Word of mouth communication within online communities: Conceptualizing the online social network

By John Brown, Amanda J. Broderick, Nick Lee. 2007

1,810 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Word of mouth (WOM) communication is a major part of online consumer interactions, particularly within the environment of online communities. Nevertheless, existing (offline) theory may be inappropriate to describe online WOM and its influence on evaluation and purchase. The authors report the results of a two-stage study aimed at investigating online WOM: a set of in-depth qualitative interviews followed by a social network analysis of a single online community. Combined, the results provide strong evidence that individuals behave as if Web sites themselves are primary “actors” in online social networks and that online communities can act as a social proxy for individual identification. The authors offer a conceptualization of online social networks which takes the Web site into account as an actor, an initial exploration of the concept of a consumer–Web site relationship, and a conceptual model of the online interaction and information evaluation process.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c8a62b17dc1f2b8e2490d61bfd5f4b6173ec204

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In Sociology and Political Science

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Disclosure of Third-Party Influence on an Opinion Leader's Credibility and Electronic Word of Mouth in Two-Step Flow (2014, background): “WOM campaigns have increasingly migrated online (Brown, Broderick, and Lee 2007), following consumers’ move to interactive, computermediated platforms.”
An Experimental Study of the Relationship between Online Engagement and Advertising Effectiveness (2009, background): “, Brown et al. 2007; Dwyer 2007; Sen and Lerman 2007). Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) and Sawhney et al. (2005) discuss the co-creation experience.”
The roles of brand community and community engagement in building brand trust on social media (2014, background): “…but they mainly focus on brand community elements and activities (McAlexander et al., 2002; Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001 ), but they also indirectly mention the outcomes brand community practices would bring about for firms and consumers (Brown et al., 2003; Schau et al., 2009; Muñiz & Schau, 2007).”
Customer-to-Customer Interactions: Broadening the Scope of Word of Mouth Research (2010, background): “Often, these group conversations are labeled WOM (Brown, Broderick, and Lee 2007), yet they are very different in nature from WOM in dyads.”
Debunking in a world of tribes (2015, background): “Socio-technical systems and microblogging platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have created a direct path of content from producers to consumers, changing the way users become informed, debate ideas, and shape their worldviews ( 2–6 ).”
The impact of e-service quality and customer satisfaction on customer behavior in online shopping (2019, background): “According to Brown et al. (2007), the emergence of the internet has allowed customers to interact with each other quickly and has easily established a phenomenon known as interpersonal online in ﬂ uence or electronic WOM.”
How Much can you Trust Online Information? Cues for Perceived Trustworthiness of Consumer-generated Online Information (2011, background): “Many people think of the Internet as a vast library because of the abundant information available online and are increasingly dependent on it to find the information they need (Bagozzi and Dholakia 2002; Brown, Broderick, and Lee 2007; Granitz and Ward 1996; Sen and Lerman 2007).”
The co-creative practice of forming a value proposition (2012, background): “The process had an a priori thematic focus – reciprocal knowledge exchange – and an approach that was ‘between either wholly inductive or completely confirmatory’ (Brown et al., 2007, p. 9).”