A critical element of word of mouth (WOM) marketing (aka buzz marketing) is to identify central actors with high degree in the social network to serve as seeds. However, seed identification typically requires data on the full network structure, which is often unavailable. We examine WOM seeding strategies motivated by the friendship paradox to get higher degree nodes without knowing network str...

Objective Successful development of tourism in many tourism destinations around the world depends on how to manage tourists’ perceptions by marketing managers and tourism planners. Thus, any information source about the tourists is of high importance that can be used to affect their beliefs towards the religious destinations. Therefore, it is important to identify the formation of such percept...

In the Internet environment, electronic word-of mouth plays an important role in affecting consumers’ attitude toward product and service. However, there exists a widespread situation that consumers may receive two-sidedness e-WOM (An e-WOM has both positive and negative message about the same object), and past research has shown that gender differences and situational involvement affect consum...

I this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a firm’s proactive management of customer-to-customer communication. We are particularly interested in understanding how, if at all, the firm should go about effecting meaningful word-of-mouth (WOM) communications. To tackle this problem, we collect data from two sources: (1) we implement a large-scale field test in which a national firm created...

With the high penetration of Internet, consumers now can share their consumption experience online. Word-of-mouths (WOMs) are now an important information source to get product and service information before making purchase decision. However, not all consumers tend to share their own consumption experience online, the question then arises about which kinds of consumers will share WOMs online. T...

Accurate box office forecasting models are developed by considering competition and word-of-mouth (WOM) effects in addition to screening-related information. Nationality, genre, ratings, and distributors of motion pictures running concurrently with the target motion picture are used to describe the competition, whereas the numbers of informative, positive, and negative mentions posted on social...

The ability to exchange opinions and experiences online is known as online word of mouth (WOM) and has been shown in the literature to have the potential to impact e-commerce sales. The purpose of this paper is to expand previous findings by empirically evaluating the impact of online WOM attributes and other related factors (e.g. product views, promotion, and category) on e-commerce sales usin...

Interpersonal influence and word-of-mouth (WOM) are ranked the most important information source when a consumer is making a purchase decision. This influence may be especially important in the hospitality and tourism industry, whose intangible products are difficult to evaluate prior to their consumption. When WOM becomes digital, the largescale, anonymous, ephemeral nature of the Internet ind...

This study addresses a growing trend in how consumers obtain and use information prior to making their online purchasing decisions. Specifically, the authors investigate the relationship between online word-ofmouth (WOM, i.e., customer reviews and ratings) and sales (as measured by Amazon “ranks”) for different product categories. Using data collected from Amazon, the authors find that online W...