customer engagement social media
jiafeng1
CaseStudy1-SocialMediaEngagement2.pptxHow Social media can afford engagement processes
XiaoXiao Zeng and Dr Brad McKenna
University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
Dr Shahper Richter
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Dr Wenjie Cai
University of Greenwich, United Kingdom
Background to the paper
This paper is based on a MSc student dissertation from NBS.
The paper was presented at the European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS), in Limassol, Cyprus
Citation:
Zeng, X., McKenna, B., Richter, S., & Cai, W. (2018). How Social Media Can Afford Engagement Processes. In European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (pp. 272-279). Springer, Cham.
Introduction
Social media represents a significant innovation for customer engagement, it allows information changes among customers and influences potential customer decisions
Social media has changed the way companies communicate with customers, hence, allowing companies to organize a variety of customer engagement strategies
We present an initial pilot study to explore the affordances of social media in engagement processes.
Engagement
Research Question: How do affordances of social media tools facilitate the customer engagement process?
Social Media and customer engagement
Social media offer online platforms where customers can express their satisfaction, experiences and opinions with a certain brand [2].
Social media enables users access to information more quickly and at their own conveniences and users also have more control over the content, because they can generate or co-create content liberally [11].
Social media enables dynamic and real-time interaction between the company and customer [4]
Interactive consumer experiences and co-created actions can be regarded as the act of “engaging” [12].
Theoretical framework: Affordances
the potential behaviour permitted by an object due to its attributes.
relational - between the abilities of an animal, and the features of an environment.
Affordance in the technology focuses on technology’s design, development and usage, as well as the human - artefact relationship.
Possibilities of action that animals have within an environment (Gibson, 1977).
Affordance is:
Social Media Affordances (Treem and Leonardi, 2012)
Theoretical framework: Affordances
| Visibility | Persistence | Editability | Association |
| Status updates Pushes activity to connections Lists of “friends” or connections Personal Profiles Visible in Search Engines Allows comments and opinion expression (e.g., the “like button”) | Profiles indexed by search engines Allows catalogs of photos Displays past activity of individuals on site | Asynchronous text-based entries Revision of own content on site permissible Content contributions of others on individual’s site can be deleted | Relations to others displayed (e.g., Friends) Comments and opinion (e.g., “Like” Button) on entries Activity of related others displayed on page |
Theoretical framework: Engagement
(Porter, Donthu, MacElroy, & Wydra, 2011)
Methodology: Case Study
Produces: milk, cream, butter, and yogurt
Customer Groups:
National retailers (49%)
Local independent businesses (30%)
Food manufacturers (21%)
Data collection and Analysis
Netlytic and R used to download
Searched for relevant #hashtags
26 June 2017 to 26 July 2017
1,712 posts/tweets
4 events
62 videos
334 links
1,215 photos
Qualitative (Interpretive) study
Thematic text coding
Preliminary findings
Understanding Customer Needs and Motivations
Embedded social media analysis features
The Dairy applied the embedded features from their social media platforms to help them monitor customers.
The Dairy uses Twitter analytics to help them understand their follower’s interests and what types of posts they expect to see.
Two-way communication
The Dairy posts many messages, while at the same time they also receive a lot comments and feedback from customers. It illustrates the functional affordances of persistence and editability [23].
Please let us know what the common substance is – it’s bad enough that our household has already drank 4 pints and are already a way into a second 4 pint (both dated 25th Aug). I’m not looking to throw a fit or blame coincidental symptoms of a bug but my toddlers have drunk the milk straight – the environment agency’s word is useless without us knowing if we’ve been drinking bleach, chlorine and more (Facebook).
We've always believed that in life you get out what you put in - and this ethos is no different in our dairy. If you can tell us what you think makes our milk taste so uniquely different and delicious, then you could win a lovely prize! Get guessing... (Facebook)
Preliminary findings
Promote Participation
Brand Expression
The Dairy’s brand-expression is “delicious things” which was developed based on customers’ comments.
Encourage content creation
The Dairy encourages content creation through two aspects: firstly, by posting different types of content to involve participants; secondly, encouraging their fans to like or share the content they produce.
Create enjoyable experience
The Dairy uses social media to provide a variety of enjoyable experiences to engage its existing customers and potential customers, like competitions and recipes.
“Delicious things says everything we want to say about the natural goodness, the care, the attention and the expertise you can taste every time you try one of our delicious products”
Competition time! Following on from last years 'How many balloons in a Smart Car' is this years 'How many balloons in a Mini'. Let us know your answers by 4pm today and you could be in with a chance to win some The Dairy goodies! (Facebook, 2016-02-24)
Preliminary findings
Motivate Cooperation
Find influencers
The Dairy builds interactions with some potential influencers to spread brand awareness.
Construct networks
We found that The Dairy has direct connections with wide range of users.
Dairy related organizations: a local market, a herb farm, a bakery, and a baker.
Other organizations (organizations that do not directly relate to dairy), which contains travel agencies, financial companies, and hotels.
Individual users who generally are fans of The Dairy.
Affordance of Social Media in the Engagement Process
Conclusion
Pilot study to explore the affordances of social media in engagement processes of an organisation and how those socialising affordances help organisations to increase engagement.
Contributes to the understanding of social media and social media use in engagement processes [37, 38].
We attempted to answer how socialising affordances helps organisations increase engagement. The next stage of the research is for further investigation to validate our research model.
