Yibai Li

Social commerce research: Definition, research themes and the trends

Abstract Social commerce, an emerging phenomenon rooted in social media and Web 2.0 technologies, has attracted the attention of many researchers. The number of publications on social commerce has grown exponentially in the past 10 years. Now, social commerce has become a significant emerging research area. In this paper, we first define the boundary of social commerce research and then attempt to review the extant literature in this area comprehensively and systematically. Based on the definition, this study surveyed 1369 peer-reviewed academic publications in the social media, Web 2.0, and other related areas. Following the survey, 418 of the publications were identified as social commerce research. Then, latent semantic analysis (LSA), a text mining approach, was applied to summarize the current state of social commerce research. LSA results show that there are three major research themes in the current social commerce research: organization, advertisement, and word-of-mouth. Each theme discusses topics such as innovation, user-generated content, and reputation, among others. In addition, we identify some interesting trends. The first main trend is that innovation, corporate reputation, and user-generated content remain the major research topics, although they are experiencing a slight decline. The second main trend is that online reviews, trust, and e-word-of-mouth are attracting more attention from researchers.

Business intelligence in online customer textual reviews: Understanding consumer perceptions and influential factors

Apply text mining and regression to analyze customer textual reviews.Identifies key attributes leading to customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.Hotel star level significantly influences satisfaction and dissatisfaction. With the rapid development of information technology, customers not only shop onlinethey also post reviews on social media. This user-generated content (UGC) can be useful to understand customers shopping experiences and influence future customers purchase intentions. Therefore, business intelligence and analytics are increasingly being advocated as a way to analyze customers UGC in social media and support firms marketing activities. However, because of its open structure, UGC such as customer reviews can be difficult to analyze, and firms find it challenging to harness UGC. To fill this gap, this study aims to examine customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward attributes of hotel products and services based on online customer textual reviews. Using a text mining approach, latent semantic analysis (LSA), we identify the key attributes driving customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward hotel products and service attributes. Additionally, using a regression approach, we examine the effects of travel purposes, hotel types, star level, and editor recommendations on customers perceptions of attributes of hotel products and services. This study bridges customer online textual reviews with customers perceptions to help business managers better understand customers needs through UGC.

How Trust and Need Satisfaction Motivate Producing User-Generated Content

ABSTRACT The motivation of user-generated content (UGC) is a vital issue for social media providers. This study investigates this issue using the self-determination theory (SDT). The SDT identifies three fundamental human psychological needs, namely the need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. This study aims to answer the question of how the satisfaction of these needs motivates users to produce UGC and utilizes the multi-study model comparison approach. Two survey studies were conducted in China and the United States. The partial least squares (PLS) analyses confirmed that the SDT indeed explained UGC motivation significantly and that trust beliefs support people’s need for relatedness. Post hoc analyses showed that there were significant differences between Chinese and American culture. Those results make important contributions to theory and practice. For example, practitioners need to motivate users to produce UGC by supporting their psychological needs. Besides, different trust beliefs should be emphasized in different countries.

Online Social Networking Sites Continuance Intention: A Model Comparison Approach

ABSTRACT Retaining existing users and letting them continue to use the current social networking sites (SNSs) have become increasingly challenging for developers. This study takes a model comparison approach to investigate this important issue. Based on technology acceptance model, self-determination theory, and net-valence model, our study develops four models that explain individuals’ continuance intention. Based on the data collected from U.S. SNS users, all four models can predict individuals’ intention reasonably well, and net-valence model with perceived benefits and risks as second-order constructs explains the largest amount of variance of SNS continuance intention. This study is among the first model comparison studies in the SNS continuance area. It is also among the first to apply self-determination theory and net-valence model to investigate SNS continuance.

Seeking Health Information on Social Media: A Perspective of Trust, Self-Determination, and Social Support

In the past few years, social media has changed the ways that health seekers seek health information. However, despite the tremendous growth of social media applications in the health-care industry, trust is still among the biggest challenges for social media health services in gaining greater acceptance. Drawn from previous literature on self-determination theory, social support, and trust, this study investigates peoples intentions to seek health-information on social media. The authors carefully selected a sample from Italy with subjects who already had experience in seeking health information on social media. The empirical results show that informational support, emotional support, and the satisfaction of peoples autonomy and relatedness needs play an important role through trust in influencing peoples health-information-seeking intentions on social media. This study is among the first to adopt the theories of self-determination, social support, and trust to investigate peoples intentions to seek health information on social media.

Understanding collaborative resilience from continuous disruption: an actor-network perspective

People need help to recover after crises. With the help of information and communication technologies (ICTs), people can engage in resilience collaboratively. Specifically, they can develop new routines to access various infrastructures and meet their societal needs via ICTs. Therefore, the role of ICTs in supporting collaborative resilience needs further examination and clarification. In this study, we use actor-network theory (ANT) to understand collaborative resilience during and after a war, which is a specific kind of crisis that may last a long time. We revisit a published case to clarify how ICTs help people develop new routines so that their societal needs still can be met. We find that a number of issues suggested by ANT, such as problematisation and translation, contribute significantly to the process and outcomes of the case. We provide practical implications to present the essence of our findings. Overall, our study suggests that an ANT-informed understanding can help practitioners better understand the role of ICTs in supporting collaborative resilience.