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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how nonprofit service providers can better engage their customers through online communication. It identifies two communication styles and three communication functions, and examines their impact on customer commenting, customer liking and customer sharing.

Similar to Python for Facebook, a software package for the automatic retrieval of web page content was developed specifically for this study to extract data from the microblog Sina Weibo. Following the successful retrieval of 1,500 randomly selected messages from 34 universities in China, a two-level regression was performed using Mplus 7 to examine the association between the proposed relationships.

The findings reveal that messages with a friendly communication style increase both the number of comments and their positive tone; an authoritative style has no effect on customer engagement. The functions associated with message content (spreading information, building community or promoting action) influence customer liking and sharing. Building community tends to engage more customers than spreading information; promoting action often generates the least customer engagement in social media settings.

The study fills an important research gap in the service marketing literature as it pertains to nonprofit service organizations (i.e. universities) by identifying two types of online identities based on the communication style and the messages posted on social media. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between identity type and audience engagement, and to analyze the moderating factors of this relationship.

Social media have increasingly gained credibility as information sources in emergencies. Retweeting or resharing nature has made Twitter a popular medium of information dissemination. The purpose of this article is to enhance our understanding of both linguistic style and content properties (i.e. both affective and informational contents) that drives resharing behavior or virality of disaster messages on Twitter. We investigate this issue in the context of natural disaster crisis.

In this study, the authors develop, drawing upon language expectancy and uncertainty reduction theories as an enabling framework, hypotheses about how the language (i.e. style and content) influence resharing behavior. They employ a natural language processing of disaster tweets to examine how the language – linguistic style (concrete and interactive language) and linguistic content (information- and affect-focused language) – affects resharing behavior on Twitter during natural disasters. To examine the effects of both linguistic style and content factors on virality, a series of negative binomial regressions were conducted, particularly owing to the highly skewed count data.

Our analysis of tweets from the 2013 Colorado floods shows that resharing disasters tweets increases with the use of concrete language style during acute emergencies. Interactive language is also positively associated with retweet frequency. In addition, neither positive nor negative emotional tweets drive down resharing during acute crises, while information-focused language content has a significantly positive effect on virality.

Agencies for public safety and disaster management or volunteer organizations involved in disseminating crisis and risk information to the public may leverage the impacts of the linguistic style and language content through the lens of our research model. The findings encourage practitioners to focus on the role of linguistic style cues during acute disasters. Specifically, from the uncertainty reduction perspective, using concrete language in the disaster tweets is the expected norm, leading to a higher likelihood of virality. Also, interactively frame disaster tweets are more likely to be diffused to a larger number of people on Twitter.

The language that people use offer important psychological cue to their intentions and motivations. However, the role of language on Twitter has largely been ignored in this crisis communication and few prior studies have examined the relationship between language and virality during acute emergencies. This article explains the complex and multifaceted nature of information resharing behavior using a multi-theoretical approach – including uncertainty reduction and language expectancy theory – to understand effects of language style and content cues on resharing behavior in the context of natural crisis events.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of a competition mind-set on persuasion. Specifically, this research examined the effect of a fit between a competition mind-set and messages on the persuasive effectiveness.

Participants were randomly assigned to a condition of 2 (competition: competition mind-set vs control) × 2 (message: concrete feasibility vs abstract desirability) between-subjects design.

This research demonstrated that participants in the competition mind-set (vs control) condition expressed the messages as more persuasive and evaluated the product more favorably when they were exposed to concrete feasibility messages. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by a local processing style.

The present research provides a useful marketing communication strategy. For the effectiveness of messages, concrete feasibility-related merits should be emphasized in competition contexts.

This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain.

A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses.

This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing.

The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages.

The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed.

The study’s findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study’s findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands.

Online collaboration – a required method for many problem-solving situations in today’s work environments – has many aspects that are not clearly understood or explored. One of them is how work styles, specifically leadership styles, within a seemingly homogeneous teams with no prior role assignments affects the process and outcomes of collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aspect of online collaboration to learn how different leadership styles that may emerge impact collaborative work.

The work described here employs a user study involving 84 participants in 42 pairs, working in one of the three conditions across two sessions. The three conditions are defined based on the amount and the kind of awareness provided to the team members: no awareness of personal or team progress (C1), awareness of personal progress (C2), and awareness of both personal and team progress (C3). The log and chat data from the sessions where these teams work in collecting relevant information for two different topics are collected and analysed.

Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate the difference among the three conditions with respect to these two leadership styles. Specifically, it is found that those with the team awareness provided to them (C3) exhibited the least amounts of leadership, keeping the team relatively symmetric. The democratic nature of such teams also fostered more diverse searching behaviour and less need for communication.

The work reported here is a first attempt to shed light on two kinds of connections: individual and team awareness to leadership style, and leadership style to diversity of information exploration.

Product recall messages represent an essential communication tool in crisis situations. Their function is twofold: to provide information of a practical nature regarding the defective product, and the operational process of recalling it, and to defend the reputation of the affected firm. This paper attempts to analyse the structure and the function of product recall messages published in the UK national press, using as points of reference best practice guides published by professional or governmental organisations.

Numerous electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) studies have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of persuasive eWOM messages. Despite the impact of eWOM messages in decision-making processes, few researches have directly tested potential antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages among message recipients in social media context. The purpose of this paper is to critically discuss and examine the determinants of persuasive eWOM messages when message recipients intend to accept and use eWOM messages.

The authors reviewed extant literature of eWOM and proposed hypotheses regarding persuasive eWOM messages in social media context. A survey of 78 respondents was conducted and the data were analysed using SmartPLS.

This study found that argument quality, source credibility, source attractiveness, source perception and source style are critical antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages. The PLS results suggested that source credibility (trustworthiness), source perception (usefulness, social ties) and source style (visual cues, number) are main characteristics of credible eWOM messages in relation to users’ intention to accept and use online reviews. The variance of information acceptance and intention to use were also explained in the findings.

This paper identified critical antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages and suggested eWOM messages as a credible source. An integrated conceptual framework was developed to illustrate comprehensive antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages, and the relationships between these messages, information acceptance and intention to use.

The significance of the study is to identify the effectiveness of eWOM messages and its impact on intention to accept and use these messages. Moreover, this study will provide insightful guidelines for marketers with practical implications in approaching emerging markets via eWOM initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of brand communication activities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among major Indonesian brands by assessing the message appeals, orientation, and consumer responses.

A content analysis of 10,752 social media posts was conducted from the official Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts of 43 leading brands in Indonesia during a six-month period between July and December 2016. The data collected from each individual social media post generated by those brands were coded and analysed in terms of their message appeal, orientation, and responses.

Interactive brand posts were responded more frequently than informative message content. Twitter was more effective for informative appeal, Facebook worked better for interactive entertainment posts, and Instagram was more suitable for interactive content combining informative–entertainment appeals. Interactive brand post with mixed appeals received the most responses in Facebook and Instagram, while self-oriented message with informative appeal obtained the least.

The findings expand the marketing literature about new media for marketing communication and suggest marketing practitioners the importance of different creative brand communication strategies to enhance social media marketing effectiveness when using multiple platforms.

This is among the first studies to compare the effectiveness of creative message strategy on multiple social media platforms as well as to present insightful findings on social media marketing practices in Indonesia.

This paper demonstrates that a message library – the computer‐tailored intervention component that contains all potential versions of tailored content – can be adapted for use in a new setting at reasonable cost and effort. A message library developed for one population was adapted to enable its use with a second population in a different geographic region. Concludes that adapting message libraries for new populations need not be a barrier to disseminating tailored interventions and designing message libraries with dissemination in mind creates tailored interventions that can be adapted for use with different populations.

Many consumer general health information Web sites now provide interactive services such as “e‐mail the doctor” and online discussion boards. There has been little research into how consumers are using these services, especially general health discussion boards. In this exploratory study, features of health e‐mails such as enquiry subjects were investigated using content analysis. The material studied was 100 unsolicited e‐mails and 100 discussion messages sent between 2000 and 2003 by users of the UK‐based Web site MedicDirect. Issues emerging from the analysis included the high proportion of unsuitable e‐mails (up to 62 per cent) and the failure of nearly one‐third of users to find the information they sought on the Web site. Over one‐third of e‐mail senders misspelled key search terms. Readability tools could not be applied to e‐mails to assess consumer literacy, despite a suspected mismatch between Web page readability and consumer comprehension. There is ample scope for further research on these topics.