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Digital self-expression, recently one of the most important research themes, is currently under-researched. In this context, this study aims to propose a parsimonious research model of self-extension tendency, its drivers and its outcomes. The model is tested in the context of social media engagement intentions (liking, sharing and commenting) with focal brands and across individualist versus collectivist cultures.

The model is tested in two individualist cultures (N = 230 and 232) and two collectivist cultures (N = 232 and 237) by conducting surveys in four countries (Australia, USA, Qatar and India). Nike and Ray-Ban are the focal brands studied, with Facebook serving as the targeted social networking site (SNS) platform.

Self-monitoring and self-esteem are found to drive the self-extension tendency across cultures, with stronger effects in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. The self-extension tendency has a relatively stronger positive influence on social media engagement intentions in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. This tendency is also found to mediate the link between self-monitoring, self-extension and social media engagement intentions across both cultures, albeit in different ways. In collectivist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness. The study’s findings have important theoretical and practical implications. In individualist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness.

The present findings confirm that the tendency to incorporate the brand into one’s self-concept and to further extend the self is indeed contingent on one’s cultural background. The role of public self-consciousness may vary between individualist and collectivist cultures, something recommended by past research for empirical testing.

Managers can leverage this research model to entice pro-brand social media engagement by nurturing consumers’ digital selves in terms of maneuvering their self-extension tendency and its drivers, namely, self-monitoring and self-esteem. Second, promoting the self-extension tendency and its drivers varies across cultures, with this finding offering practical cultural nuances supporting marketing managers’ decisions.

This is one of the pioneering studies that tests a cross-cultural parsimonious model based on theories of self-extension, self-monitoring and self-esteem, especially within the context of brand engagement intentions on an SNS platform.

The present research aimed to identify the motivations, needs, wants, preferences and limitations of corporate professionals with regard to business social analytics.

Online interviews were conducted with 26 professionals the majority of whom work at the management level at 20 reputable corporations in Turkey. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected during these interviews, which lasted an average of one hour.

The findings shed light on the motivations of corporate professionals for monitoring social media and other digital media, their perceived capability and limitations in doing so, the media that they monitor and wanted to monitor if possible, their criteria and processes for working with service providers in the field of business social analytics, their needs which are not fully met by service providers, their suggestions on service improvement and their reflections on how internal and external customer data can be analyzed with an integrated approach.

This research is an attempt to bridge the gap between the priorities of engineers who generate artificial intelligence for the purposes of social listening and analytics and the end users, e.g. corporate communication professionals. Only by doing so, this field, which is getting more and more important as people spend more time online, will reach its full potential and benefit corporations by providing fruitful insight upon which strategic steps can be taken.

This chapter discusses the growing use of social media during election campaigns in Ghana. It examines how social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became preferred tools for voter engagement, mobilisation and campaign for political parties and their presidential and parliamentary candidates in the 2020 elections in Ghana. It establishes that social media are gradually surpassing traditional/legacy media as the preferred media choice for political mobilisation, civic engagement and political communication in Ghana. The chapter reviews the European Union Election Observation Mission (EOM) report through social media affordance lens. This chapter attempts to answer two critical questions: To what extent did political parties and presidential candidates in Ghana use social media in electioneering campaigns during the 2020 elections and, which social media platforms were highly preferred by political parties and presidential candidates in engaging the electorate? The EOM's data indicators show the prominence of Facebook and Twitter as significant in political party campaigns during the period under study. Preliminary analysis also points out that the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and their presidential candidate, Nana Akufo Addo including the opposition National Democratic Congress and their leader, John Dramani Mahama, spent thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements for extensive voter mobilisation.

During COVID-19, this study aims to evaluate the crisis communication strategies (CCS) of Fortune 500 medical device businesses. These companies’ CCS adoption is evaluated using data from the microblogging site Twitter.

A total of 11,569 tweets were collected over the course of a year, from 31 December 2019 to 31 December 2020, and analysed using COVID-19’s pre-crisis, crisis and new normal stages. The data acquired from Twitter is assessed using latent Dirichlet allocation-based topic modelling, valence aware dictionary for sentiment reasoning sentiment analysis and emotion recognition analysis and then further examined using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to build a configurational model. The findings were compared to Cheng’s (2018, 2020) integrated strategy toolkit for organisational CCS, which included 28 strategies.

With positive sentiments across stages, companies chose “information providing”, “monitoring” and “good intentions” as the CCS. In the crisis and new normal stages of COVID, the emotion of “depression” was observed.

Researchers would be able to assess the CCS used through visual aids in the future by conducting a cross-industry examination using image analytics. Furthermore, by prolonging the study’s duration, long-term changes in the CCS can be investigated.

Companies should send real-time information to their stakeholders via social media during a pandemic, conveying good intentions and positive sentiments while remaining neutral.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to investigate the CCS patterns used by medical device businesses to communicate via social media during a pandemic.

Fake news stories have become a central element of crises that corporate public relations practitioners have confronted. Whether such stories are rumors, outright lies or deliberate attempts to discredit corporations, they have the same impact and require specific strategies for public relations practitioners to effectively respond. The purpose of this study is to uncover strategies to manage crises that arise from fake news and if and how these strategies differ for other corporate crises.

In this multi-method study of 21 in-depth interviews and a 8-person focus group with senior-level corporate public relations practitioners, authors explored decision-making strategies for responding to fake news crises. Transcripts of interviews and the focus group were thematically analyzed.

Results reveal insights regarding how public relations practitioners determine if and when to respond to fake news crises in corporations; what response strategies public relations practitioners have the autonomy to employ for fake news crises in corporations, and how public relations practitioners control media narratives during fake news crises in corporations.

The findings guide public relations practitioners to craft an autonomous decision-making process and effective online listening strategies—establishing a watchful waiting approach—and determine if the fake news issue is a passing moment or movement swirling into a crisis.

Few studies have examined the perspectives of crisis communication experts about minimizing and managing fake news crises. The study identifies opportunities for future research focused on crises originating from fake news and disinformation.

The significance of social media in our lives is manifold. The tourism sector closely interacts with existing and potential tourists through social media, and therefore, social media analytics (SMA) play a critical role in the uplift of the sector. Hence, this review focus on the role of SMA in tourism as discussed in different studies over a period of time. The purpose of this paper to present the state of the art on social media analytics in tourism.

The review focuses on identifying different SMA techniques to explore the trends and approaches adopted in the tourism sector. The review is based on 83 papers and discuss the studies related to different social media platforms, the travelers' reactions to a particular place and how the tourism experience is enriched by the way of SMA.

Findings indicate different sentiments associated with tourism and provides a review of tourists’ use of social media for choosing a travel destination. The various analytical approaches, areas such as social network analysis, content analysis, sentiment analysis and trend analysis were found most prevalent. The theoretical and practical implications of SMA are discussed. The paper made an effort to bridge the gap between different studies in the field of tourism and SMA.

SMA facilitate both tourists and tourism companies to understand the trends, sentiments and desires of tourists. The use of SMA offers value to companies for designing quick and adequate services to tourists.

This study is designed to investigate a critical association between social media addiction and employee sleep while considering its implications for employee well-being and performance in the hospitality industry.

Based on adapted measures for the study variables, an electronic questionnaire was designed and used for the survey administered in the chain-restaurants of Pakistan. Through a non-probability convenient sampling survey, a total of 347 usable responses were obtained and analyzed for testing the hypothesized research model.

Results reveal negative associations between social media addiction, sleep quality, employee performance and well-being. The results have further shown sleep quality as an underlying mediating reason that explains the associations between social media addiction, employee performance and well-being.

The study addresses a gap in the literature by examining rarely explored factors such as social media addiction and sleep quality at the same time investigating its impact on performance and well-being of service employees. Significant implications for scholars and practitioners of the hospitality industry have been discussed while highlighting limitations and directions for future research.

Based on a relationship marketing approach, this paper aims to study the influence of social media use on salesperson performance and its underlying mechanisms from the perspective of salespeople in B2B settings.

To test the proposed model, the authors used structural equation modeling with a sample of 196 French B2B salespeople. Moreover, to explore the moderating effect of emotional management between social media use and relationship quality, the authors used the Hayes macro PROCESS for SPSS and the Johnson–Newman’s floodlight method.

The authors confirm the direct role of social media use on salesperson performance, and its indirect role through the parallel mediation of social proximity and relationship quality. The empirical study provides evidence for the moderating effect of emotional management on the relationship between social media use and relationship quality.

Companies should promote the use of social media to increase both the sales and creative performance of salespeople. Moreover, salespeople with low to moderate abilities to manage other people’s emotions benefit strongly from the use of social media, as this directly increases their relationship with their customers.

The research complements the conceptualization of salesperson performance as a combination of sales performance and sales creativity and shows that emotional management is an asset for social media users to develop valuable business relationships.