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In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how users on social media view brands with a heritage. Consumers commonly post opinions and accounts of their experiences with brands on social media. Such consumer-generated content may or may not overlap with content desired by brand managers. Drawing from “The medium is the message” paradigm, this study text-mines user narratives on Twitter1 to shed light on the role of social media in shaping public images of brands with heritage through the lens of the stereotype content model.

The study uses a data set of almost 80,000 unique tweets on 12 brands across six categories, compares brands high versus low in heritage and combines dictionary-based content analysis with sentiment analysis.

The results indicate that both user-generated content and sentiment are significantly more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding warmth, consumers use significantly more positive words on sociability and fewer negative words on morality for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding competence, tweets include more positive words on assertiveness and ability for low-heritage brands. Finally, overall sentiment is more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage.

Important from co-creation and integrated marketing communication perspectives, the findings provide brand managers with actionable insights on how to more effectively use social media.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine user-generated content in a brand heritage context. It demonstrates that heritage brands, with their longevity and strong links to the past, need to be aware of how contemporary social media can detract from their image.