رفتارهای تعامل مشتری در رسانه های اجتماعی: گرفتن فرصت های نوآوری Customer engagement behaviours in social media: capturing innovation opportunities

Introduction Brands globally are making substantial investments in social media brand communities to better engage with their customers to identify and facilitate co-created innovation opportunities (Kao et al., 2016; Hamilton et al., 2016; Uncles and Ngo, 2017). Studies across service environments indicate that an engaged customer actively participates in idea generation and collaborative behaviours such as sharing knowledge, ideas and preference information to support the brand (Alexander and Jaakkola, 2016; Gruner et al., 2014). Central to the successful management of such interactions is an understanding of what stimulates customer engagement behaviours (hereafter CEB) in a social media environment, which contributes to the innovation efforts of brands, and ultimately, enhanced value propositions to target audiences. Advancements in online services have enabled interactive “engagement platforms” to be constructed where consumers can exchange resources as well as co-create value (Ramaswamy, 2009; Breidbach et al., 2014). In this context, scholars have argued that the concept of CEB has brought about a new behavioural perspective. This perspective examines customers’ behavioural manifestations that have a brand focus, beyond purchase, resulting from motivational drivers that add value to the firm (Van Doorn et al., 2010; Groeger et al., 2016). Therefore, managers need to increasingly introduce practices to stimulate and encourage customers to participate in voluntary, discretionary, helpful behaviours toward the brand and other customers (Verleye et al., 2014). Such focus enables brands to unlock customer sharing behaviours such as increasing a customer’s propensity to provide feedback/innovative ideas, and collaborating and interacting with others in brand communities (Alexander and Jaakkola, 2016; Hollebeek et al., 2016). The increasing sophistication of online social networking services such as brand pages have enabled brands to transform passive observers to active participants and collaborators that generate new ideas (Jahn and Kunz, 2012; Hollebeek et al., 2016). Consumers are becoming pivotal authors of brand stories by sharing brand experiences via social media, linking consumers and brands (de Vries and Carlson, 2014). Although the notion of virtual communities is not new (Dholakia et al., 2004; Nambisan and Baron, 2009), the availability of powerful social networking tools makes it relatively easy to initiate conversations, gather and capture user-generated input rapidly from a large number of participants (Mount and Martinez, 2014). Understanding these processes are critical for achieving competitive advantage given advancements in social media monitoring and text analysis techniques that “listen” to, and capture, customer-generated content from brand pages for innovation purposes including product development and brand experience improvements (Moe and Schweidel, 2017; Schweidel and Moe, 2014). Despite the promise that social media holds and the value to be extracted by brands from it through text analysis, the expected positive results for engaging customers for innovation are frequently not realized in practice. For instance, Roberts and Piller (2016) suggest that although some companies are using social media to develop new insights that lead to successful innovations, many others simply do not know how to use social media for capturing innovation opportunities. Furthermore, they argue understanding website design characteristics that facilitate dialogue and conversations with customer innovators is important to encourage cooperation and idea sharing among consumers. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms by which social media managers can design such online services to facilitate voluntary innovation-related behaviours by consumers that benefit the brand and other customers, is critical.