Engaging Consumers via Twitter

The interactive nature of social networking sites contributes to reinforce engagement between consumers and brands in terms of co-creation of shared values. According to Hollebeek (2011), consumer-brand engagement (CBE) implies cognitive, emotional, behavioral factors, which connect a brand with its followers. This chapter will show three successful Twitter strategies from three different brands, using a methodological approach focusing on the relational conditions that turn a brand into an engaging player on Twitter. Interviews with brand communication managers and followers were conducted. Moreover, initiatives were explored through the stream of tweets produced around the brands; pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and structural features of tweets were considered. Results show that, while the three initiatives considered here lean on a cognitive-based CBE, a full engagement in the/a brand's world is needed to build a long-lasting and successful relationship between brand and consumer, in order to co-construct a future shared reality.

Micro-Blogging as Generator of Market Insights and Competitive Intelligence

Despite the growing popularity of social media in academic papers, micro-blogging research is still in its infancy and there are few research studies on micro-blogging as a tool for achieving business objectives. In particular, the aim of this chapter is to examine the role of micro-blogging in improving the market knowledge of firms. Therefore, this manuscript wants to make a contribution to the strategic marketing field, providing an overview of how micro-blogging can draw insights from the market. It has been shown that micro-blogging allows firms to understand the real thoughts of customers, to control marketing strategies and to acquire updated knowledge about competitors. In fact, the intrinsic features of micro-posts (micro, mobile, instantaneous, spontaneous) make this social media different from other marketing channels and very useful for gathering customer data and accumulating market knowledge.

Integration of Micro-Blogs into the Human Resource Management (HRM) Areas of Recruitment and Selection

This chapter examines the use of micro-blogs in the human resource management (HRM) areas of recruitment and selection. While there is much attention in the popular press and practitioner literature about how HRM is incorporating micro-blogging and related social media platforms to help execute basic HRM functions, scholarly research on the subject is sparse, with only a handful of peer-reviewed journal articles/edited books. Although these works have contributed much to our understanding, we still know very little about how specific HRM practices can incorporate micro-blogs to achieve competitiveness. We also know very little about the legal and ethical dilemmas associated with using micro-blogs and how employers in general and HRM in particular can circumvent these problems. This chapter will address these issues and will conclude with future research directions that might be used as a platform for subsequent conceptual and empirical research.

Whom to Trust for Financial Advice?

Twitter has become a popular online platform for individuals seeking news and advice about financial assets. In this study, we examine which user characteristics relate to the quality of investment advice. Due to the fact that Twitter allows users to anonymously create and share content, a large portion of the information and investment advice found on its channels turns out to be non-useful, misleading or even incorrect. Using methods from computational linguistics to analyze roughly 9 million tweets, our findings show that a set of behavior-based user features, as well as characteristics of the message content relate to the quality of proffered investment advice.

Benchmarking Micro-Blog Performance

This chapter outlines a content classification framework designed to categorize content from individual and group Twitter activity. Measurement of Twitter at the individual account level can support the analysis of individual use of Twitter, and, guide the use of the platform for commercial operations. Applying a pre-existing content classification framework allows for the consistent coding of Twitter timelines into one of the five categories, with an option to further refine into a series of sub-categories. This coding approach allows for the ongoing longitudinal measurement, benchmark and analysis of how individuals or groups use their social media accounts. This chapter also outlines the potential use of the classification framework as a planning tool for guiding content creation. This approach creates a two-stage process of planned content engagement and consistent content measurement metrics from a single framework.

Customer Service on Twitter

Twitter is one of the world's most popular social media websites, and company spending on social media is rapidly increasing. One area of investment for companies in social media is customer service, but many marketers struggle to understand how micro-blogging can be integrated into customer service efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to explore customer service interaction on micro-blogs by understanding company and customer expectations on Twitter. The authors examine (1) whether gaps in service expectations exist between consumers and companies in a customer service scenario and (2) the impact of specific customer service response configurations on these consumer-company expectation gaps. Results of a study of Twitter users and customer service providers suggest that differences exist between customers' expectations of customer service on Twitter and companies' understanding of these expectations. The authors discuss how managers can use their understanding of these differences to make better decisions about service delivery through Twitter and other social media websites.

Twitter Data Acquisition and Analysis

Social media data collection is often treated as tacit knowledge with the collation of tweets reduced to a single sentence without explanation as to means, mechanisms or relative merit of the approach. This chapter describes methods and techniques for the capture of Twitter timeline data, inclusive of first person and third party methods for data capture from personal accounts, public accounts, and keyword searches. The chapter takes a practical approach to acquiring Twitter data with a focus on individual timelines, and small to medium scale search sets. The emphasis is on being able to obtain, examine, and convert Twitter data into knowledge quickly, and with limited requirement for technical skills. This type of data collection assumes no prior programming knowledge. The chapter explains how to retrieve Twitter data from three sources: personally controlled timelines, third party timelines and ongoing search results. Finally, the chapter describes preliminary analysis that can be performed to ascertain content creation patterns, without recourse to analysis of individual tweets.

Legal Implications of Utilizing Micro-Blogs in Employment Practices

Business professionals take full advantage of micro-blogs and other social media platforms as powerful tools in recruiting and screening job candidates. In addition businesses aggressively monitor employees' social media use, both inside and outside the workplace, as employees actively use these platforms to both discuss work experiences and perform work duties. These monitoring practices seem warranted as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recognizes hiring practices, harassment, and off-duty conduct as the top three areas of conflict in the workplace. Much litigation and literature in this area focuses largely on employees' privacy rights; this chapter will take a more encompassing view and assert that having a strong corporate-wide social media policy in place can help strike an equitable balance between an employee's expectation of privacy and an employer's legitimate business interests in selecting ideal job candidates, managing its brand image, protecting the company's proprietary interests and assuring a harassment free workplace.

Tourism Services, Micro-Blogging, and Customer Feedback

The digital environment and the tools of Web 2.0 provide opportunities and challenges for the providers of tourism services to better listen to and understand their current and potential consumers. This chapter approaches the Social Media, and more specifically Twitter, as a tool for integrated communication with tourism consumers. It takes a strategic and operational marketing perspective to analyze the potential contribution of micro-blogging, from the point of view of tourism providers. Twitter is regarded as a source of and medium for interactive communication with customers. Therefore, the main aim of this chapter is to examine and suggest the ways in which tourism businesses could take advantage of Twitter as a channel of interactive communication and constructive dialogue. More specifically, it examines the potential contribution and possible uses of Twitter by tourism businesses in acquiring customer feedback for two purposes: service quality/performance and customer-driven innovation.

Perceptions of Risks of Non-Advertising Uses of Micro-Blogging within Small to Medium Enterprises

This chapter is about the perception of risks of non-advertising uses of micro-blogging in small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK. Risks of micro-blogging are defined as situations which involve exposing the organization and employees to danger. Few previous studies have been carried out into risks of internal micro-blogging in the corporate context. In the research presented in this chapter, initially a thematic analysis of previous literature on enterprise micro-blogging (EMB) was conducted. Following this, qualitative interviews were selected as the most appropriate method for data collection to explore understanding of the issues among practitioners. Twenty-one interviewees were conducted with SMEs in the area of South Yorkshire in the UK, during 2013. The participants were from organizations in the field of IT, Consultancy and Sports. The analysis of the qualitative data revealed new areas of risk in micro-blogging, which had not been identified in previous literature. Based on the data, a descriptive account of the risks is provided. The chapter concludes by introducing participants' views of how to mitigate such risks.