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The Web 3.0 has been hugely enabled by smartphones and new generation mobile applications. With the growing adoption of smartphones, the use of mobile applications has grown exponentially and so has the development of mobile applications. This study is an attempt to understand the issues and challenges faced in the mobile applications domain using discussions made on Twitter based on mining of user generated content.

The study uses 89,908 unique tweets to understand the nature of the discussions. These tweets are analyzed using descriptive, content and network analysis. Further using transaction cost economics, the findings are reviewed to develop practice insights about the ecosystem.

Findings indicate that the discussions are mostly skewed toward a positive polarity and positive user experiences. The tweeters are predominantly application developers who are interacting more with marketers and less with individual users.

Most of these applications are for individual use (B2C) and not for enterprise usage. There are very few individual users who contribute to these discussions. The predominant users are application reviewers or bloggers of review websites who use the recently developed applications and discuss their thoughts on the same.

The results may be useful in varied domains which are planning to expand their reach to a larger audience using mobile applications and for marketers who primarily focus on promotional content.

The domain of mobile applications on social media is still restricted to promotions and digital marketing and may solely be used for the purpose of link building by application developers. As such, the discussions could provide inputs towards mobile phone manufacturers and ecosystem providers on what are the real issues these communities are facing while developing these applications.

The study uses mixed research methodology for mining experiences in the domain of mobile application developers using social media analytics and transaction cost economics. The discussion on the findings provides inputs for policy-making and possible intervention areas.

Online retailing is continuing to grow at a time with many fashion brands are closing retail stores. Social media is now an essential component within the purchase journey of a fashion consumer. As social media networks continue to develop transactional capabilities, this has giving rise to the expansion of social shopping. Fashion brands need to consider how best to optimise social shopping opportunities as an extension of the retail shopping experience. Reviewing developments within retailing, a conceptual model of social shopping is proposed, which places mobile technologies as central to the social shopping experience both on social media and in store.

As the number of social media users continues to rise globally, a heated debate emerges on whether social media use improves or harms mental health, as well as the bidirectional relation between social media use and mental health. Motivated by this, the authors’ study adopts the stressor–strain–outcome model and social compensation hypothesis to disentangle the effect mechanism between social media use and psychological well-being. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

To empirically validate the proposed research model, a large-scale two-year longitudinal questionnaire survey on social media use was administered to a valid sample of 6,093 respondents recruited from a university in China. Structural equation modeling was employed for data analysis.

A longitudinal analysis reveals that social media use positively (negatively) impacts psychological well-being through the mediator of nomophobia (perceived social support) in a short period. However, social media use triggers more psychological unease, as well as more life satisfaction from a longitudinal perspective.

This study addresses the bidirectional relation between social media use and psychological unease. The current study also draws both theoretical and practical implications by unmasking the bright–dark duality of social media use on psychological well-being.

This study aims to investigate the effect of social influence and value-driven mobile marketing activities on consumers’ acceptance of mobile marketing offers.

The method used is survey questionnaire. A proposed model was tested by using structural model analysis and data gathered from 356 Mexico consumers and 346 US consumers.

The study shows the number of peers and providing information are the main predictor variables of consumer acceptance of mobile marketing offers in both countries. These results suggest that social value factors are important variables for explaining consumers’ responses to mobile marketing offers across two countries characterized by dissimilar macro-environmental conditions.

The study’s overall implication about standardization vs adaptation is that social value messages can be standardized across countries. However, the marketing tools and touch points required to communicate any message appeal must be adapted across countries. One limitation in this study is the use of a convenience sample of undergraduate college students. This study did not control for different types of mobile phones and the screen sizes of mobile phones.

The overall implication of standardization vs adaptation from the study results is that social value messages can be standardized across countries. However, the marketing tools and touch points required to communicate any message appeal must be adapted across countries.

Unlike previous studies where the emphasis is to explicate the effect of value-oriented mobile activity, this study examines the combined effect of social influence and value-driven mobile activities on acceptance of mobile marketing.

This paper aims to discuss major influencing factors causing users’ mobile social media fatigue and divides them into three hierarchies, including causal factors, intermediary factors and outcome factors. The study also sorts out connections between different levels of factors, thus providing effective guidance for the sustained development of social media.

Based on the grounded theory and by collecting data through in-depth interviews, the authors use open coding, axial coding and selective coding to analyze major influencing factors of users’ mobile social media fatigue, build a model using the software NVivo 11, organize and analyze mobile social media fatigue behavior and identify the relationships by combining the interpretive structural model and explore connections among the factors.

The influencing factors of mobile social media fatigue behavior conform with the stressors-strains-outcomes (SSO) theoretical framework, where stressors (S) include the five factors of fear of missing out, perceived overload, compulsive use, time cost and privacy concerns; strains (S) include the five factors of a low sense of achievement, emotional anxiety, reduced interest, social concerns and emotional exhaustion; outcomes (O) include the six factors of neglect behavior, diving behavior, avoidance behavior, tolerance behavior, withdrawal behavior and substitution behavior.

It focuses on the discussion of the interactions between users’ stressors, strains and outcomes without fully considering the impact of social environment and educational background on social media fatigue behavior. This study only focuses on one social media platform in the Chinese context, namely, WeChat. We reply on the qualitative research method to construct the relationships between social media fatigue factors because we were mainly interested in how users would respond psychologically and emotionally to social media fatigue behavior.

The study has extended the application of the SSO theory. Additionally, the research method and model used in this paper may serve as guidelines to other interested scholars who intend to explore relevant variables and conduct further research on the influencing factors of social media fatigue. In analyzing the causality of social media fatigue, the study has integrated the intermediary factor strain to display users’ strains from social media stress with a more detailed path discussion on the causality of social media fatigue, which has not received broad attention in previous research literature on social networking services users’ use.

In this study, text data are collected in a diversity of forms combined, allowing respondents to answer questions without being limited by the questions in the questionnaire, which helped us to identify new variables of social media fatigue. As a result, we were able to dig out the fundamental causes of social media fatigue and potential connections between the factors. Relevant scholars, users and businesses may analyze, manage and forecast users’ social media fatigue behavior by analyzing the type of social media stress and users’ state, providing guidance for the proposal of corresponding management strategies.

Most relevant studies focus on the sustained use of social media, and there is a scarcity of studies on social media fatigue in China. There is very limited research that conducts model analysis of social media fatigue through the integration of stressors, strains and outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to discuss how the new media revolution can improve social marketing by bringing the “place” (one of four P's from the marketing mix) closer to the consumer.

This paper describes current new media trends related to social media and mobile communication technologies and discusses the implications of these technologies for social marketing by exploring examples of their use in commercial marketing, social change, and public health.

The rapid growth of online social networks and near ubiquity of mobile phones in much of the world offers social marketers enormous potential for engaging consumers in radically new ways. The nature of these new communication platforms differs from traditional media in important ways that can make them more effective for marketing, most notably the potential for deeper consumer engagement, multi‐directional information exchange, and location‐based tracking and messaging.

The trends described in this paper are rapidly and fundamentally changing how commercial marketers, brand managers, and consumer relationship managers engage with the current and prospective consumers. Social Marketing should learn from these changes and leverage these new media to engage large numbers of consumers more deeply and closer to the “right place and right time” than they ever could before.

This paper explores a topic that has been introduced at the Global Non‐Profit and Social Marketing Conference in Dublin, Ireland in April 2011. The discussion should encourage social marketers to reconsider the role of “place” and explore how new media can bring place closer to consumers.

By building and examining an integral model, the principal objectives of this research are to systematically explore how indirect and direct network externalities lead to user loyalty toward WeChat through the mediating effect of perceived gratifications.

The data were collected through an online survey of 688 young people in Mainland China. To empirically assess the conceptual model, zero-order correlation analyses and structural equation modeling were carried out utilizing web-based data.

Path analysis results demonstrate that indirect network externalities and direct network externalities exert a significant impact on users' hedonic gratifications and utilitarian gratifications. Moreover, the study discovers the significant mediating influences of utilitarian gratifications on the association between indirect network externalities and user loyalty.

Theoretically, this article may extend the scope of diverse studies on the association between network externalities and perceived gratifications and offer fresh insights into how mobile social media could actually improve user loyalty through enhancing perceived values among younger generation. Practically, this research assists mobile social media practitioners in retaining users and gaining competitive advantages over rival applications.

Although the extraordinary growth of WeChat has successfully become the dominant media by which individuals develop interpersonal network and contact with others, the roles of perceived gratifications between network externalities and user loyalty toward WeChat have not yet been investigated in depth. These obtained outcomes not only enrich the existing literature regarding the relationship between network externalities and affective response, but also offer fresh insights to mobile social media designers, marketers and users.

The purpose of this paper is to present a study that compares ownership and usage of new media among young “tween” consumers in Denmark and Hong Kong. Further, it shows the ways of finding new interesting web sites.

In 2004‐2005 a survey was conducted in Denmark and Hong Kong of 434 fourth, fifth and sixth class students. Questionnaires were distributed in six elementary schools. Hypotheses about new media ownership and usage in the two societies are formulated based on the economic development and individualistic/collective cultural dimensions of the societies.

Household ownership of new media, ownership of mobile phone and heavy use of the internet were found to be more prevalent among Danish tweens than among Hong Kong tweens. Danish tweens were more likely to use mobile phones and the internet for interpersonal communication and for enjoyment than Hong Kong tweens. Hong Kong tweens used the internet more for educational purposes than Danish tweens. The results seem to support that adoption and consumption of new media are motivated differently in cultures of individualism and collectivism, and consequently that the tween consumer segment is not as globally homogeneous as it is claimed to be.

The study was based on a convenience sample, thus it may be problematic to generalize from the findings.

The study can serve as a guideline for marketing communication targeting tweens. The emphasis on the hedonic use and social function of new media may be suitable for a highly developed, individualistic society. In collective societies, marketers may need to put emphasis on the instrumental values of new media, such as improving academic performance.

This paper offers insights into designing communication strategies for Danish and Hong Kong tweens, particularly when incorporating new media. Findings are compared with existing preconceptions of the tween segment in the marketing literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of m-commerce (mobile commerce) combined with social media for the wine industry in order to reach distinctive customer segments Differences about access to information and shopping habits on the Internet seem to exist according to the cohorts users belong to.

Based on a study of 190 respondents, this paper describes the consumer behavior of the Y generation regarding several variables: level of Internet sophistication and orientation, brand loyalty, risk aversion, involvement, shopping behavior and perception of authenticity.

Results of the study show that m-commerce and e-commerce applications using social media platforms may prove greatly efficient in the foreseeable future for wine growers. Different ways of selling and disseminating information about their products are observed.

The infancy of m-commerce implies a relative difficulty to gather data about m-consumption. Active users on m-commerce browse and purchase a few items on the mobile web and many brands still don’t have the proper interface of their website to fit with mobile screens. As a result, it is not easy to find users with similar interests on the mobile web based on product preferences, directly linked to their browsing and purchasing history.

Results of the confirmatory study show that m-commerce and e-commerce applications using social media platforms may in the foreseeable future, offer wine growers greater efficiency to expand their selling opportunities and reach a wider audience.

This topic is promising since various data show that wine consumption is composed of 45% of occasional drinkers (once or twice a week); and between 25 and 34 years old, it is composed of 50% are occasional drinkers.

Y-Gens are occasional drinkers and therefore, to link those occasional drinkers with wine, it is important to use social media as a communication tool and maybe a distribution channel to better reach this potential target.

Global mass communications and advances in new information and telecommunication technology present a new challenge to the traditional way of conducting international relations. While the mode of conducting diplomacy is changing, diplomats are forced to communicate with many new actors in the international stage through new means of communication. The chapter overviews the existing digital diplomacy research reports. Against this backdrop it presents the outcomes of a 2017–2018 study of communication strategies employed by six countries of the Western Balkans, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The findings of the study give a first-hand data from the practical point of view on how, which, and to which extent digital tools are utilized as a tool of digital tools are utilized as a tool of digital diplomacy by the official communicators of ministries of foreign affairs (MFA) in the researched region.