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Word-of-mouth (WOM) literature has identified the roles of source and message in WOM influence, but the relationship between them is yet to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to explore this relationship by examining the mediation of message on the impact of perceived source characteristics from the perspective of the receiver. The paper also considered the mutual relationships between source characteristics and message quality.

A quantitative survey of prospective students was conducted to empirically examine the proposed conceptual model. A sample of 509 respondents was analysed using structural equation modelling.

The findings suggest the significant impact of expertise, trustworthiness, homophily and opinion leadership of the WOM source on the judgement of message quality and the indirect effects on WOM influence mediated by the message quality. The results also indicate the moderating effects of receiver involvement and the valence of the message on the impact of message quality.

The findings of this paper can inform the strategic development of WOM marketing. A deeper understanding of source characteristics and the role of the message may enable marketing practitioners to better target appropriate influencers for seeding programmes that stimulate WOM communication about their brands or products.

This study examines how the receiver’s evaluations of message content mediate the relationship between source characteristics and WOM influence. Source and message are two elements of communication which are processed when people receive information. However, nascent research examines their effects on each other. This research contributes to the understanding of this relationship through an empirical examination of the direct effects of primary source characteristics on perceived message quality.

In this paper, Yale model was adopted to understand how the characteristics of a green message (goal framing, argument volume and argument consistency), its source (source credibility) and its receivers (environmental consciousness) influence the communication process regarding the receivers' perceptions and attitudes (information value, persuasiveness and communication effectiveness) and their intention to spread the green message.

Eight scenarios of factorial design were developed to test the effects of a message on receivers' perceptions and attitudes. 1,157 valid questionnaires were used to conduct AMOS-SEM and ANOVA analyses.

The analytical results showed significant differences between the persuasive effects of Scenarios 1 and 8. A high level of environmental consciousness significantly affected the relationships between the message characteristics, source credibility and information value, leading to a higher intention to share the green messages.

The Yale model was applied to online persuasion to examine the receivers' perceptions of and attitudes toward a green message and their intention to share it on social networking sites (SNSs). Being environmentally conscious can strengthen the perception that the receivers of an online green message have of the source credibility and information value. The Yale model proved to represent the online green message-sharing context and explain how to persuade online users more effectively.

This study suggests that green message providers should present content emphasizing the losses associated with inaction, thus increasing the receivers' acceptance of the message's persuasiveness. Additionally, with the assistance of supportive measures, such as national education programs, government policies and actions showing corporate social responsibility, the environmental awareness of individuals can encourage them to share green message posts on SNSs and engage in green practices.

A significant effect of the message characteristics (goal framing × argument volume × argument consistency) was observed on SNS users' perceived source credibility and information value. Therefore, key opinion leaders, governments, and organizations who want to promote green ideas and attract public attention are encouraged to provide messages emphasizing the costs of inaction and contain arguments with a sufficient number of responses strongly supporting the original message. This could arouse the concern for green issues among online communities.

A Yale model research framework was developed to investigate the effect of message characteristics on the intention to share green messages online. Receivers' environmental consciousness played a vital role in this message-sharing process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of personality traits on the perception of key message characteristics in road safety advertising.

The advertisement uses visual imagery and imagery methods to examine key message characteristics. An online survey questionnaire was used to obtain responses of 947 driver perceptions with various personality traits; and the data are explored using multiple linear-regressions.

The findings of the research indicate the importance of using key message characteristics based upon established scientific theory to developing messages, more particularly in road safety and other social marketing campaigns. The role of personality traits and its relevance also appear to be of primary importance and can be used to segment the market; guide message designs and development, as different personality traits are found to be significant for different message characteristics.

This research varies from preceding efforts as it examines the influence of personality traits on drivers’ perceptions of messages using established scientific theory, and bridging the gap in the research between two main paths of research with reference to fear-based messages: the process that influences an individual response to key messages; and the influences of personality trait differences on message perceptions.

This study extends the knowledge in several essential areas and offers a set of recommendations to assist marketers in developing effective message strategies and segmentation based on personality traits. Besides advancing theory, this study enhances the understanding of how to develop more effective road safety messages that will save lives and prevent injuries.

Word‐of‐mouth (WOM) has been found to significantly influence consumers' decision making. Much attention has been paid to the effect of WOM characteristics such as the number of postings, the dispersion of online conversations, the reputation of the reviewers, and the review quality on product sales. Little research, however, has examined the interaction process of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consumers' product attitude formation process in online WOM. Three research questions will be addressed in this paper, i.e. the effect of prior responses on the following repliers' product attitude, the negativity effect and the role of main messages in shaping consumers' product attitude formation process.

The product attitude formation process of online WOM is investigated using the data of product reviews (main messages) and their corresponding responses. The paper collected 26 product reviews from various web sites and kept the first 40‐50 responses for each review, which resulted in 26 main messages and 1,173 observations (i.e. responses) in total. A hierarchical Bayesian ordinal choice model is then specified and estimated with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to address the research questions and to capture the main message heterogeneity.

The paper finds that the impact of prior responses (e.g. the proportion of positive and negative responses) on the product attitudes of the following responses differs significantly across products. This heterogeneity can be well explained by the characteristics of the main messages at the second‐level specification. Thereby, factors that influence consumers' product attitudes in the interaction process of online WOM include prior responses and main message characteristics. Another interesting finding is that positive responses have larger impacts on product attitudes than negative ones.

This research contributes to both academic research and the firms' online WOM management. Theoretically, this research is the first attempt to examine the formation process of attitudes toward new products in online communications. This research contributes by modeling how the dynamic process of online WOM influences new product attitudes. Furthermore, inconsistent with the “negativity effect” proposed by researchers (e.g. Skowronski and Carlston), the paper finds that positive responses matter more than negative ones in online communications. In addition, the way the paper configures the data for online communications is innovative and provides a perspective to quantitatively model the communication process. Managerially, this research provides implications for firms to intervene in the online communication process and influence consumer attitude of new products.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical assessment of the diffusion of advertising messages on microblogging sites. The diffusion properties of advertising messages are quantified based on the following three aspects: diffusion breadth, depth, and speed. Furthermore, this study examines the influence of message- and advertiser-level factors on the diffusion of advertising messages.

The study data comprises 20,000 advertising messages that are randomly drawn from a popular microblogging web site in China. Five message-level factors and four advertiser-level factors are constructed based on the information retrieved from the microblogging web site. Generalized linear modeling is adopted to examine the effects of such factors on the diffusion properties of advertising messages.

The positive driving forces underlying the diffusion of advertising messages on microblogging sites include message length, the advertisers’ in-degrees, and their reputation. The diffusion of advertising messages is hampered by typicality, affectivity, the completeness of the information of the advertising messages, and advertisers’ out-degrees.

To achieve optimal diffusion on microblogging sites, advertisers should select the appropriate time windows for releasing advertising messages. Moreover, advertisers should actively increase the number of fans, use less typical and less emotional words in advertising messages, and eliminate unnecessary URLs in such messages.

This study contributes to the diffusion theory by identifying the mixed effects of different information attributes on the diffusion of advertising messages on microblogging sites, and examining the roles of advertisers’ structural characteristics in the diffusion of advertising messages. Furthermore, the results illustrate how consumers cope with the advertisers’ sales presentations on microblogging sites.

The purpose of this research is to study the characteristics of chat messages from analysing a collection of 33,121 sample messages gathered from 1,700 sessions of conversations of 72 pairs of MSN Messenger users over a four month duration from June to September of 2005. The primary objective of chat message characterization is to understand the properties of chat messages for effective message analysis, such as message topic detection.

From the study on chat message characteristics, an indicative term‐based categorization approach for chat topic detection is proposed. In the proposed approach, different techniques such as sessionalisation of chat messages and extraction of features from icon texts and URLs are incorporated for message pre‐processing. Naïve Bayes, Associative Classification, and Support Vector Machine are employed as classifiers for categorizing topics from chat sessions.

Indicative term‐based approach is superior to the traditional document frequency based approach, for feature selection in chat topic categorization.

This paper studies the characteristics of chat messages and proposes an indicative term‐based categorization approach for chat topic detection.

How information flows through an organization is important to many organizational processes. The information people receive influences the perceptions they have of the organization they work for and the tasks they are assigned. Electronic mail constitutes a new medium in organizational communication. It may alter some of the information flow in the organizations in which it is used. My analysis suggests that some new communication occurs in large organizations that have electronic mail. I suggest that this new communication occurs because the way electronic mail is organized allows people to find other people with common interests at a low cost to either party. This new communication creates links between people who would otherwise not share information. Granovetter's work on the significance of weak ties suggests that such connections may have substantial influence on the way in which behavior is shaped and constrained by one's network and in the manipulation of networks to achieve specific goals. These processes are important to organizational socialization and problem solving, respectively. Other functions of large formal organizations may also be affected.

An increasing number of users are inspired by enterprises to repost social media messages, which greatly contributes to the dissemination of such messages in an online social network. The purpose of this paper is to discover the repost patterns of users regarding enterprise social media messages to help enterprises improve information management abilities for social media.

This paper proposes a novel method to discover the repost patterns of users in enterprise social networking (ESN) at the macro-level through topic analysis. Specifically, it proposes the message-diversity metric to measure the latent topic diversity degree of the social media messages. Through this technique, the paper analyzes the message-diversity characteristics of the enterprise social media messages and then explores the repost patterns of users.

The experimental results show that a high repost rate is more prominent for the messages with diverse latent topics, where message-diversity is as high as 0.5.

The findings have great potential in several management areas, such as employing social media marketing, predicting popular messages, helping enterprises strengthen their online presence, and gathering more potential customers.

This study explores how the repost patterns of users in ESN can be determined through general macro-level behavior of users instead of their micro-level processes. The patterns can also lead to a deeper understanding of which contents can drive people to diffuse information. This study gives an important insight into the information behavior of social media users for enterprise management researchers.

The effectiveness of a message to persuade tourists to consume healthier and more ecological food may be influenced by (1) the message content, (2) the message sender and (3) the receiver of the message. This study analyses effective persuasion of tourists by simultaneously investigating how these three characteristics influence tourists' healthy and ecological food choices at hotel buffets.

A randomised 4 × 2 between-subject experimental design, replicated in two hotels, collected perceptions of 329 participants on four persuasive messages aimed at increasing food consumption in a realistic and natural setting at hotel buffets. The eight treatments included four persuasive messages (placebo appeal, health appeal, environmental appeal, local origin appeal), each with and without endorsement (i.e. with/without a specific sender).

Message content, in particular health and local provenance-related messages, and the characteristics of the receiver (tourists' attitudes and habits) influence food choices on holiday while the sender (endorsement) was found to be less influential. This implies that appropriate messages can persuade tourists to eat in a considerate manner from hotel buffets, especially for tourists with favourable attitudes and everyday behaviours.

This paper contributes to theory and practice in persuasive communication to encourage healthier and more ecological choices in hedonistic consumption. Specifically, this paper is the first to present an integrated empirical analysis on the simultaneous influence of (1) message content, (2) presence of an identifiable sender and (3) receiver characteristics, on healthy and ecological eating behaviour of tourists.

The present study aimed to identify the characteristics of effective messages in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication on social networks to be considered in the planning of eWOM strategies. For this purpose, the present study tries to identify these factors through a qualitative approach.

A qualitative approach based on the thematic analysis was used with semi-structured interviews and opinions of 25 experts in the field of e-marketing and e-retailing. The collected data were analyzed and coded in the MaxQDA software.

The results of the study showed the extracted seven main themes of message sender specifications, aesthetic appearance, choosing the right content, sending strategy, message usefulness, correct targeting, type of information and also 47 subthemes. These seven criteria provide a way to design the right strategies.

Limited studies in this area were a challenge and also integrating the opinions of the interviewees due to contradictory and different views, as well as unfamiliarity with some new approaches to digital marketing, were among the limitations of the present study that managed and controlled their effects. Practical and theoretical implications for developing and planning effective eWOMs in social networks presented.

Understanding the way of creating appropriate features of effective and suitable messages in the planning of eWOM strategies is crucial to digital marketers. This study recommends considering the extracted features in designing effective messages.