Leslie S. Adriaanse and Chris Rensleigh
The research aim for this study was to compare three citation resources with one another to identify the citation resource with the most representative South African scholarly…
Abstract
Purpose
The research aim for this study was to compare three citation resources with one another to identify the citation resource with the most representative South African scholarly environmental sciences citation coverage. This paper focuses on the results of the content verification process which measured amongst others the citation counts, multiple copies and inconsistencies encountered across the three citation resources ISI Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar.
Design/methodology/approach
The research, the first phase of a longitudinal study, used a comparative research design method with a purposive, non-probability sample. Data from the South African scholarly environmental sciences journals for the year range 2004-2008 (first phase) were extracted from the three citation resources and compared.
Findings
It became evident during the verification process that the citation resources retrieved varied results. The total citation counts indicated that ISI Web of Science (WOS) retrieved the most citation results, followed by Google Scholar (GS) and then Scopus. WOS performed the best with total coverage of the journal sample population and also retrieved the most unique items. The investigation into multiple copies indicated that WOS and Scopus retrieved no duplicates, while GS retrieved multiple copies. Scopus delivered the least inconsistencies regarding content verification and content quality compared to the other two citation resources. Additionally, GS also retrieved the most inconsistencies, with WOS retrieving more inconsistencies than Scopus. Examples of these inconsistencies include author spelling and sequence, volume and issue number.
Originality/value
The findings of the study contribute to the understanding of the completeness of citation results retrieved from different citation resources. In addition it will raise awareness amongst academics to check citations of their work.
Details
Keywords
Jordi Pujadas-Hostench, Ramon Palau-Saumell, Santiago Forgas-Coll and Javier Sánchez-García
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intention to purchase products through clothing brands’ social network sites (SNS) based on the theory of planned behavior and uses…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intention to purchase products through clothing brands’ social network sites (SNS) based on the theory of planned behavior and uses and gratifications theory (U&G), and the moderating effects of self-image congruity (SIC).
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 1,003 followers of their favorite clothing brands’ SNS. Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group SEM analysis. The models were estimated from the matrices of variances and covariances by the maximum likelihood procedure using EQS 6.1.
Findings
The results highlight the positive impact of U&G on attitude, SNS intentions and SNS use, and U&G, SNS intentions and SNS use were seen to be the main antecedents predicting purchase intentions. Furthermore, SIC was found to have moderating effects between SNS attitude and SNS intentions and between SNS intentions and SNS use.
Practical implications
This research can help clothing brands understand the need to generate brand beliefs, and to develop contents or events to help accomplish the transition from use to purchase.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the literature by providing a better understanding of intention to use and purchase intention through clothing brands’ SNS pages.
Details
Keywords
Arch G. Woodside and Marcia Y. Sakai
A meta-evaluation is an assessment of evaluation practices. Meta-evaluations include assessments of validity and usefulness of two or more studies that focus on the same issues…
Abstract
A meta-evaluation is an assessment of evaluation practices. Meta-evaluations include assessments of validity and usefulness of two or more studies that focus on the same issues. Every performance audit is grounded explicitly or implicitly in one or more theories of program evaluation. A deep understanding of alternative theories of program evaluation is helpful to gain clarity about sound auditing practices. We present a review of several theories of program evaluation.
This study includes a meta-evaluation of seven government audits on the efficiency and effectiveness of tourism departments and programs. The seven tourism-marketing performance audits are program evaluations for: Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, Australia, and two for Hawaii. The majority of these audits are negative performance assessments. Similarly, although these audits are more useful than none at all, the central conclusion of the meta-evaluation is that most of these audit reports are inadequate assessments. These audits are too limited in the issues examined; not sufficiently grounded in relevant evaluation theory and practice; and fail to include recommendations, that if implemented, would result in substantial increases in performance.
Soo Il Shin, Dianne Hall, Kyung Young Lee and Sumin Han
The purpose of the current study is to examine a social network site (SNS) users' overall satisfaction with SNS use in conjunction with their fan page visiting activities. We…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the current study is to examine a social network site (SNS) users' overall satisfaction with SNS use in conjunction with their fan page visiting activities. We examined overall satisfaction with SNS usage from the lens of people's perceptions acquired from the use of sub-components of SNS.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study employed uncertainty reduction theory (URT) and general systems theory (GST) to examine antecedents affecting overall satisfaction with SNS use. Five constructs were adopted: interactive and passive uncertainty reduction strategies, perceived usefulness and continuance visiting behavior, satisfaction, and perceived functional benefits. Using a web-based survey, we analyzed 200 SNS users who follow at least one company's fan page, utilizing seemingly unrelated regression models to test hypotheses empirically.
Findings
Research findings reveal that uncertainty reduction strategies supported by URT are significantly associated with the perceived usefulness of a company's fan page. In turn, we found that perceived usefulness becomes a strong motivator to continuance visits to the fan page. The frequency of return visiting behaviors eventually accounts for overall satisfaction with SNS. Perceived functional benefits moderates the relationship between perceived usefulness and visiting behaviors significantly.
Originality/value
The current study contributes to information systems (IS), electronic communication, and their adjacent academic disciplines in providing evidence, including (1) the impact of uncertainty reduction strategies on continuance visiting behaviors in the SNS context, (2) SNS functionalities influencing the relationship between people's belief and behavior, and (3) theoretical significant perceptional link between a sub-component and a whole.
Details
Keywords
Zeya He, Laurie Wu and Xiang (Robert) Li
Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged…
Abstract
Purpose
Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how perceptual information mediated by an online photo contributes to the formation of consumers' holistic perceptions of the service environment and (2) how such consumers' holistic perceptions further influence customers' online purchasing behaviors.
Design/methodology/approach
This research adopts an innovative crowdsourcing approach and refers to field data on consumers' online hotel booking behaviors to examine relationships among inferred servicescape dimensions, consumers' holistic perceptions of the mediated servicescape and their actual online booking/reservation behaviors (e.g. page-view and meta-click behaviors).
Findings
Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis indicated that five mediated servicescape dimensions (i.e. color, lighting, furnishings, layout and style) contribute significantly to consumers' perceptions of the mediated servicescape (CPMS) and exert different impacts on CPMS. Connecting the crowdsourced rating and consumer behavioral data, CPMS is found to influence consumers' aggregated page-view and meta-click behavior, especially in the US market.
Originality/value
Building upon servicescape theory, the medium theory and the online booking literature, this research proposes a novel conceptual framework of CPMS to theorize the process by which visual cues in online photos contribute to CPMS and subsequent online purchase behaviors. Findings from this research extend Bitner's servicescape framework to mediated service contexts and provide practical implications for promoting service businesses.
Details
Keywords
A comprehensive operational framework is proposed to explain young consumers’ (i.e. generations Y and Z) engagement with brands on social media sites (SMSs). This paper aims to…
Abstract
Purpose
A comprehensive operational framework is proposed to explain young consumers’ (i.e. generations Y and Z) engagement with brands on social media sites (SMSs). This paper aims to synthesize two motivational theories: uses and gratifications (U&G) theory and the technology acceptance model (TAM).
Design/methodology/approach
A selective literature review was conducted to examine recent publications related to young consumers’ brand-driven engagement behavior on SMSs in which either TAM or U&G theory was applied. A three-stage method was used: an initial search was followed by vertical and horizontal searches and then a targeted search of scholarly publications. At each stage, the university’s library databases and Google Scholar were searched for relevant, mainly peer-reviewed articles, using appropriate filters and keywords. The articles’ references and the studies that cited those articles were added to the initially identified research pool (vertical search), coupled with publications of a similar nature based on keywords (horizontal search). The final stage, the targeted search, involved identifying and adding specific articles (e.g. literature reviews and integrated models).
Findings
After a review of a significant number of U&G and TAM studies, similarities and differences of the two theories were identified, and an integrated operational framework was developed. Based on empirical findings of existing U&G and TAM studies, testable propositions were presented.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed hybrid model and the associated propositions provide a research opportunity to empirically examine how young consumers’ motivational (i.e. motivating and demotivating) drivers, normative influence, perceived value and attitudes (toward brand content and engagement) predict intention or actual brand-related behavior on SMSs.
Practical implications
Much of current research indicates that generations Y and Z (“digital natives”) spend considerably more time on SMSs than any of the older generations (“digital immigrants”). Thus, brands that aim to target this cohort need to develop successful engagement strategies (e.g. gamification and influencer marketing) on current and emerging SMSs. The suggested conceptualization provides guidelines for companies to effectively use such communication strategies to motivate young people to engage with their brands on sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Originality/value
A review of TAM research indicates that it lacks rich motivating/demotivating constructs, and thus borrows from other theories to complement this weakness. An examination of U&G frameworks, particularity Ducoffe (1996)-based models, indicates that these frameworks mainly test engagement with social media advertising but seldom other types of brand-driven engagement on SMSs. In addition, many U&G studies focus less than TAM studies do on outcome variables such as behavioral intentions and behavior. Thus, the authors propose a synthesized U&G and TAM framework that mitigates both theories’ weaknesses and builds on their strengths, enriching the growing research on brand-driven engagement behavior via SMSs.
Details
Keywords
Srinivas Vadrevu, Fatih Gelgi, Saravanakumar Nagarajan and Hasan Davulcu
The purpose of this research is to automatically separate and extract meta‐data and instance information from various link pages in the web, by utilizing presentation and linkage…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to automatically separate and extract meta‐data and instance information from various link pages in the web, by utilizing presentation and linkage regularities on the web.
Design/methodology/approach
Research objectives have been achieved through an information extraction system called semantic partitioner that automatically organizes the content in each web page into a hierarchical structure, and an algorithm that interprets and translates these hierarchical structures into logical statements by distinguishing and representing the meta‐data and their individual data instances.
Findings
Experimental results for the university domain with 12 computer science department web sites, comprising 361 individual faculty and course home pages indicate that the performance of the meta‐data and instance extraction averages 85, 88 percent F‐measure, respectively. Our METEOR system achieves this performance without any domain specific engineering requirement.
Originality/value
Important contributions of the METEOR system presented in this paper are: it performs extraction without the assumption that the object instance pages are template‐driven; it is domain independent and does not require any previously engineered domain ontology; and by interpreting the link pages, it can extract both meta‐data, such as concept and attribute names and their relationships, as well as their instances with high accuracy.
Details
Keywords
Robert Kozielski, Grzegorz Mazurek, Anna Miotk and Artur Maciorowski
It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently…
Abstract
It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently enjoying a period of fast and stable growth. This is manifested by the growing number of both Internet users and companies which – to an ever-increasing extent – use the Internet as a form of communication (both internal and external), promotion, sales etc. Expenditures on Internet advertising are growing continuously and now constitute more than 25% of all advertising expenditure. A natural consequence of this development is the need for the standardisation and organisation of the world of the Internet. These activities will result in a greater awareness of the benefits which this medium provides, increasing the possibilities of its use, and – most importantly – the opportunity to evaluate the return on investments made on the Internet. Nowadays, it is clear that many companies are striving to increase the quality of their activities on the Internet or to improve the effectiveness of such activities. As a consequence, the number of companies that look for indices which would enable the making of more precise and effective decisions in the scope of online operations is growing.
This chapter is dedicated to the phenomenon of the increasing role of the Internet in business, including the scale of its use by Polish and international companies. We present the most commonly used measures of marketing activities on the Internet and in social media. This group includes the indices which make it possible to determine whether a company actually needs a website. Other measures allow for the improvement in the effectiveness of the activity on the Internet, whereas others specify the costs of activities on the Internet and often serve as the basis for settlements between a company and advertising agencies or companies specialising in website design. It is worth emphasising that the Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned (PESO) model, worked out by Don Bartholomew,1 is the basis for creation and description of indices concerning social media. This model has gained certain popularity in the social media industry. It does not, however, specify how individual indices should be named and calculated. It maps already existing indices and adapts them to specific levels of marketing communication measurement. All the measures indicated by the author of the model have been grouped into five major areas: exposure, engagement, brand awareness, action and recommendations. This model– similarly to all models of performance measurement – inspired by the sales funnel concept, adjusts certain standard indices and proposals of measurements for specific levels. Additionally, the measures are divided into four types, depending on who the owner of the content is: Paid (P) – refers to all forms of paid content; Owned (O) – all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand; Earned (E) – the contents about a given brand created spontaneously by Internet users; and Shared (S) – the contents shared by Internet users.
Details
Keywords
A simple notation for describing the internal structure of a document is presented, and contrasted with other, more conventional notations for describing documents, in particular…
Abstract
A simple notation for describing the internal structure of a document is presented, and contrasted with other, more conventional notations for describing documents, in particular those related to subject‐classification systems and document description for bibliographic purposes, as well as with document metalanguage codes such as those of SGML. It is suggested such a notation should assist the science of human messaging through (1) permitting hypotheses to be more readily expressed and/or tested concerning document structure, and (2) facilitating the formation of taxonomies of documents based on their structures. Such a notation should also be of practical value in contributing to the processes of document specification, building and testing, and possibly also contribute to new generations of IR systems which link retrieval against record databases to the search systems internal to specific documents. It is suggested that, following formative criticism, professional standards for describing document structure should be sought based on the notation. The notation is at present limited to linear documents, but extensions to it to accommodate documents in non‐linear form (e.g. hypertext documents) and/or existing in physically distributed form, could usefully be constructed. Examples of the application of the notation are provided.
Sora Kim, Soo-Yeon Kim and Kang Hoon Sung
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Fortune 100 companies are using Facebook (FB) in terms of employing corporate ability (CA), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Fortune 100 companies are using Facebook (FB) in terms of employing corporate ability (CA), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and hybrid communication strategies, meeting different stakeholders’ expectations, and incorporating interactivity components into social media.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative content analysis was used to examine a total of 1,486 corporate FB postings.
Findings
–Fortune 100 companies predominantly employed a CA strategy over a CSR strategy or a hybrid strategy. They prioritize customers’ needs over other stakeholders’ (e.g. stockholders and community members) on FB. FB fans are more likely to post “like” when companies personalize their FB messages. Seeking specific action-oriented participation on FB increased the frequencies of “like” and “comment,” whereas using the generic terms like “try” or “learn” decreased such frequencies. Finally, the frequencies of fans posting “like” and “comment” are affected by how often companies responded to fans’ postings and not influenced by how often companies feed new FB updates to fans.
Originality/value
This study provides a benchmark case of how corporations are using a mainstream social media outlet to engage different stakeholders. It helps to assess the current status of public relations communication strategies on the mainstream social networking site. Companies can increase public engagement and response on social media through more personalized messages and techniques to encourage active participation and dialogue.