The roles of involvement, source credibility, and authenticity in the formation of online destination image

Author(s):  
Arifur Rahman ◽  
Naila Sharmin ◽  
Mily Akhter

Social media platforms are now prevalent in tourism literature and have the potential to influence tourists’ decision-making by impacting the process of their destination image (DI) formation. The aim of the study was to investigate the DI formation process by simultaneously incorporating three pivotal constructs—involvement, source credibility, and authenticity—in the context of social media platforms, a context relatively unexplored in the literature. The study employed a mixed research design to verify the proposed model empirically. The interrelationships among different constructs were analysed with a sample of 210 tourists who had recently visited or intended to visit Saint Martin’s Island, Bangladesh. The data were tested using PLS-SEM method. Results indicate that: (1) authenticity and source credibility both have positive influence in the formation of DI, demonstrating it as an antecedent of the tourists’ intention to visit; (2) tourists’ perceived authenticity has a direct positive impact on the intention to visit; (3) tourists’ involvement might not be a significant factor in the formation of online DI. Practically, this study highlights the factors that affect tourists’ perception of and intention towards selecting a tourism destination in the context of social media platforms, which can serve as a basis for tailoring an effective online positioning strategy for destinations.

2021 ◽  
pp. 016555152110136
Author(s):  
Muhammad Imran ◽  
Adnan Ahmad

The importance of big data is widely accepted in various fields. Organisations spend a lot of money to collect, process and mine the data to identify patterns. These patterns facilitate their future decision-making process to improve the organisational performance and profitability. However, among discovered patterns, there are some meaningless and misleading patterns which restrict the effectiveness of decision-making process. The presence of data discrepancies, noise and outliers also impacts the quality of discovered patterns and leads towards missing strategic goals and objectives. Quality inception of these discovered patterns is vital before utilising them in making predictions, decision-making process or strategic planning. Mining useful and credible patterns over social media is a challenging task. Often, people spread targeted content for character assassination or defamation of brands. Recently, some studies have evaluated the credibility of information over social media based on users’ surveys, experts’ judgement and manually annotating Twitter tweets to predict credibility. Unfortunately, due to the large volume and exponential growth of data, these surveys and annotation-based information credibility techniques are not efficiently applicable. This article presents a data quality and credibility evaluation framework to determine the quality of individual data instances. This framework provides a way to discover useful and credible patterns using credibility indicators. Moreover, a new Twitter bot detection algorithm is proposed to classify tweets generated by Twitter bots and real users. The results of conducted experiments showed that the proposed model generates a positive impact on improving classification accuracy and quality of discovered patterns.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002224292110021
Author(s):  
Alireza Golmohammadi ◽  
Taha Havakhor ◽  
Dinesh K. Gauri ◽  
Johann Joseph Comprix

Firms are increasingly turning to social media platforms for complaint handling. Past research and practitioners’ reports highlight the benefits of complaint handling on social media, urging firms to provide prompt and detailed responses to complaints. However, little research has explored the possible drawbacks of such practices, especially when responses inadvertently further publicize complaints. Utilizing two unique data sets in a series of observational and quasi-experimental analyses, this research provides the first evidence of complaint publicization in social media, a phenomenon in which firm responses to complaints on popular social media platforms increase the potential public exposure of complaints. This negative effect can outweigh any positive customer care-signaling impact from firm responses. The authors show that a response strategy that engenders a high level of complaint publicization – e.g., providing detailed responses through multiple communication exchanges with a complainant – could negatively impact perceived quality and firm value, diminish the positive impact of a firm’s own posts, and increase the volume of future complaints. Additional analyses reveal that these adverse impacts are stronger for firms that are targeted by retail investors. The authors also uncover specific response strategies and styles that could mitigate these effects.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1332
Author(s):  
Hong Fan ◽  
Wu Du ◽  
Abdelghani Dahou ◽  
Ahmed A. Ewees ◽  
Dalia Yousri ◽  
...  

Social media has become an essential facet of modern society, wherein people share their opinions on a wide variety of topics. Social media is quickly becoming indispensable for a majority of people, and many cases of social media addiction have been documented. Social media platforms such as Twitter have demonstrated over the years the value they provide, such as connecting people from all over the world with different backgrounds. However, they have also shown harmful side effects that can have serious consequences. One such harmful side effect of social media is the immense toxicity that can be found in various discussions. The word toxic has become synonymous with online hate speech, internet trolling, and sometimes outrage culture. In this study, we build an efficient model to detect and classify toxicity in social media from user-generated content using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The BERT pre-trained model and three of its variants has been fine-tuned on a well-known labeled toxic comment dataset, Kaggle public dataset (Toxic Comment Classification Challenge). Moreover, we test the proposed models with two datasets collected from Twitter from two different periods to detect toxicity in user-generated content (tweets) using hashtages belonging to the UK Brexit. The results showed that the proposed model can efficiently classify and analyze toxic tweets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 02`-16
Author(s):  
Dyuty Firoz

Social media destination promo videos (DPVs), are among the most important information sources of travel decision-making for their interactive and sharing features, and outstanding destination promotion strategy. Country image is also another important factor for travel decision-making. This study’s purpose is to assess whether the social media DPVs like DMOs’ promo videos and country image have any impact on visiting intentions towards risky destinations. A quantitative method was used for this study. Data was collected by online questionnaires, and 609 valid responses were considered for the analysis of the study. The results showed that the country's image positively influences the attitude of young tourists towards the country and that attention towards the promo videos positively influences young tourists’ overall emotions, attitudes, social norms, interests, desires and behaviours toward visiting a risky destination. This study results would be beneficial for those who are interested in using social media DPVs as part of their destination-promotion strategy, and also can guide destination-marketers to monitor and create better destination promotional contents in social media platforms, to encourage tourism to the destinations, especially risky ones.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 190-194
Author(s):  
BALUSAMY S ◽  
VENKATASUBRAMANIAM A ◽  
GIRI N

Until the late 1990’s the only form of media known to businesses were television, newspapers and radio, however in the early 2000s, a revolution in media was witnessed and the world was introduced to Social Media. Social Media is a just like any other Form of media is a tool used for communication but at the larger scale for social interaction using highly accessible and scalable Communication techniques. Social media has a positive impact and a positive influence on the company as well as the customers. Social media is becoming an essential tool for marketers, which is at a very minimum investment. In today’s’ scenario consumers judge a company based on their online presence, hence companies can innovate and simultaneously create a strong social presence by always catering to their customers’ needs and concerns.Internationally, companies have adopted Social Media as an essential tool for their marketing campaign; however the same is not adapted in India to a large extent. What are the benefits of Social media? What are the examples of Social media? This study understands the benefits,impact and importance of Social Media on business performance and growth.


Author(s):  
Cameron H. Malin

With the vast advances in computer, mobile, and online technologies, visibility into an offender’s thought processes and decision-making trajectory has been markedly enhanced. Digital behavioral artifacts, or digital evidence “breadcrumbs” of an offender’s behaviors, are now often left in publicly accessible locations on the Internet—such as social media platforms and social messaging applications—and in locations not privy to the public—such as the offender’s devices. Importantly, early seminal literature introduced and described examining an offender’s actions as series of steps along a path of threat escalation, or “pathway.” The totality of these emerging digital behavioral artifacts allows investigators to piece together an offender’s behavioral mosaic at a much more intimate and granular level, warranting a revised pathway—the cyber pathway to intended violence (CPIV)—that captures the thoughts and actions of an offender leading up to an act of deliberative, predatory violence. This chapter introduces the emerging discipline of Digital Behavioral Criminalistics and how this process can meaningfully be used by threat assessors to elucidate an offender’s steps on the CPIV.


Author(s):  
Cláudia Ribeiro de Almeida ◽  
Célia M.Q. Ramos ◽  
Maria del Mar Alonso Almeida ◽  
Paula Odete Fernandes ◽  
Lucas Estrada Gamarra

The Internet has transformed people's daily lives, not only in the search of information but above all giving the possibility of buying several products and services in a quick and easy way. Social networks have emerged as the quintessential medium for sharing experiences and communicating tourist information to all players in the tourism distribution chain. Today, we can sell, search, consume, connect, and share experiences related to our travel or services on different social media platforms and some online communities that share the same interests. The focus of this chapter is to point out the use of social media along the travel process in order to understand the behaviour of tourists before, during, and after trip. Having in mind the travel decision-making process the authors prepared a questionnaire with several questions spread through Facebook and answered by 95 people. The authors present the results and main conclusions in the chapter.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-94
Author(s):  
Eman Ali Alghamdi ◽  
Naima Bogari

Social media (SM) tools have an immense potential in e-marketing and online shopping. However, there is a lack of researches on the use of social media platform as effective marketing tools. This study has aimed to investigate the revolution of social media in Saudi Arabia through understanding the impact of two popular SM platforms (Instagram and Snapchat) on the purchasing decision of Saudi customers through advertisements and blogger recommendations. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to develop a model, which was tested using Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results indicated a positive impact of social media platforms on the purchasing decision of young female users. Moreover, the effectiveness of these platforms in generating electronic-word of mouth (eWOM) among consumers was highlighted. However, further research is needed to promote marketeers and consumers' awareness in the digital marketplace.


2022 ◽  
pp. 264-292
Author(s):  
Mansour Alraja ◽  
Mohamed Hamdoun

This study aims to explore the ways in which targeted consumers engage with corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on social media platforms, specifically when discussing their opinions and experiences regarding the CSR activities of their favorite brands. Therefore, the variable moral norms were integrated in the theory of reasoned action. The study data about consumers' engagement (CE) in corporate social responsibility communication (CSRC) over social media (SM) platforms—electronic word of mouth, or e-WoM—was collected from 290 actual engaged consumers in online ordering and involved in social media groups. The findings confirmed that the antecedent factors (consumers' attitudes, subjective norms, and moral norms) have a positive influence on consumers' intention to use e-WoM, while no effect was found on CE in CSRC in SM. Furthermore, e-WoM was found to have direct significant impact on CE in CSRC in SM as it mediates the relationship between the antecedent factors and CE in CSRC in SM.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taegoo Kim ◽  
Osman Karatepe ◽  
Gyehee Lee ◽  
Hande Demiral

Male and female consumers differ in terms of decision-making. This is also true for inexperienced and experienced consumers. Although the extant research delineates studies that have centered on the interrelationships between perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived enjoyment (PE), perceived usefulness (PU), attitude toward using social media (ATUSM), and users’ behavioral intentions, there is still a dearth of empirical research about gender and prior experience as the two potential moderators. With this recognition, our study examines gender and prior experience as moderators of the effects of PEU, PE, and PU on ATUSM. Our study also investigates ATUSM as a full mediator of the impacts of PEU, PE, and PU on users’ intentions to attend festivals (IAF). Data came from the students of the Korean Government Scholarship Program. The results from structural equation modeling reveal that the positive influence of PE on ATUSM is stronger among female users. As expected, the positive impact of PU on ATUSM is stronger for male users. As hypothesized, prior experience strengthens the positive effects of PE and PU on ATUSM. The results further reveal that ATUSM fully mediates the effects of PE and PU on IAF. Based on the aforesaid findings, theoretical implications are discussed and managerial implications to enhance business sustainability are offered.


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