – instead of only the manufacturer as has been the norm in extant research – facilitates our understanding of consumer responses when product failures occur.

Buying behaviour can be interpreted as a signal of social identity. For example, individuals may purchase specific cars to indicate their social status and income, or they may dress in particular ways to show their taste in fashion or their membership in a social group. This paper aims to focus on the identification of market place influencers in a social identity context, in order to better market products and services to social groups.

A structural model linking consumers ' individual capital (motivation to influence), social capital (opportunistic use of social influence), and social leadership ability (persuasive “power”) is introduced. Hypotheses on the interrelations of these factors are proposed and the model is empirically tested using causal analysis. The survey data were collected in Germany in the context of socially influenced automotive buying behavior (428 valid questionnaires).

The proposed model supports significant relations between individual capital and social capital and social leadership ability. The results suggest which factors (individual and social capital) describe social influencers, helping to identify powerful social influencers in a social identity context. Different types of social influence leaders and followers are presented and characterized.

This paper offers marketing researchers and practitioners a new integrative approach to target consumers with specific social identities via social influencers.

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As the pervasiveness of blogging becomes comingled in personal and corporate lives, companies are harvesting useful information from user-generated media. It appears that user-generated media (e.g. blogs, among others) has become an increasingly important way for companies to connect with customers. Though blogging activity is a fast emerging phenomenon, however, to date only a handful of research has been done by scholars about blogging activity. The little research done on blogging has focused on the company perspective; how companies can use blogs to interact with their customers, but did not examine the individual blogger ' s viewpoint. Hence, the main objective of this study is to help fill that void in the literature and ascertain the following: to lay the groundwork for understanding the factors that enhance bloggers ' attitudes toward participating in blogging activity and how bloggers ' attitudes influence their propensity to blog.

A structural model was developed depicting the relationships among key constructs of research interest. This model reflects theories drawn from social psychology and the literature on marketing and information systems. Structural equation modeling (SEM) methodology was used to empirically validate the model and its hypotheses.

Results of the SEM analysis indicated that bloggers ' knowledge, bloggers ' responsiveness to their readers, bloggers ' market mavenism, and bloggers ' social network optimization had a strong influence on attitude which in turn influenced propensity to blog.

This research has certain limitations. First, resource constraints limited the collection of data to only US consumers, so the analysis of this study may only be generalized over population groups within the USA. A future replicating study of this kind would help to verify if the final model of this study holds true in different countries and cultures. A second limitation is that in this study the unit of analysis is at the individual level. Future studies could examine these effects at multiple levels of analysis such as network and business group level, firm level, and country and region level to understand the behavior of bloggers in those settings.

In this paper the two germane theories (e.g. theories of network effect and diffusion of innovation) are presented. Related theoretical rationales form the bases for hypotheses underlying the model framework. The second section discusses the empirical tests and validation of the model and presents the results of the SEM methodology. The final section discusses implications of the findings, summarizes limitations, and offers suggestions for future research.

Online consumer reviews play an important role in influencing consumers' purchasing decisions by providing a wealth of information about products and services. Framed by uncertainty reduction theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of online consumer reviews and effects on consumer attitudes and usage behaviors in relation to individual characteristics.

Data were randomly collected from 1,930 US online consumer review users using an online survey.

The researchers found that consumers perceived both benefits and costs from online consumer reviews and that both benefits and costs influenced consumer attitudes toward, and usage behaviors of, online consumer reviews. Individual characteristics – confidence in the information process and consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence – were shown to determine how online consumer reviews were perceived.

The results provide insight to retailers and marketers as to how they can use consumer reviews for their products or services to improve business performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how monetary incentives foster purchase intention in WOM settings.

This study investigates offering mobile coupons as an incentive and word-of-mouth (WOM) tool. An empirical study compares achievable effects on WOM behavior in an Eastern cultural context, which an Indonesian sample represents, and in a Western cultural context, which a German sample of incentivized WOM represents.

Providing senders and receivers’ with differing incentives leads to German consumers having an unfavorable attitude toward such incentives, but not for Indonesian consumers. Furthermore, Indonesian consumers base their decision to redeem mobile coupons more on their personal judgment and their overall deal proneness, while German consumers rely on their personal judgment and on others’ opinion.

There is a need to explore more countries to enrich the Western and Eastern cultural perspectives.

Western firms should consider providing senders and receivers with the same incentives. Alternatively, a non-transparent strategy might be a solution. For firms located in Indonesia, or in other Eastern societies, the transparency of the provided incentives is not a main concern, because inequality is not a big issue in an Eastern society, while senders’ or receivers’ deal proneness character strongly influences their intention to redeem a coupon.

The use of a mobile coupon as a novel incentive and WOM tool.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Palka et al.'s model to predict young Chinese consumers' mobile viral attitudes, intents and behavior.

A paper survey was administered to 835 college students in Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, and Liuzhou in summer and fall, 2010. The data were subject to statistic analyses including Pearson correlation, structural equation modeling, and backward regression with SPSS and AMOS.

The SEM model testing results confirmed the chain of young Chinese consumers' viral attitudes to intents to actual behavior. Subjective norm, perceived cost and pleasure were significant predictors of their viral attitudes. Their viral attitudes, perceived utility and subjective norm predicted their intent to pass along entertaining electronic messages. Their intent to forward useful electronic messages was determined by their viral attitudes, perceived utility and market mavenism. Their viral attitudes, intents and market mavenism predicted their mobile viral behavior.

It pays to foster Chinese consumers' favorable attitudes toward mobile viral marketing. It is advisable to know both target consumers and their associates very well. It is recommended to convince Chinese consumers that their friends and relatives can benefit greatly from viral content forwarding. Mobile messages with entertaining, useful, relevant and self‐involved values can go viral more easily.

The paper is probably the first study the integration of the TPB, TAM and Palka et al.'s model to predict Chinese consumers' mobile viral attitudes, intents and behavior.

Buyers in China often communicate positive and negative purchasing experiences through word‐of‐mouth (WOM), which creates special problems and opportunities for marketers. Price mavenism, which is associated with price‐information searching and price‐sharing behavior, is often considered a negative dimension of price. The purpose of this paper, however, is to propose price mavenism as an outcome variable arising from both positive perceptions of price (prestige sensitivity) and negative perceptions (price and value consciousness) and examine that the “know” (price mavenism) will positively impact the “glow” (shopping hedonism) among the Chinese.

Data were collected through a survey in Shanghai, China. The conceptual model was tested using structural equation modeling.

This study found that prestige sensitivity, price consciousness and value consciousness shaped price mavenism among the Chinese, supporting the idea that price mavenism arises from both positive and negative perceptions of price. In addition, for the Chinese, being a source of price information and sharing the knowledge with their social groups fulfill a hedonic motivation for shopping. While value consciousness was positively associated with shopping hedonism, price consciousness per se was not.

This study challenges the idea that price mavenism is mainly explained by a negative perception of price.

By understanding the drivers of price mavenism and their impacts on shopping hedonism, international marketers can fine‐tune their marketing strategies to appeal more effectively to price mavens in China.

This study highlights the importance of cultural perspectives in understanding the structure of price mavenism and its theoretical and marketing foundations.