The impact of marginalization on entrepreneurs’ online presence and firm performance

Purpose This study aims to examine the relationship between marginalization, Web presence and firm performance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach This study relies upon interviews and surveys of managers and/or owners of SMEs. Using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the authors tested an integrated model of the relationship between marginalization, Web presence and firm performance. Findings Findings indicate that marginalization enhances the risk perceptions entrepreneurs assign to internet use. This enhanced risk perception then limits the extent to which an entrepreneur responds to online customer feedback, which has implications for the SME’s relationship and reputation management efforts with buyers, ultimately impacting the enterprise’s performance. Originality/value This study sheds light on the overlooked phenomena of marginalization and internet avoidance among entrepreneurs. The findings provide insight for entrepreneurs on the deleterious consequences associated with lacking an online presence.

#BingeDrinking: Using Social Media to Understand College Binge Drinking (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Hazardous drinking among college students persists, despite ongoing university alcohol education and harmful drinking intervention programs. College students often post comments or pictures about drinking episodes on social media platforms. OBJECTIVE We sought to understand the real-time contexts of student drinking that are shown on social media platforms, and to identify opportunities to reduce alcohol-related harms and inform novel alcohol interventions. METHODS We analyzed social media posts from 7 social media platforms using qualitative inductive coding based on grounded theory to identify the contexts of student drinking, and the attitudes and behaviors of students and peers during drinking episodes. We reviewed publicly available social media posts that included references to alcohol, collaborating with undergraduate students at one university to select their most-used platforms and develop locally-relevant search terms. We coded text and visual posts for explicit and implicit alcohol use, classified them as positive, neutral, or negative, and analyzed the frequency of each code. From codes, we derived themes about the student culture around alcohol use. RESULTS A total of 1,151 social media posts was the sample for this study. These included 809 Twitter tweets, 113 Instagram posts, 23 Facebook posts, 8 YouTube posts, 64 Reddit posts, 34 College Confidential posts, and 100 Greek Rank posts. Posts included implicit and explicit portrayal of alcohol use. Across all types of posts reviewed, we found that positive drinking attitudes were most common, followed by negative and then neutral, but valence varied by platform. Posts that portrayed drinking positively received positive peer feedback, and support the idea that drinking is an essential and positive part of student culture. CONCLUSIONS Social media provides a real-time picture of students’ behavior during their own and others’ heavy drinking. Posts portray heavy drinking as a normal part of student culture, reinforced by peers’ positive feedback on posts. Interventions for college drinking should help students manage alcohol intake in real-time, provide safety information during alcohol use, and raise awareness of online privacy concerns and reputation management. Additional interventions for students, alumni, and parents are needed to address the impact of positive attitudes about and traditions of drinking.

The Importance of Online Reputation Management in Four- and Five-Star Hotes

In recent years, online reputation management has become increasingly crucial in the hotel industry, as online reviews have become one of the most critical factors in choosing accommodation. Consequently, hotels have adapted themselves to this new reality and define strategies focused on online reputation management, whose primary goal is to monitor and correct unwanted situations verified on the internet. Regarding its importance, several investigations about online reputation management have been made, but mostly about their impact on consumer satisfaction and decision-making. This investigation shows that hotels in Lisbon adopt adequate strategies in both four and five-star hotels, and their classification (star rating) did not influence the strategies chosen by them. Additionally, hotels with the same classification have similar strategies, in contrast to some investigations in the literature. Finally, the method of data collection chosen for the current investigation was the online survey, since it allows the collection of a significant volume of data in a short period.

A Review of Urdu Sentiment Analysis with Multilingual Perspective: A Case of Urdu and Roman Urdu Language

Research efforts in the field of sentiment analysis have exponentially increased in the last few years due to its applicability in areas such as online product purchasing, marketing, and reputation management. Social media and online shopping sites have become a rich source of user-generated data. Manufacturing, sales, and marketing organizations are progressively turning their eyes to this source to get worldwide feedback on their activities and products. Millions of sentences in Urdu and Roman Urdu are posted daily on social sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Disregarding people’s opinions in Urdu and Roman Urdu and considering only resource-rich English language leads to the vital loss of this vast amount of data. Our research focused on collecting research papers related to Urdu and Roman Urdu language and analyzing them in terms of preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification techniques. This paper contains a comprehensive study of research conducted on Roman Urdu and Urdu text for a product review. This study is divided into categories, such as collection of relevant corpora, data preprocessing, feature extraction, classification platforms and approaches, limitations, and future work. The comparison was made based on evaluating different research factors, such as corpus, lexicon, and opinions. Each reviewed paper was evaluated according to some provided benchmarks and categorized accordingly. Based on results obtained and the comparisons made, we suggested some helpful steps in a future study.

Twitter Mediated Sociopolitical Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in India

While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. Using the case of India, which was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy, this research explicates how political leaders responded to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter during the first wave as it was the first time such a crisis occurred. Theoretical frameworks of discursive leadership and situational crisis communication theory have been used to analyze interactions based on the usage patterns, the content of communication, the extent of usage in relation to the severity of the crisis, and the possible role of leaders’ position along with the status of their political party. The sample consisted of tweets posted by six prominent political leaders in India across the four consecutive lockdown periods from 25th March to 31st May 2020. A total of 4,158 tweets were scrapped and after filtering for retweets, the final dataset consisted of 2,809 original tweets. Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness. By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership.

Crystal: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Reputation Management

This paper investigates the situation in which exists the unshared Internet in specific areas while users in there need instant advice from others nearby. Hence, a peer-to-peer network is necessary and established by connecting all neighbouring mobile devices so that they can exchange questions and recommendations. However, not all received recommendations are reliable as users may be unknown to each other. Therefore, the trustworthiness of advice is evaluated based on the advisor's reputation score. The reputation score is locally stored in the user’s mobile device. It is not completely guaranteed that the reputation score is trustful if its owner uses it for a wrong intention. In addition, another privacy problem is about honestly auditing the reputation score on the advising user by the questioning user. Therefore, this work proposes a security model, namely Crystal, for securely managing distributed reputation scores and for preserving user privacy. Crystal ensures that the reputation score can be verified, computed and audited in a secret way. Another significant point is that the device in the peer-to-peer network has limits in physical resources such as bandwidth, power and memory. For this issue, Crystal applies lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptographic algorithms so that Crystal consumes less the physical resources of devices. The experimental results prove that our proposed model performance is promising.

ENHANCING GOODWILL POTENTIAL WITH BRAND MANAGEMENT TOOLS

The emergence of goodwill in the process of doing business is due to the nature of the interaction of enterprise resources with environmental factors. On the basis of research, it is proved that with a competent correlation of approaches to managing the elements of the macro- and microenvironment of the enterprise, understanding the specific features of creating goodwill taking into account the scope of activity, the enterprise will receive a number of advantages. Firstly, it is the creation of additional value of the company, secondly - the possibility of obtaining excess profits (that is, profits exceeding the industry average) and, thirdly, it is the creation of favorable prospects and prerequisites for business development. The analysis of the most popular formulations of the concept of “goodwill” used in Russian and foreign practice is carried out. According to its results, it is concluded that this term is equated with the concept of "business reputation". The article presents an attempt to streamline the understanding of key aspects of brand management within the framework of the studied models of reputation management. From the review of modern and most relevant models of assessment of the company's reputation, the relationship of the main criteria for assessing the company's reputation with business results is shown. A logical chain of goodwill potential formation has been built, based on the management of emotional involvement of customers. Based on the results of the research, within the framework of the focus groups, a criterion for assessing emotional involvement - “emotional comfort” - was proposed and evaluation coefficients characterizing the level of emotional comfort of customers were developed. The actual metrics of brand management assessment are revealed, allowing to diagnose the influence of the brand on the development of goodwill potential within the framework of the proposed complex model of the influence of brand management tools on the growth of goodwill potential.