Electronic Word of Mouth and Consumer Generated Content
With the Internet, even ordinary Web users can conveniently create and disseminate media content. The notion of User-Generated Content (UGC) or Consumer-Generated Content (CGC) captures the user-as-producer feature and refers to content that is not generated or published by professionals on the Internet, unlike traditional media. An important type of online advertising that makes use of CGC is eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) advertising. Defined in terms of situations where consumers refer products or services to other consumers on the Internet, eWOM is closely related to CGC and can be applied to many online forums for UGC and CGC. With this in mind, this chapter seeks to define and categorize eWOM based on different online platforms of CGC, review existing research in eWOM, and, finally, extend the use of eWOM to health promotion by examining characteristics of eWOM in an online breast cancer bulletin board.