activities to attract the attention of consumers. In addition to attracting the attention of consumers, businesses are increasingly focusing on maintaining customer relationships.
Businesses are very eager for long-term and sustainable loyal customers and they rely on how businesses retain, sustain and nurture its customer base (Jenny et al., 2010). In the case of business resource being limited, which channel shall be chosen and how to optimize the benefit of marketing activities become big questions?
In 2013, Taiwan’s online population spent 3 hours and 24 minutes a day, more than 1 hour compared to the time spent on watching television (FIND, 2013). Further, the number of active users per month in Facebook being up to 14 million (www.Facebook.com, 2013), the use of such a large number of people explains why businesses scramble to establish their own brand community on Facebook fan page.
Facebook fan page does offer a number of features to maintain customer relationships;
such businesses can post some information of product with text, photo or video, and customers can use text response the post. However, do businesses have a two-way communication platform meaning to maintain a stable customer relationship?
Current businesses are good at commodity-oriented marketing strategy, and their Facebook fan pages are too emphasizing on B2C’s information transference to improving customer engagement. Customer engagement, it is defined as “behaviors going beyond transactions and driven by motivation, and specifically refer to customer’s behavioral manifestations that have a brand or business focus (Van Doorn et al., 2010, p. 254). Customer more engaged in a business brand may be more of loyalty, thus the business can reduce the cost of maintaining customer relationship (Yeo et al.,
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2005). Irena et al. (2013) addressed that in this new marketing era the terms engagement and participation became the central non-transactional constructs (i.e., going beyond purchase and driven by motivation) accordingly can be used to describe the nature of social platform participants' specific interactions and/or interactive experiences.
1.2 Research Question
Customer engagement behaviors can contribute to the business’s performance in two ways: (1) CEBs in interactions with business and their employees result in cost advantages for business while ensuring rewarding customer experiences (Hoyer et al.
2010) and (2) CEBs in interactions with other customers affect other customers’
attitudes and behaviors toward business (Gupta and Harris 2010). In the other words, customer can engage business through B2C’s interaction and C2C’s interaction.
However, the businesses’ traditional social marketing practices have no concept of customer engagement, and this leads to high turnover of customer (Divol, Edelman, and Sarrazin, 2012). This is more than business using these following three criteria to measure a fan page management being good or bad: counts of like, response, and share on each post. These criteria are the outermost behavior on social platforms like Facebook and show only partial B2C word of mouth (WOM, defined as person-to-person communicating between a receiver and a sender, and the person-to-person may be friends, family members or strangers behavior (Jose´ et al., 2012).) Through these criteria we still do not know the degree of customer engagement and the degree of interaction between customer and customer. We must let fans have a willingness to revisit the fan page; after research, we believe that the best way is through introvert leader (Zubair Shafiq et al., 2012). Introvert leaders, as mentioned by Zubair Shafiq et al. (2012), refer to those who would well digest prior to responding in a social media when they get information or feedback from their neighbors.
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Between businesses and businesses, there exist competitive relationships, these relationships don't let customers flow smoothly between businesses on social platforms.
No one will let competitor expose on their own fan page. Nonetheless, when information cannot be streamed on social platform, businesses will lose the opportunity to make their own exposure. Thus, it makes customers struggle to search information about the product they need on the Internet, resulting in low degree of product / service complexity and low process simplification for and business’s products (Martin et al., 2014).
In addition, WOM is also an important task for business. If the business only concerned about B2C WOM, it would be not completely trusted by customers (Jesse and Orit, 2008); if the business hopes that C2C WOM is able to achieve all the publicity effect, but the results have no control over the business and there’s no guarantee that C2C WOM will meet the minds of business. The only way to solve this problem is through B2C2C WOM to operate the most efficient social marketing. We define B2C2C WOM as business engages customers through introvert leaders.
Jose et al. (2012) proposed that it has the same importance between “in-group”
(WOM with close friends or family) and “out-group” (WOM with persons who are out of one’s social circle) WOM marketing. Hennig-Thurau et al. (2010) described the impact of new media on customer relationship as playing pinball (marketing managers continue to guide “marketing ball” path with “flippers,” but the ball will not always go where it is intended to and the slightest miscue can be amplified into a catastrophic crisis.), implying the difficulty of controlling WOM on new media (eWOM), and the importance of C2C WOM. Unfortunately, current Facebook fan page managers focus only on B2C WOM, and therefore “Like-oriented” fan page operating strategy highlights the lack of measuring of customer engagement and C2C WOM’s effect.
Nowadays, businesses used to collect likes for fan page after hosting an event. However,
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encourage customers' clicking “like” on their fan page, and it may have great impact on the existing models of managing fan page (Facebook, 2014). Thus, the BC2C eWOM of the actual characteristics still needs to be studied and verified.Katrien et al. (2013) had done a research about managing engagement behaviors in a network of customers and stakeholders. They mentioned that the stakeholders include business and their employees, customers and their family. However, the common joint marketing stakeholders are the other businesses, and mistrust that exists between them would be one of the reasons to obstruct mutual cooperation. But these obstructs still cannot be a reason to not to cooperate with each other among businesses. Besharat et al. (2013) pointed out that co-brand is a business trend: a successful co-brand can reduce marketing costs for both businesses and can produce win-win result. According to above, we believe that business cooperates with different kinds of businesses will have different degrees of impact on customer engagement, so we will provide some service on an engagement site that can let them have a good cooperated experience with each other.
In this research, we investigate two research questions. The first is how to execute and optimize B2C2C eWOM through the influence of introvert leaders. The second is how we establish a platform for businesses to cooperate to each other in the smooth way through imagery matching mechanism. This research proposes a resolution method and system in response to two questions and the method has two main components – business cooperation and B2C2C eWOM – that will be briefed later.
1.3 Research Method
In our system, there are some components: business, business’s Facebook fan page, engagement site. Engagement site is a website that creates and sends some information
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Businesses can put link of their brand website or fan page on engagement site that can redirect customer to visit their brand website or fan page. And engagement site also stores that communication on itself so that it can provide the data that we can analyze and improve in terms of the following proposed services from the business point of view, an engagement site provides business with (1) finding out introvert leaders on their Facebook fan page, let business realize their main engagement target, (2) measuring the eWOM of Facebook fan page and each post, let business know our mechanism is effective, (3) picking out the great eWOM performance article, let it be the reference for business to design the article in the future. We will explain in the next paragraph of the value of these three services.
First, choosing joint marketing scope allows business to choose their cooperation partner categorized by geographic factor or product/service type. These are two of the most common practices for businesses selecting cooperation partners. How do businesses find the suitable cooperation partners? Through engagement site, Facebook community performance will be used as a reference. According to Ali et al. (2014), brands tend to find the higher population brand to perform co-branding, so we need to analyze the characteristic of their fan page for matching each other. Second, checking eWOM measurements is defined by counts of like, response, and participating in the discussion of proportion (i.e., the extent of the discussion of the post exceeds the previous level or not). We believe comprehensive measurement can avoid the disadvantage of counting only the counts of like. Third, in order to add to B2C eWOM by managing C2C eWOM, we provide business’s Facebook fan page manager with appropriate materials for posting.
After businesses finish using our services on engagement site, we will refer their eWOM performance to improve our service, providing some more appropriate posting
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performance is the attractiveness due to extent of an article. There are several data that we can collect on fan page articles, and these data are also that Facebook uses to measure an article’s popularity to decide whether to let this article appear on fans’ wall (Facebook, 2010). These data are “like”, “share”, and “response” on the article. So we will collect these to measure our eWOM performance.1.4 Purpose and Contribution
The aim of this research is to optimize B2C2C’s eWOM likelihood on social media.
Our engagement site provides Facebook fan page managers with new measurement of social marketing (B2C2C eWOM) and the posting materials they need. Through B2C2C system we build, posts on fan page will meet Facebook’s ranking criteria so that we can make the post have higher chance to expose on their fans’ wall. Besides, in the past the way to attract fans is more difficult to learn how to reach the target customer base. Now, through contacting with introvert leaders, who have influence and effect their neighbors by inward interaction, we can attract the target customers (i.e., those fans who are attracted by introvert leaders). Message in private message box with friends is one of the most common inward interaction on Facebook, it is hard to trace by crawler, but this information propagation way greatly decreases the commercial feeling to message receivers. Therefore, through the introvert leader, the information dissemination are often better accepted by others.
Further, through joint marketing service, business will be easier to find the appropriate cooperation partners and establish positive ecosystem. Their cooperation stakeholders are suggested through our system that is able to match each business by the characteristic of business, the type of goods and area of location. We believe our
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system can improve business’s B2C2C eWOM performance and business will acquire long-term and sustainable loyal customers.
1.5 Content Organization
The content of the research is divided into four main sections and followed by the design science research framework (Hevner et al., 2004) (See Figure 1.1)., which aims to define the environment of research problem, to apply the foundations and methodologies in knowledge base, to build the IT artifacts to solve the relevant problem and relate them in relevance and rigor.
Figure 1.1 Hevner’s Design Science Research Framework (Hevner, 2004)
Chapter 1 – Introduction
This chapter elaborates the current environment to provide an overall understanding of research background, motives, and purposes. By reading this
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chapter, readers would have a vivid understanding about the current state of quo in order to define the problem space and the business needs.