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The purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into the relationship between social media activities and thinking styles, and its potential mechanism.

The current study conducted four studies using an experimental method and eye-tracking method to evaluate prediction.

Results from studies 1 and 2 showed that social media activities influence individuals’ self-construal, and the impact of self-construal on the relative reliance on cognitive vs affective thinking styles. Study 3 supports the hypothesis that social media activities influence individual’s thinking styles, and self-construal is a critical mediator in this process. Furthermore, the authors replicated these findings using an experimental method and eye-tracking method (Study 4), which enabled us to better understand the consumer’s psychological experience when using social media.

This paper contributes to the social media activity literature in the following ways. First, this research advances the knowledge of social media by demonstrating that social media activities can have significant effects on thinking styles. Second, the current research brings important insights to the literature on self-construal. Finally, using eye-tracking methods, the authors also provided some new insights on consumer thinking and behavior.

This paper aims to explore the interaction between consumer empowerment and social interactions as fundamental social media elements. It demonstrates their relationship in both experiential and informative social media setting where social media complements an offline consumer activity. The study aims to contribute to the literature on social media by demonstrating its complementary role on offline activities through these fundamental elements.

The paper reports three experimental designs that manipulate the empowering and the socializing elements of complementary activities to show their effects on both the complementary online and the complemented offline activities.

The paper presents three empirical studies that reveal the effects of two fundamental social media elements (i.e. empowerment and socialization) on consumers’ responses toward consumption episodes that consist of complementary online and complemented offline activities. It reveals that that these elements increase positive consumer responses toward both the online and the offline activities through psychological empowerment. However, the interaction between the elements changes with respect to specific empowerment types.

The paper contributes to the literature on social media by demonstrating its complementary role on offline activities through its empowering and socializing elements. It bridges research on consumer empowerment and socialization in a way that reveals their interaction beyond the extant definitions of empowerment resulting from enhanced communication among consumers. The paper also demonstrates the complementary role of social media on offline consumer behaviors through the effects of these two fundamental elements.The participants of the experimental studies are presented with hypothetical scenarios and asked about their behavioral intentions. Thus, future studies should address the research questions in real-world settings.

The paper includes implications for social media usage as a complementary activity to offline real-life consumer behavior through the effects of consumer empowerment and social interactions. Thus, it may benefit marketers seeking to optimize the empowering and socializing components of their social media strategies.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how social media may affect real-life consumer behavior. It also identifies the interaction between the empowering and the socializing elements of social media offerings in both experiential and informative settings.

Although the consumption of luxury brands is significantly on the rise in emerging markets, a significant impetus is needed to boost their growth to achieve desired revenues and profitability. This paper aims to consider social media marketing activities and consumer-brand engagement as key constructs to realize these desired objectives.

The empirical relationships among social media marketing activities, consumer-brand engagement and consumer response have been examined with a sample of 465 respondents.

Social media marketing activities foster engagement among luxury brand consumers, translating into a favorable response. Besides this, informational marketer generated content (MGC) moderates the relationship between social media marketing activities and consumer-brand engagement.

Marketers can use the outcomes of this study to better engage consumers of luxury brands on social media platforms to engender a favorable response.

This paper highlights how consumers of luxury brands are engaged through different marketing activities in the social media context. Also, the moderating role of MGC has been explored.

This paper aims to investigate what activities allow the firm to efficiently and effectively integrate social media into its strategic marketing activities.

As the current research investigates a new area of focus in the literature, an exploratory study consistent with the adoption of new technology in a firm was used to identify salient activities. In-depth interviews with those who oversee their firm’s social media strategies were conducted to discover and assess organizational activities.

Findings suggest that many firms did not adopt organizational activities important for effective social media execution, leading us to the view social media as the “step-child” of corporate functions, not receiving resources more traditional functions would receive; those responsible for the social media function, an exercise in external communications, may be hampered by poor internal communications; and few firms have defined and measured goals for social media where employees are held accountable for supporting an overall marketing strategy.

The findings point the way for future confirmatory empirical research of organizational activities, top management team support and effective internal communication in the rapid-response environment of social media. Findings also provide implications for marketing practitioners for the use and measurement of social media to achieve marketing objectives.

The current research is meaningful and unique in that it approaches social media from the organizational process perspective, which has received little attention in the social media literature.

Firms are increasingly using social media platforms to engage with individuals, as it is recognized that a firm’s social media activity outcomes, such as number of user comments, followers or likes, impact brand equity. This study aims to evaluate both the extent that these social media activity outcomes relate to brand equity and the classification of firms which benefit from the various types of social media activity outcomes.

This study identifies various components of social media activity and then captures specific social media activity outcomes for Fortune 500 firms. This study then performs a hierarchical regression analysis to assess the impact of the various social media activity outcomes on brand equity.

The results show significant relationships of social media activity outcomes with brand equity. The activity outcome measures of social networking and content communities platform are significantly related to a firm’s brand equity. This study also found that the social media activity outcome levels of various types of social media platforms are contingent upon a firm’s brand country of origin and industry classification type.

The results help firms gain a clearer view of potential applications of social media platforms, thus improving their understanding of the impact of social media. This study can enhance social media strategy and design tactics to improve brand equity. The findings can also guide firms in evaluating which social media activity outcomes enhance brand equity.

The results highlight that activity outcomes in a firm’s selected content communities platform and social networking platform are related to brand equity.

In the context of fashion brands on Instagram platform, this study aims to investigate the impact of age on the relationships between informative, interactive and trendy social media marketing (SMM) activities, customer brand engagement (CBE) and brand loyalty.

A quantitative method was used to collect and analyses the data and to test the conceptual model. In total, 241 usable questionnaires were collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling and multi-group moderation analysis.

The results of this study demonstrate that informativeness of SMM activities relates positively and significantly to CBE in all age groups. However, the strength and the significance of interactive and trendy social media activities differ between age groups.

This study used only two age groups of college students to answer the research questions. Despite that tech-savvy millennials and generation Z are highly engaged in social media environment, the results may not be representative of the entire population and the findings may be cautiously generalized to other platform types or product categories.

By offering a new understanding of perceived SMM in different age groups on Instagram platform, this study contributes to the literature by identifying the types of social media activities that engage different age groups on social media networks.

This study aims to examine how perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities (i.e. environment, society and stakeholders) enhance perceived value, social media engagement to win customer loyalty in the hotel industry. In addition, it investigates the mediating effects of customer perceived value and social media engagement between CSR activities and customer loyalty.

A self-administered survey was conducted on customers in Malaysia. Based on the data collected from 389 customers, the analysis used the structural equation modelling (SEM) approach. The validity and reliability of the measurements were confirmed before the hypotheses of the study have been tested.

The results revealed that CSR related to the environment has significant direct and indirect impacts on customer loyalty. In addition, the effect of perceived value and social media engagement on customer loyalty has been supported. The results also demonstrated the mediating role of perceived value and social media engagement between CSR activities and customer loyalty.

This study advances the understanding of the impact of CSR activities, perceived value and social media engagement on customer loyalty in the hotel industry. Hoteliers can gain benefits by understanding how specific CSR activities can enhance customer perceived value and social media engagement value, thus leads to customer loyalty.

This study investigates the association between CSR activities, perceived value, social media engagement and customer loyalty, which has been lacking a full investigation in the hospitality literature.

El objetivo de este estudio es examinar cómo las percepciones de las distintas actividades de Responsabilidad Social Corporativa (RSC) (i.e., medio ambiente, sociedad y skateholders) mejoran el valor percibido por los clientes, su compromiso en medios sociales y su lealtad en la industria hotelera. También se investigan los efectos mediadores del valor percibido por el cliente y su compromiso en medios sociales sobre las relaciones entre las actividades de RSC y la lealtad.

Se realizó una encuesta autoadministrada a los clientes en Malasia. Tomando como referencia los datos recogidos de 389 clientes, se utilizó la metodología SEM. La validez y fiabilidad de las escalas de medida fueron confirmadas antes de contrastar las hipótesis del estudio.

Los resultados revelaron que sólo la RSC relacionada con el medio ambiente tiene un impacto, tanto directo como indirecto, sobre la lealtad de los clientes. Además, se han confirmado los efectos del valor percibido y el compromiso en medios sociales sobre la lealtad de los clientes. Los resultados también demostraron el papel mediador del valor percibido y el compromiso en medios sociales sobre la relación entre las actividades de RSC y la lealtad de los clientes.

Este estudio permite comprender mejor el impacto de las actividades de RSC, el valor percibido y el compromiso en medios sociales en la lealtad de los clientes en la industria hotelera. Los hoteleros pueden obtener beneficios al comprender cómo las actividades específicas de RSC pueden mejorar el valor percibido por los clientes y su compromiso en medios sociales y, por lo tanto, aumentar la lealtad de los clientes.

Este trabajo analiza la asociación entre las actividades de RSC, el valor percibido, el compromiso en medios sociales y la lealtad de los clientes, lo cual ha sido escasamente estudiado en la literatura sobre hospitalidad.

RSC, Medios sociales, Valor percibido, Compromiso, Lealtad de clientes, Industria hotelera

Trabajo de investigación

It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently enjoying a period of fast and stable growth. This is manifested by the growing number of both Internet users and companies which – to an ever-increasing extent – use the Internet as a form of communication (both internal and external), promotion, sales etc. Expenditures on Internet advertising are growing continuously and now constitute more than 25% of all advertising expenditure. A natural consequence of this development is the need for the standardisation and organisation of the world of the Internet. These activities will result in a greater awareness of the benefits which this medium provides, increasing the possibilities of its use, and – most importantly – the opportunity to evaluate the return on investments made on the Internet. Nowadays, it is clear that many companies are striving to increase the quality of their activities on the Internet or to improve the effectiveness of such activities. As a consequence, the number of companies that look for indices which would enable the making of more precise and effective decisions in the scope of online operations is growing.

This chapter is dedicated to the phenomenon of the increasing role of the Internet in business, including the scale of its use by Polish and international companies. We present the most commonly used measures of marketing activities on the Internet and in social media. This group includes the indices which make it possible to determine whether a company actually needs a website. Other measures allow for the improvement in the effectiveness of the activity on the Internet, whereas others specify the costs of activities on the Internet and often serve as the basis for settlements between a company and advertising agencies or companies specialising in website design. It is worth emphasising that the Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned (PESO) model, worked out by Don Bartholomew,¹ is the basis for creation and description of indices concerning social media. This model has gained certain popularity in the social media industry. It does not, however, specify how individual indices should be named and calculated. It maps already existing indices and adapts them to specific levels of marketing communication measurement. All the measures indicated by the author of the model have been grouped into five major areas: exposure, engagement, brand awareness, action and recommendations. This model– similarly to all models of performance measurement – inspired by the sales funnel concept, adjusts certain standard indices and proposals of measurements for specific levels. Additionally, the measures are divided into four types, depending on who the owner of the content is: Paid (P) – refers to all forms of paid content; Owned (O) – all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand; Earned (E) – the contents about a given brand created spontaneously by Internet users; and Shared (S) – the contents shared by Internet users.

Social media has the potential to enable exchange of diverse opinions, foster dialogue on important social issues and exert positive influence on stakeholders and society. However, evidence is contradictory as to whether this is the case; it is possible that millennials' behaviors on social media are mainly driven by conservation (conformity and safety) or self-enhancement (power and achievement). In this research, the authors examine the extent to which different human values (self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement and openness to change) influence millennials' activities and behaviors on social media.

The authors conduct three separate surveys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with 491 millennials (18–34 years of age) in the USA, examining the influence of four higher-order values of the Schwartz human values model (open self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement and openness to change) on specific social media activities (consumption, self-focused and sharing nonpersonal content activities).

First, the authors find that for millennial users, human values significantly influence social media activities. Second, conservation values, followed by self-enhancement values, overshadow the expression of open self-transcendence values on social media. Thus, social media platforms may function more as agents of conservation and self-enhancement than agents of personal growth.

This is among the first studies to examine the influence of human values on social media and to find that human values such as conservation and self-enhancement have a strong influence on users' social media activities, while open self-transcendence values, which lead to expansion and growth, do not find genuine expression on social media.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the use of social media by citizens has impacted the traditional conceptualization and operationalization of political participation in the society.

This study is based on Teorell et al.’s (2007) classification of political participation which is modified to suit the current context of social media. The authors classified 15,460 tweets along three parameters suggested in the framework with help of supervised text classification algorithms.

The analysis reveals that Activism is the most prominent form of political participation undertaken by people on Twitter. Other activities that were undertaken include Formal Political participation and Consumer participation. The analysis also reveals that identity of participant does not play a classifying role as expected from the theoretical framework. It was found that the social media as a platform facilitates new forms of participation which are not feasible offline.

The current work considers only the microblogging platform of Twitter as the data source. For a more comprehensive insight, analysis of other social media platforms is also required.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few analyses where such a large database covering multiple social media events has been created and analysed using supervised text classification algorithms. A large proportion of previous studies on social media have been based on case study and have limited analysis to only a particular event on social media. Although there exist a few works that have studied a vast and varied collection of social media data (Gaby and Caren, 2012; Shirazi, 2013; Rane and Salem, 2012), such efforts are few in number. This study aims to add to that stream of work where a wider and more generalized set of social media data is studied.