• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2012

Many companies have recently become interested in using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as a new channel to communicate with their customers. For example, companies often offer "special deals" (e.g., coupons, discounts, free samples, etc.) to their customers who participate in promotions or events on social networking sites. Companies often make important announcements on their products or services on social networking sites. By doing so, customers are encouraged to continue to have relationships with companies on social networking sites and to recommend the companies' presence on social networking sites to other potential customers. Moreover, customers who keep close relationships with companies on social networking sites often provide the companies with valuable suggestions and feedback. For instance, Starbucks has more than 2 million followers on Twitter, and often receive suggestions and feedback for their product offerings and services from the followers on Twitter. Although companies realize potential benefits of using social networking sites as a channel to communicate with their customers, it appears that many companies have difficulty forging long-lasting relationships with customers on social networking sites. It is often reported that many customers who had followed companies on Twitter later stopped following them for various reasons. Therefore, it is an important issue to understand what motivates customers to continue to keep relationships with companies on social networking sites. Nonetheless, due attention has yet paid to this issue until recently. This study intends to contribute to our understanding on customers' intention to continue to follow companies on Twitter and to spread positive word-of-mouth about companies on Twitter. Specifically, we identify seven potential factors that customers perceive as important in evaluating their experience with companies on Twitter. The seven factors include similarity, receptivity, interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, enjoyment, usefulness and transparency. We posit that the seven perception factors can affect the two types of satisfaction, emotional and cognitive, which can in turn influence on customers' intention to follow companies on Twitter and to spread positive word-of-mouth about companies on Twitter. Research hypotheses formulated in this study were tested with data collected from a questionnaire survey administered to customers who had been following companies on Twitter. The data was analyzed with the partial least square (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling. The results of data analysis based on 177 usable responses were generally supportive of our predictions for the effects of the seven factors identified and the two types of satisfaction. In particular, out results suggest that emotional satisfaction was strongly influenced by perceived similarity, perceived receptivity, perceived enjoyment, and perceived transparency. Cognitive satisfaction was significantly influenced by perceived similarity, perceived interactivity, perceived enjoyment, and perceived transparency. While cognitive satisfaction was found to have significant and positive effects on both continued following and word-of-mouth intentions, emotional satisfaction had a significant and positive effect only on word-of-mouth intention.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-22
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• 2016

News contents has been collected, selected, edited and sometimes distorted by the news recommendation mechanisms of online portals in nowadays. Prior studies had not confirmed the consensus of newsworthiness, and they had not tried to empirically validate the impacts of newsworthiness on audience reactions. This study challenged to summarize the concepts of newsworthiness and validate the impact of representativeness of both editor's and audience's perspective on audience reactions as perceived news quality, trust on news portal, perceived usefulness, service satisfaction, loyalty, continuous usage intention, and word-of-mouth intention by adopting the representativeness heuristics method and information adoption model. 357 valid data had been collected using a scenario survey method. Subjects in each groups are exposed by 3 news recommendation mechanisms: 1) the time-priority news exposure mechanism (control group), 2) the reference-score-based news recommendation mechanism (a single treatment group), and 3) the major-news-priority exposure mechanism sorting by the reference scores made by peer audiences (the mixed treatment group). Data had been analyzed by the MANOVA and PLS method. MANOVA results indicate that only mixed method of both editor and audience recommendation mechanisms impacts on perceived news quality and trust. PLS results indicate that perceived news quality and trust could significantly affect on the perceived usefulness, service satisfaction, loyalty, continuance usage, and word-of-mouth intention. This study would contributions to empathize the role of information technology in media industry, to conceptualize the news value in the balanced views of both editors and audiences, and to empirically validate the benefits of news recommendation mechanisms in academy. For practice, the results of this study suggest that online news portals would be better to make mixed news recommendation mechanisms to attract audiences.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.10
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• pp.1340-1346
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• 2018

There have been researches on game continuance intention based on consumer behaviour theory of management science. Such macro access of computer game analysis might be insufficient to draw valuable results due to complex subsystem structure of recent computer games. In this paper, we choose 'Blade and Soul' game that was first published in 2012 and has been within top 20 MMORPG in Korea but known as a 'long time users' only game'among game players recently. Three user groups - long loyalty, concentrated, casual - are classified based on their play history and play time per day of Blade and Soul. The first survey with 222 subjects revealed that the real strength of the game was not the combat - Dungeon, Arena, Battleground competition - but very cohesive game community Blade and Soul has. Thus, we conduct another survey on the game community issues among 148 long time users (over 3 years playing history) and analyze their traits and behaviour patterns.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.1-26
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• 2013

Estimating levels of user trust is important for maintaining continuous use of e-commerce systems because trust alleviates user concerns about the invisibility of service providers or their reputation. Conventional trust estimation approaches such as policy-and reputationbased reasoning have focused on the experience of e-commerce systems at an early stage. However, only a few trust reasoning methods have considered the mature stage, which is more related to continuance intention. We propose a trust reasoning method dedicated to the mature stage of using e-commerce systems. In particular, a new method of unobtrusively estimating the degree of user intimacy is developed, because intimacy has been highly associated with trust as well as reputation. Our experiments show that the proposed method is valid and can be used in conjunction with reputation-based trust reasoning.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.147-165
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• 2009

Virtual community(VC) will increasingly be organized as commercial enterprises, with the objective of earning an attractive financial return by providing members with valuable resources and environment. For example, Cyworld.com in Korea uses several community services to enable customers of Cyworld to take control of their own value as potential purchasers of products and services. Although initial adoption is important for online network service success, it does not necessarily result in the desired managerial performance unless the initial usage is continuously related to the continuous usage and purchase. Particularly, the customer who receives relevant online services and is well equipped with online network services, will trust the online service provider and perceive less risk and experience more activities such as continuous usage and purchase. Thus, how to promote continued online service usage or, alternatively, how to prevent discontinuance is a critical issue for VC service providers to consider. By aggregating a wide range of information and online environments for customers and providing trust to its members, the service providers of virtual communities help to reduce the perceived risk of continuous usage and purchase. Drill down, online service managers realize that achieving strong and sustained customers who continuously use online service and purchase on it is crucial. Therefore, the research into this online service continuance will identify the relationship between the initial usage and the continuous usage and purchase. The research of continuous usage or post adoption has recently emerged as an important issue in the IS literature. Individuals' information systems(IS) continuous usage decisions are congruent with consumers' repeat purchase decisions. The TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) paradigm has been strongly confirmed across a wide range from product purchase on EC to online service usage contexts. The analysis of IS usage based on TAM has proven to be successful across almost online service contexts. However, most of previous studies have focused on only an area (i.e., VC or EC). Just little research has tried to analyze the relationship between VC and EC. The effect of some factors on user intention, captured through several theories such as TAM, has been demonstrated. Yet, few studies have explored the salient relationships of VC users' EC acceptance. To fill this gap between VC and EC research, this paper attempts to develop a research model that extends the TAM perspective in view of the additional contributions of trust in the service provider and trust in members on some factors that affect EC and VC adoption. In this extension, we applied the TAM-to-TAM(T2T) model, and analyzed the transfer effect of trust between these two TAMs. The research model was empirically tested on the context of a social network service. The model was to extend TAM with the trust concept for the virtual community environment from the perspective of tasks. By building an extended model of TAM and examining the relationships between trust and the existing variables of TAM, it is aimed to explain a user's continuous intention to use VC and purchase on EC. The unit of analysis in this paper is an individual user of a virtual community. The population of interest is the individual with the experiences in virtual community. The data for this paper was made available via a Web survey of VC users. In total, 281 cases were gathered for about one week, but there were some missing values in the sample and there were some inappropriate cases. Thus, only 248 cases were finally analyzed. We chose the structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses and it is better suited for explaining complex relationships than the other methods. In this test, AMOS was used to test the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Noticeable results have been found in the T2T model regarding the factors affecting the intention to use of virtual community and loyalty. Our result showed that trust transfer plays a key role in forming the two adoption beliefs. Overall, this study preliminarily confirms the salience of trust transfer in online service.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.25-36
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• 2018

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine one's life without smart phones or the internet. Furthermore, not only do people form groups offline, but also online. Based on the cognitive dissonance theory, there have been many studies about how an offline group's initiation affects attitudes toward the group. However, there has not been a study about how an online group's initiation can affect attitudes toward the group. Therefore, this study aims to find out how cognitive dissonance aroused by initiation affects the attitudes toward the online community, which represents groups that are formed online. In addition, this study examined how perceived similarity affects changes in attitude aroused by cognitive dissonance. Participants were assigned to a group in three ways as follows: without a registration process, with a simple registration process, and/or with a complex registration process. Perceived similarity was calculated by the difference between the current body mass index (BMI) and the target BMI of the participant. Attitudes toward the online group were measured by perceived source credibility, perceived information quality, satisfaction, information usefulness, and continuance intention. Contrary to the cognitive dissonance theory, the results showed that when applied to offline social groups, there were conflicting results. There were cases where there was no difference in the evaluation between initiation conditions. However, other cases showed that groups with the most complex registration process were found to have the worst evaluation. People were more favorable toward the group when the perceived similarity was larger. Interestingly, people who had higher perceived similarity had more positive attitudes toward the groups that had been assigned with a registration process compared to the group formed without a registration process. Conversely, people with lower perceived similarity had more positive attitudes toward the group when there was no initiation process. Online communities may use the results of this study to design more suitable registration processes for their communities.