Diffusion Of User-Generated Content And Firm Online Response Strategy

Management of user-generated content (UGC) holds unprecedented challenges, opportunities and promises for customer relationship management, enterprise crisis management and firm value creation. Grounded on accumulated insights in marketing and information systems research, this dissertation looks into the dynamic process of UGC diffusion and management. This dissertation consists of four different studies.The first study evaluates exploiting UGC for crisis management. The extant research focuses on constructing the index systems of network public opinion analysis without considering the UGC situation assessment. However, more and more users can express their opinions using UGC more conveniently and quickly, which always has a great impact on firms. To reflect the power of UGC and overcome the research shortcomings, this study delves in-depth explorations into UGC situation assessment. First, we propose a conceptual analytical framework based on three dimensions including user, content and influence. We present quantitative computing methods of the last-level indexes. Second, we propose a Markov chain-based UGC influence analysis method. Experiments demonstrate that this method can effectively predict the trend of UGC influence scale.The second study builds a model of UGC and EGC interaction for enterprise strategy formulation. Based on the equilibrium solution analysis, we provide the runaway mode and effective mode in handling crisis UGC. Our results show that in runaway mode, EGC does not affect the propagation of crisis UGC, and the optimal EGC strategy is to do nothing. However, in effective mode, the effect strength of EGC on UGC is the most important key factor in defending against UGC propagation, followed by the input rate of the subgroup where users accept and repost EGC. Based on our model, we explain why EGC strategies such as deleting post and employing paid posters are helpless in crisis management exploiting UGC. Overall, the findings in this research offer some unique implications for UGC management.The third study constructs a simulation model for enterprise online response strategies based on the multi-agent simulation theory. From the perspective of enterprises, different strategies of EGC have been adapted to response to the UGC, but few studies have explored the effect of the enterprise’s response strategies on crisis UGC. This research aims at exploring the optimal EGC strategies for UGC from the perspective of crisis UGC diffusion. Exploiting multi-agent theory, we design the interactive rules among common users, enterprise and opinion leaders. We use the Netlogo platform to simulate the model and describe the UGC propagation. We investigate how these variables including enterprise online response speed, enterprise reputation and online response content quality affect the crisis UGC diffusion.The fourth study builds a theoretical model to investigate the effect of enterprise online communication strategies using framework of situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). First, the online communication effect is measured from the perspective of public cognition. Second, we investigate which factors affect the online communication from three levels including enterprise, crisis UGC, and online response content. Taking crisis UGC from Sina Weibo as our research setting and using the data from Weibo website, the empirical results demonstrate that the shorter the time of the first response is, the better the online communication effect will be. The results also show that response frequency and response content simplification can affect the positive sentiment density.In brief, this dissertation provides new and novel insights on UGC situation assessment, interaction mechanism and online communication effect. The results from this dissertation not only pave the way for future investigation on enterprise crisis management but also provide practical managerial implications for enterprise crisis management.