Why recommend a brand face-to-face but not on Facebook? How word-of-mouth on online social sites differs from traditional word-of-mouth

By Andreas B. Eisingerich, H. Chun, Yeyi Liu, Heqi Jia, Simon Bell. 2015

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the conceptual difference between consumer electronic word-of-mouth on online social sites (sWOM) such as Facebook and traditional face-to-face word-of-mouth (WOM). We find that consumers are less willing to engage in sWOM than WOM. Such a difference in willingness to offer word-of-mouth can be explained by social risk associated with different communication modes. We show that the difference between people's desire to engage in sWOM and WOM is mediated by perceived social risk and amplified when social risk is made salient. Furthermore, we show that consumers' need to self-enhance mitigates the difference in willingness to offer sWOM versus WOM.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d052aa39d2078f714ec3bf035e264810d7c7d6c3

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Citations in the corpus

Don't Distract Me When I'm Media Multitasking: Toward a Theory for Raising Advertising Recall and Recognition (2016, unknown): “For example, in the domain of online product reviews, consumers are well known to adapt their ratings so not to appear too harsh or too lenient to other posters (Sridhar and Srinivasan 2012; Eisingerich et al. 2015).”
Beyond valence: a meta-analysis of discrete emotions in firm-customer encounters (2019, background): “…a purchase has direct monetary consequences and is thus associated with financial and performance risks (cf., Kaplan et al. 1974), whereas sharing behavior is predominantly associated with privacy or social risks, or may not be perceived as risky at all (e.g., Eisingerich et al. 2015).”
The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior (2016, background): “[34] studied differences between transmitting WOM in social media (e.”