When Social Media Delivers Customer Service: Differential Customer Treatment in the Airline Industry

Unpacking the social media–driven innovation capability: How consumer conversations turn into organizational innovations

“…Specifically, our study shows that consumer conversations can provide important impetus for organizational innovation and potentially lead to a continuous dialog between consumers and organizations throughout the entire innovation process. Our study thereby broadens the focus of existing social media research and shifts attention from the implications of organizational responses to consumer conversations (or the absence thereof) (Gallaugher & Ransbotham, 2010;Gunarathne et al, 2018) to the value of dialog and conversation with consumers for organizational outcomes.…”

“…In turn, consumers have started to leverage social media not only to identify the best products and services but also to complain about products and services that are below expectations (Constantinides et al, 2008;Sorescu et al, 2011). These conversation often take place in real-time during service delivery and can reach a large audience, thereby creating a dynamic high-velocity environment that retailers have to deal with (Gunarathne et al, 2018). In response, retailers are increasingly attempting to engage with consumers on social media to learn from them and ultimately to innovate their services and improve their market position (Cameron, 2014;Mason, 2015).…”

“…This tension between the enormous mass and critical importance of social media conversations on the one hand, and the difficulty to understand them on the other hand, imposes challenges for organizations: they need to be able to not only acquire and respond to (Gunarathne, Rui, & Seidmann, 2018), but also filter and assess the vast amount of conversations on social media to identify knowledge and ideas with innovation potential that may be hidden in it.…”

“…The literature on digitalization of innovation management is focusing on platforms, toolkits and communities that have been designed for innovation (Dong & Wu, 2015;Schlagwein & Bjørn-Andersen, 2014), neglecting those that are not but could be appropriated as such. The literature on the use of public social media by organizations by and large focuses on how organizations could communicate via or respond to conversations they listen to (Gunarathne et al, 2018;Schlagwein & Hu, 2017) but not how organizations can leverage these conversations. In fact it has already been acknowledged that little is known about how social media conversations of consumers that might not have been created for innovation purposes may result in organizational innovation (Roberts et al, 2016;Stanko, Fisher, & Bogers, 2017).…”

Effects of the presence of others on prosocial behavior: Perceived face as mediator

“…A field study conducted by Pozzoli and Gini () has concluded that higher numbers of strong friendships among bystanders produce more proactive attitudes toward bullying among students and make them feel a greater responsibility to intervene. Further research has investigated other characteristics of such situations and the concrete nature of the bystanders present to explain certain effects such as the social relationships among the bystanders (Gunarathne, Rui, & Seidmann, ).…”