Social media affordances: Enabling customer ... - Apeiron - Iulm

Annals of Tourism Research 48 (2014) 175–192

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Annals of Tourism Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures

Social media affordances: Enabling customer engagement Francesca Cabiddu a,⇑, Manuela De Carlo b,1, Gabriele Piccoli c,2 a b c

University of Cagliari, Italy IULM University, Italy University of Pavia, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 25 January 2013 Revised 7 June 2014 Accepted 13 June 2014 Coordinating Editor: Ulrike Gretzel Keywords: Social media Affordance Multiple-case Customer engagement Recognition

a b s t r a c t Despite the acknowledged importance of social media for customer engagement, our understanding of this phenomenon is limited and new theories can help shed further light on the unique features of social media in the tourism context. Our work contributes to the literature by adopting an affordance perspective that leads us to identify three distinctive social media affordances for customer engagement in tourism: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. Our work also extends prior research on customer engagement by examining the process of recognition (proprioception, exteroception and coperception) through which organizations engage customers in social media. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Social media are a ‘‘group of Internet-based applications which build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and which allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’’ (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Thus, social media are browser or mobile-based applications that allow users to easily create, edit, access and link to content and/or to other individuals. Examples include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and electronic social networks, as well as user-generated content ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 070 6753382; fax: +39 070 6753374. 1 2

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Cabiddu), [email protected] (M.D. Carlo), [email protected] (G. Piccoli). Tel.: +39 02891412815; fax: +39 02891412770. Tel.: +39 0382 986219.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.06.003 0160-7383/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

176

F. Cabiddu et al. / Annals of Tourism Research 48 (2014) 175–192

aggregators, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and location-based applications such, as Foursquare or MyCityWay. More than one third of online travelers are somewhat influenced by social media, with Facebook referring more than 15.2 million visitors to tourism websites in 2010 (PhoCusWright., 2011). TripAdvisor-branded sites comprise the largest travel community in the world, with more than 200 million unique monthly visitors and more than 100 million reviews and opinions for 2.5 million accommodations, restaurants, and attractions worldwide (Google, 2013). As a testament to their growing importance, the literature includes a proliferation of studies that focus on social media in tourism (Banyai, 2012; Bronner & De Hoog, 2010; Bynum Boley, Magnini, & Tuten, 2013; Hvass & Munar, 2012; Kang & Schuett, 2013; Leung, Law, van Hoof, & Buhalis, 2013; Månsson, 2011; Xiang & Gretzel, 2010). Social media represent a critical innovation for the tourism industry not only because they allow informational exchanges among tourists (Cox, Burgess, Sellitto, & Buultjens, 2009; Schmallegger & Carson, 2008; Xiang & Gretzel, 2010) and affect potential tourists’ experiences (Tussyadiah & Fesenmaier, 2009) but also because of their ability to spur further innovation (Hjalager, 2010). The proliferation of social media platforms has changed how organizations communicate with customers, thus allowing tourism service providers to pursue a variety of customer engagement strategies (Dholakia & Durham, 2010). Customer engagement is ‘‘a psychological state, which occurs by virtue of interactive customer experiences with a focal agent/object within specific service relationships’’ (Brodie, Hollebeek, Juric, & Ilic, 2011, p. 258). Despite the acknowledged importance of social media for customer engagement in the tourism context (Chan & Guillet, 2011; Park & Allen, 2013; Wei, Miao, & Huang, 2013), our understanding remains limited and theorists call for new approaches to exploring the unique features of social media (Majchrzak, 2009; Treem & Leonardi, 2012). This need is particularly evident in the tourism context (Chan & Guillet, 2011; Hudson & Thal, 2013), where social media introduce new interactive channels between providers and tourists (Hjalager, 2010). Our work contributes to the literature utilizing affordance theory, thus considering the symbiotic relationship between human activities and technological capabilities in the tourism context (Majchrzak & Markus, 2012). By treating the interplay of humans and technology as a single unit of analysis, rather than examining each separately, the affordance perspective provides a language with which to examine the broader impacts of social media on tourism and tourism specific innovations. In this study we focus specifically on the implications of social media affordances for customer engagement. First, we explore the process of recognition through which tourism organizations conceptualize of engaging customers through social media. We identify three distinctive social media affordances that support customer engagement in a tourism domain: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. Then, we explore the differences between hotels with high and low customer engagement performance with respect to the recognition and exploitation of the three affordances. The value of our research lies mainly in exploratory theory building and early theory testing about specific social media affordances in the context of customer engagement in a tourism domain.

Theoretical approaches to the study of social media engagement A number of engagement-based concepts have been proposed in different bodies of literature, including tourism, such as customer engagement behavior (Van Doorn et al., 2010), user-generated hotel reviews (Wei et al., 2013), customer brand engagement (Hollebeek, 2011), online consumer engagement (Mollen & Wilson, 2010), the customer engagement cycle (Sashi, 2012), customer engagement value (Kumar et al., 2010), community engagement (Hamilton & Alexander, 2013), and co-creation as a customer engagement behavior (Grissemann & Stokburger-Sauer, 2012, Cabiddu, Lui, Piccoli, 2013). Some studies define engagement in terms of a psychological state (Mollen & Wilson, 2010; Vivek, Beatty, & Morgan, 2010), while others focus on its behavioral manifestations toward a company or a brand (Hollebeek, 2011; Kumar et al., 2010; Van Doorn et al., 2010). The advent of social media led to an explosion of interest in customer engagement, given the opportunities presented by these media to facilitate close relationships with customers (Gorry & Westbrook, 2011; Hudson & Thal, 2013). Engagement includes: browsing and consuming consumer-generated media contents, content contribution, active participation (Yoo & Gretzel, 2011), levels of participation in online tourist


177

communities (Hamilton & Alexander, 2013; Wang, Yu, & Fesenmaier, 2002), user-generated hotel reviews as a particular type of customer engagement behavior (Park & Allen, 2013; Wei et al., 2013), social media marketing (Chan & Guillet, 2011), and tourism blogs as elements of tourism destination strategy (Schmallegger & Carson, 2008). Despite the increasing research on the adoption of social media by the tourism industry and some evidence that confirms a return on investment for companies that have invested in this technology (Dholakia & Durham, 2010), tourism scholars claim that research must adopt new theoretical and methodological approaches to better explain the unique characteristics of social media (Chan & Guillet, 2011; Hudson & Thal, 2013). Moreover, this theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped, and a better understanding of the concept is essential to the development of customer engagement strategies (Sashi, 2012). The information systems community contributes considerably to our understanding of the ways in which these new tools can revolutionize business practices (Aral, Dellarocas, & Godes, 2013) and create new ways to engage customers (Wagner & Majchrzak, 2007). In particular, recent research has shown that social media that allow users, managers, and developers to act and interact with each other in novel ways might undermine or violate the assumptions of established theory. Consequently, researchers must adapt these theories for applications to social media settings, or possibly develop new ones (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, & Borgatti, 2014; Majchrzak, 2009). In other words, theorists have called for a break with traditional information systems literature characterized by either technological determinism or institutionalism (Markus & Silver, 2008) (Table 1). Despite their undeniable value, the main limitation of these theories is that they focus separately on organization and technology. The affordance perspective overcomes this limitation and complements traditional approaches to the study of social media adoption and use (Leonardi, 2011; Leonardi & Barley, 2008; Markus & Silver, 2008; Treem & Leonardi, 2012). In line with recent calls we adopt the affordance perspective and argue that it facilitates service providers’ understanding of available opportunities to use social media for customer engagement. For example, Facebook provides different possibilities for action to tourism service firms with open cultures versus those with strict traditional views of guest privacy and confidentiality. These complex patterns of technology use and effects are difficult (perhaps impossible) to discern if organizations and technology are treated separately. Rather, they are best understood with simultaneous references to the socio-technical ensemble that has emerged from organizational technology use (Leonardi, 2011).

Theoretical framework Affordance In the ecological psychology literature, from which the concept of affordance originates, affordance represents the notion of ‘‘opportunities for action’’ as perceived by an organism in its environment (Gibson, 1979). The original conceptualization of affordance simultaneously considers the properties of an object (e.g., a hill) and of a perceiving entity (e.g., a farmer). Affordances are originally defined as ‘‘properties of the animal-environment system that determine what can be done’’ (Stoffregen, 2003, p. 124); for example, a farmer might perceive that a hill offers him the opportunity to feed grazing livestock, whereas a tourism entrepreneur might perceive the same hill as a surface upon which to climb, cycle, or ski. As a possibility for action rather than the action itself, an affordance is conceptually separate from a given behavior and is merely a necessary precondition for the behavior to occur (Majchrzak & Markus, 2012). Furthermore, it is not necessary that the entity ‘‘picks up information about the specific affordance’’ but rather that ‘‘the possibility exists for the affordance to be realized’’ (Bærentsen & Trettvik, 2002, p. 53). A more fundamental question pertains to the relevant abilities of the social agent (animal or human) that coincide to determine an affordance (Chemero, 2003; Warren, 1984). An affordance exists when the properties of an object intersect with the ability of a social agent. In the example of online tourists, a computer or tablet has the technology features to enable obtaining tourism information on the Web. However, those features are only activated in the hands of a potential tourist with the ability and intention to find information online. Online information searching, an affordance, thus

178


Table 1 Differences between the affordance perspective and other perspectives on technology adoption. Major perspectives on technology adoption

Examples of theoretical approaches

Limitation of these theoretical approaches to social media studies in the tourism context

Deterministic school

Task-technology ‘‘fit’’ (Jarvenpaa, 1989)

Concerns

This is characterized either by ‘‘hardline determinism—the belief that certain effects inevitably follow from the introduction of technology’’—or by ‘‘more moderate contingency views, which argue that situational factors interact with technology to cause outcomes’’ (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994, p. 123)

Task-technology fit theory posits that for technology to have a positive effect on individual performance, the capabilities of the technology should match the tasks that the user must perform. In the tourism context, the capabilities of social media should match the tourism service provider’s strategies to engage customers (Jarvenpaa, 1989)

Technology is seen as immutable but social media are flexible tools. Tourism service organizations that might have assumed fixed and immutable technology now must consider the possibility that social media is dynamically changing as a basis for organizational functioning, thus triggering consequent changes in organizational functioning. (Yoo et al., 2012)

Institutional school

Structuration theory (Giddens, 1979)

Concerns

Technology is seen as ‘‘an opportunity for change, rather than as a causal agent of change,’’ wherein ‘‘people generate social constructions of technology’’ and ‘‘the creation, design, and use of advanced technologies are inextricably bound up with the form and direction of the social order’’ (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994, p. 124)

Structuration theory suggests that people draw upon norms and communication processes to shape their interactions with technology. In the context of social media use to engage customers, this means that there is not only a social structure of traditions, institutions, moral codes, and established ways of acting but also that these can be changed when people begin to ignore, replace, or reproduce them differently (Giddens, 1979)

Structuration theory might be unable to fully account for the fluid and flexible interchanges between social media and tourist organization behaviors because of privileged human behavior and the discounted technological capacity for action of those who produce and use the media

Social technology school (integrative perspectives)

Adaptive structuration theory (AST) (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994)

Concerns

This school of thought advocates ‘‘softline’’ determinism, or the view that technology has structures in its own right, but that social practices moderate the effects of these structures on behavior

This perspective considers ‘‘the mutual influence of technology and social processes’’ (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994, p. 125) It also attributes human qualities such as ‘‘intent’’ and ‘‘values’’ to artifacts

Although adaptive structuration theory considers the mutual influence of technology and social processes, structural features are conceptualized as technology properties, rather than an opportunity for action at the intersection of technology and tourism organizations. This means that in this theory the notion of appropriation refers to actual uses of social media rather than the potential uses

Ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979)

Technology affordance (Hutchby, 2001)

In favor

‘‘Ecological psychologists believed that animals and people directly ‘pick up’ rich information from the objects in their environment. In this conception, animals and people perceive, not the properties of objects, but rather the ‘affordances’ of objects, defined as ‘‘the acts or behaviors that are afforded or permitted by an object, place, or event’’ (Michaels and Carello, 1981, p. 17)

The affordance lens suggests that ‘‘technologies can be understood as artifacts which may be both shaped by and shaping of the practices human use in interaction with, around and through them’’ (Hutchby, 2001, p. 444)

As relational concepts, affordances facilitate the tourism service provider’s understanding that what an individual or tourism organization with particular capabilities and purposes can or cannot do with social media might be very different from what a different individual or organization can do with the same technology. Thus, the appropriation concept refers to potential uses of social media.


179

depends on a combination of the interacting properties and abilities of the computer and the potential tourist. The mere presence of an online information searching affordance does not imply that a person will engage in such behavior. Technology affordance in organizations The notion of affordance has recently been applied to organizations to better understand how new combinations of technology and organizational features continually create possibilities that affect organizational innovation (Yoo, Boland, Lyytinen, & Majchrzak, 2012), form, and function (Leonardi & Barley, 2008; Zammuto, Griffith, Majchrzak, Dougherty, & Faraj, 2007). Regarding the organizational uses of information technology, ‘‘the concept of technology affordance refers to an action potential, that is, to what an individual or organization with a particular purpose can do with a technology or information system’’ (Majchrzak & Markus, 2012, p. 1). Thus, affordance is an emergent property of the technology-organization system. As such, an affordance is neither a property of the technology itself (e.g., uploading pictures to Facebook) nor a characteristic of the organization (e.g., a risk-averse organizational culture), but rather an opportunity for action that exists at the intersection of these two entities, given their respective characteristics (e.g., the ability of the hotel to use an informal language on Facebook creates new opportunities for traditional organizations to engage customers and connect with them instantly.). This idea suggests that, although organization and technology interact directly with one another, they are distinct phenomena. Alone, neither organization nor technology is empirically important. ‘‘But when they become imbricated—interlocked in particular sequences—they together produce, sustain, or change either routines or technologies’’ (Leonardi, 2011, p. 149). Although affordances exist when the possibility for action is available, the recognition of an affordance is critical for the entity to enact a behavior. Because an affordance is a property of the relationship between an object and a social entity (Hutchby, 2001), affordance perception requires a combination of exteroception and proprioception. Exteroception is the interaction between an object and an observer’s perceptual/cognitive systems, such as the awareness of a specific social medium and its characteristics. Proprioception is any experience of the entity itself (Gibson, 1972), such as an awareness of the observer’s characteristics and capabilities. The recognition of an affordance requires coperception (Bærentsen & Trettvik, 2002, p. 58), or the simultaneous awareness of the available objects and the entity’s own characteristics (Gibson, 1986); for example, it might require awareness of the avenues for action that a specific medium provides to a specific firm. The case of Dtour, an interactive YouTube channel initiated by DoubleTree Hilton that allows travelers to share details about their trips and become inspired by others’ stories to plan their own trips, is a good example of coperception by the DoubleTree leadership because it demonstrates the simultaneous awareness of the hotel’s own characteristics (proprioception) and the potential for action that the YouTube channel provides to this hotel (exteroception). In particular, Hilton recognized YouTube as a place to showcase great content and create meaningful engagements with travelers for the DoubleTree brand (Crocker, 2013). Given the nature of affordance, theorists have increasingly adopted this perspective when studying digital technologies and social media adoption and uses. Previous research shows that the affordances of pervasive digital technologies such as social media produce innovations that are more fluid and changing, with capabilities that can be added after their introduction (Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002; Yoo et al., 2012). To simplify, organizations are transforming social media technologies in ways that the designers had not originally anticipated. Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, offered the best example of this phenomenon: ‘‘Twitter lets people share moments of their life, whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. [. . .] This is the primary use we saw of Twitter at the beginning. [. . .] What we didn’t anticipate were the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system’’ (Williams, 2009). Interestingly, users invented the two main functions in the modern Twitter feature set, @replies and #keywords; Twitter only incorporated these functions once they had gained significant traction with users. Other researchers have recently used the lens of affordance to review the literature regarding social media use in organizations (Treem & Leonardi, 2012). These researchers identified the following four basic affordances of social media: behavior visibility, persistent conversation, editability, and

180


associations that enable community building and access to expertise. All of these affordances explain how social media have determined a shift in the manner in which organizational knowledge is shared. Other scholars, while deepening this initial study, have theorized that social media provide the following four affordances that represent different ways to engage in knowledge-sharing conversations in the workplace: metavoicing, triggered attending, network-informed associating, and generative role-taking (Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, & Azad, 2013). Although tourism scholars have used the affordance concept (Edensor, 2006; Vosu & Kaaristo, 2009), we are not aware of any study that has mapped social media affordances in tourism. Given the unprecedented levels of fluidity and malleability that characterize social media use in tourism, an understanding of the innovative uses of this technology requires an explicit analysis of the symbiotic relationship between organizations’ actions and technology capabilities in a specific domain of action (Majchrzak et al., 2013). We chose the hospitality sector for two reasons. First, hospitality products and services are primarily designed to satisfy the needs and wants of business and leisure travelers. The specific set of activities that characterized the hospitality sector provide a good environment in which to study social media affordances. Second, the use of social media and online review have transformed consumer decision making in the hospitality industry (Park & Allen, 2012; Xiang & Gretzel, 2010). The current levels of innovation and attention to social media exhibited by hoteliers provide a good environment in which to study social media affordances. We therefore devised an exploratory study to identify social media affordances in the hospitality sector to provide an early map. Methods Research design and setting Given the novelty of our work and our intention to identify social media affordances that are currently recognized and realized by practicing managers in hospitality context, we conducted an inductive, multiple-case study (Eisenhardt, 1989). We collected data from various sources, including archival data from both internal and external organizational sources; semi-structured interviews; and informal follow-ups with e-mails and phone calls. In an attempt to study both leisure and business hotels as well as successful and unsuccessful properties, we built an initial database of 1,595 hotels by inventorying all lodging operators in a major urban area (where business tourists comprise 70% of the customer base) and in a region that represents a predominantly leisure destination (60% of the customer base). For all inventoried firms, we collected data about social media presence (see Table 2). We split the sample into two subgroups based on the ability of the companies to engage customers in social media and their successes in building a following (e.g., Facebook fans). The process of building customer engagement in a social media context constitutes a customer engagement cycle based on the following seven stages: connection, interaction, satisfaction, retention, commitment, advocacy, and engagement (Sashi, 2012). Given the exploratory nature of our paper, we did not analyze the cognitive and emotional aspects of engagement (Bowden, 2009) but instead focused our attention on the core of the engagement construct, interaction between customers and organizations (Brodie, Roderick, Illic, Juric, & Hollebeek, 2011). Based on academic literature (Sashi, 2012) and managerial reports (Haven, 2007), we developed a combined measure of engagement with four items: the

Table 2 Metrics of customer engagement. Hotels

Hotels

Facebook Fans

Average likes per post

Average responses per post

Twitter followers

Business Destination (total) Leisure Destination (total) Total

669

6026

16

1

401

926

18167

8

3

177

1595

24193

24

4

578

181


number of Facebook fans, the average responses per post, the average likes per post, and the number of Twitter followers. We chose not to refer to the number of tweets because the average number of tweets per day was very low. Within the designed sampling frame, we pilot-tested potential interview questions with the executive teams of two hotels at the forefront of technology adoption. We sought preliminary insights into social media and their associated implementations. An analysis of these interview transcripts yielded the intriguing observation that, despite the managers’ abilities to successfully operate online, they had little knowledge regarding the ways in which social media could be incorporated into their activities. They were not involved in the adoption of social media, as this activity was usually delegated to the staff. We then used the findings from this exploratory phase to develop specific interview protocols for the appropriate individuals in the organization: the chief marketing officers and digital marketing staff. After finalizing the interview protocol, we selected a research sample based on a polar-type research design (Eisenhardt, 1989) by choosing hotels that represented extreme cases. The extent to which hotels interact with customers is the most basic dimension along which our cases could vary, so we began formal interviews with the two highest-performing hotels in our database (not those used for the pilot test). We also pair-matched two hotels from the low-performing set that were very similar to the top performers in terms of star rating, location, customer profile and property profile (Tables 3 and 4). The interviews ranged from one to two hours in length, and each was recorded and transcribed verbatim to generate approximately 100 pages of text. The interview guide contained three main sections. The first section included open-ended questions that enabled informants to provide an overview of their company’s history, competitors and customer base. The second section focused on the type of social media utilized by the firm. When we asked about the type of social media utilized we try also to understand what type of potential they can see in social media. The third section focused on specific organizational initiatives (e.g., create a Twitter account, launch a Facebook campaign) related to social media implementation in which the informant was directly involved. In the second and third sections, we targeted questions to specific experiences, performed activities and incidents that had actually occurred in an attempt to gain information about real behaviors during specific events rather than vague descriptions and ideas. Data analysis Our analysis proceeded through different rounds of coding with Nvivo 9. In the first round, we created a provisional list of codes that were derived from the conceptual framework and the specific Table 3 Summary sample data. Hotel

Star

Rooms

Positioning

Location

N. of interviews

N. of interviewees

HP1 LP1 HP2 LP2

5 5 4 4

399 244 90 48

Business Business Leisure Leisure

Milan Milan Fordongianus Iglesias

2 2 2 2

2 2 2 2

HP: high-performing LP: low-performing.

Table 4 Quantitative detail of social media used. Hotel

Facebook fans

Average. like per post

Average responses per post

Twitter followers

HP1 LP1 HP2 LP2

5,317 709 5,424 373

14.5 1 2.5 0

0.92 0 1.6 0.25

401 0 115 8

HP: high-performing LP: low-performing.

182


Table 5 Definitions and sample codes for exteroception, proprioception and coperception. Category

Definitional elements

Phrase

Exteroception

Perception of social media characteristics

Proprioception

Perception of hotel characteristics

Coperception

Simultaneous awareness of social media and hotel characteristics relative to possible action

Facebook is . . . The followers are . . . Twitter is . . . Tripadivisor is . . . Our food is. . . Our customers want . . . Our hotel is . . . We create . . . We use Facebook for . . . We could run campaigns . . .

Table 6 Sample coding for exteroception, proprioception and coperception. Category

Illustrative quote

Hotel

Exteroception

‘‘Within [Facebook] Fan Page, you cannot send private messages and you cannot ask for friendship. It only works to collect users ‘Like.’ With the private profile, you can send friendship requests’’ ‘‘[Our hotel] is a very traditional, very classic environment, deeply tied to traditions and beliefs from the last century’’ ‘‘I opened an account on Mobnotes in order to understand how this type of thing worked. I said ‘‘Oh, it’s a tool that I can use to let people who are in the area know what’s happening, which is great for the [name of the hotel]’’ ‘‘We have created a page on our website from which Facebook sent back an offer targeted to people coming from Milan or Rome since these are the two destinations that fly to Oristano, and we had a good. . .a good response’’

LP2

Proprioception Coperception

Coperception

HP1 LP1

HP2

research questions created for the study (Miles & Huberman, 1994). To improve the reliability of our analysis, in the second round of coding, each author independently identified themes that emerged from the interview (Krippendorff, 2004). We then analyzed the transcripts in joint coding meetings, wherein we compared the independent codes and determined the final codes to use on each transcript. The provisional list of codes thus evolved (e.g., new codes were added and some codes were changed) throughout the data analysis process, based on ongoing comparisons between the newly analyzed transcripts and previously coded data (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). To analyze the potential actions afforded to hotels by social media, we measured instances of exteroception, proprioception, and coperception by identifying distinctive phrases used by our informants to refer specifically to their uses and intended uses of social media (Tables 5 and 6). Because these constructs are by definition perceptual in nature, we used measures based on the key informants’ beliefs and stated attitudes. Specifically, the use of descriptors such as ‘‘Facebook is,’’ ‘‘followers are,’’ or ‘‘Foursquare does,’’ which refer to the medium our informants use or are aware of, implies exteroception. The use of possessive adjectives such as ‘‘our food is,’’ ‘‘our hotel is,’’ and ‘‘our customer needs are,’’ when spoken in the context of a firm’s characteristics, implies proprioception. Finally, use of the first person plural verb form such as ‘‘we create,’’ ‘‘we intend to,’’ or ‘‘we use Facebook for,’’ when associated with an enacted, planned or possible social media initiative by the hotel, implies coperception. It is important to note that coperception does not imply action. Thus, when measuring actions, we used both specific activities and planned or possible behaviors (e.g., ‘‘we could run campaigns’’). We then inferred the hotel’s perception from the use of these phrases and the identified word constructions. Based on our interviews, we computed inter-rater reliability (k = 0.81) as an initial assessment of the coding scheme validity and the coding process reliability. Next, we discussed and negotiated disagreements, fine-tuning the coding procedure accordingly. With the coding scheme in place, we read the cases independently to form our own views of each affordance mentioned in the transcripts. During a second pass, we reviewed the transcripts and coded potential activities into action categories (e.g., persistent engagement). Although informants might have mentioned the same activity multiple


183

times and different informants might have referred to the same initiatives, we coded these mentions consistently to name them. After completing this second round of coding, we focused on identifying the most descriptive name for the identified class of similar initiatives. These were our identified affordances. Throughout the analysis, we also used informal follow-up e-mails and phone calls to clarify points of confusion and corroborate our emerging theories. These documents offered a way to crosscheck the interviews and control for retrospective bias.

Results Our analyses point to three social media affordances that are leveraged by tourism service providers to engage customers. In this section, we first discuss the process of new affordance recognition and exploitation. We then describe the three affordances introduced and effectively realized by our informants (Fig. 1). Because an affordance is a property of a relationship between an object and a social entity (Hutchby, 2001) that is well anchored to a specific domain (Majchrzak & Markus, 2012), we expected that a comparison of similar hotels that performed either well or poorly with regard to customer engagement would shed light on the patterns of social media affordance recognition. This expectation was confirmed, as high-performing hotels have at their disposal a wider array of action possibilities that have emerged from the relationship between social media technology features and hotel characteristics. Specifically, when asked to describe their strategies and the potential offered by social media within that context, low-performing hotels focused the bulk of their attention on exteroception and proprioception. In other words, they articulated the characteristics of the technology and, to a lesser extent, their own organizational idiosyncrasies; however, they generally did not emphasize an explanation of the relationships between the two factors (coperception). Conversely, high-performing hotels placed significant attention and emphasis on coperception and often described the intersection of social media functionalities with their own unique organizational characteristics. Not only did they engage in coperception more often (thirty-seven versus seven mentions), but the relative number of mentions (i.e., emphasis) of coperception was 2.47 times higher than that of low-performing hotels (Table 7). We found also that those organizations that engage in coperception realize what we term an action-reaction process. We use this term to highlight the interaction between the different steps of this process. An action-reaction is the back and forth process of coperception through which the staff in charge of digital marketing or the chief marketing officer gains clarity as to the tangible initiatives the affordance makes possible in the organization.

Fig. 1. Recognition and realization of affordances enabling customer engagement.

184


Table 7 Relative emphasis on proprioception, exteroception and coperception.

*

*

Hotels

Proprioception

HP1 LP1 HP2 LP2 HP LP

7 3 2 6 9 9

Exteroception 12% 12% 7% 40% 10% 22%

26 18 17 7 43 25

Coperception 44% 69% 56% 47% 48% 61%

26 5 11 2 37 7

44% 19% 37 % 13% 42% 17%

The rows add up to 100% and not (as by convention) the columns.

Table 8 Action-reaction process toward coperception. Steps

Description

Illustrative example

Initiative triggered by exteroception

The staff in charge of digital marketing or the chief marketing officer takes or proposes an initiative to utilize a specific social medium The staff begin utilizing social media after approval by other people After a period of trial and error, people involved redefine success, redefine what can be accomplished, and redefine their actions

‘‘We could do something on facebook’’

Approval triggered by proprioception Adjustment (balancing exteroception with proprioception)

Reflection (balancing exteroception with proprioception)

People involved reflect alone about the results

Evaluation (balancing exteroception with proprioception) Coperception

People involved evaluate the results Hotels begin to utilize social media and to incorporate in their way of doing business

‘‘Are we already working on it? Yes? Well, in that case, okay’’ ‘‘It took me two months to convince myself of a Facebook campaign...and now if someone suggests something innovative that I don’t know about, I ask them to explain it to me; I understand it and everything moves ahead more quickly. So, it was a sort of change of mentality in some ways’’ ‘‘We can’t allocate 50,000 € to Facebook, also because I don’t really get a Return on Investment’’ ‘‘I definitely have 6.000 fans on Facebook’’ ‘‘Yes, we have created a page on our website from which Facebook sent back an offer especially for people coming from Milan or Rome since these are the two destinations that fly into our city, and we had a good. . .a good response’’

Our exploratory analysis shows that the action-reaction process underpinning social media coperception is subdivided into five main steps: initiative; approval, adjustment, reflection and evaluation (Table 8). When all of these phases are accomplished, the hotels begin to incorporate social media in their way of doing business (coperception). When hotels are unable to move the action-reaction process in the direction of coperception, the affordance is not realized (Table 9). As defined earlier, an affordance represents an opportunity for action that emerges at the intersection of technology functionality and organizational characteristics (Majchrzak & Markus, 2012; Zammuto et al., 2007). For this reason, we did not expect all hotels in our sample to recognize the same opportunities. Our informants conceptualized a combined set of three classes of opportunities realized by their firms: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. The exploitation of social media affordances was widespread within our sample, with all firms referring to at least two affordances (Table 10). Next, we describe each affordance and highlight the associated enabling social media characteristics.

185

F. Cabiddu et al. / Annals of Tourism Research 48 (2014) 175–192 Table 9 Action-reaction process without coperception. Steps

Description

Illustrative example

Initiative triggered by exteroception

The staff in charge of digital marketing or the chief marketing officer takes or proposes an initiative to utilize a specific social medium The staff begin utilizing social media after approval by other people

‘‘I decided to open a fan page on facebook’’

Approval triggered by proprioception

Adjustment (balancing exteroception with proprioception)

Reflection (balancing exteroception with proprioception) Evaluation (balancing exteroception with proprioception) Coperception

After a period of trial and error, people involved redefine success, redefine what can be accomplished, and redefine their actions People involved reflect alone about the results People involved evaluate the results Hotels begin to utilize social media and to incorporate in their way of doing business

‘‘I talked about it with the general manager, but Facebook was still relatively new to her. We pointed out to her that I had created a profile on Facebook, but without going into detail’’ ‘‘We change the fan page on a company page’’

‘‘I don’t really know if the Facebook company page help us to improve our results’’ Nothing Nothing

Table 10 Affordance realized by firms. Hotels

Persistent engagement

Customized engagement

Triggered engagement

HP1 LP1 HP2 LP2 HP LP

1 6 1 2 2 8

0 0 4 2 4 2

1 4 2 0 3 4

20% 55% 5% 50% 12% 52%

0% 0% 21% 50% 11% 25%

20% 36% 11% 0% 15% 18%

Persistent engagement Persistent engagement represents the possibility of maintaining an ongoing dialogue with customers, even when they are not physically at the property. As the marketing director of the urban high performer1 (HP1) hotel stated: ‘‘What we try to do through social media is to bring a local clientele to the property by initiating a dialogue with [the local community].’’ The social media functionalities that enable this affordance are multi-media content creation and interactions in public or semi-public electronic venues. For example, connected hotels can post videos on a YouTube channel or images on Pinterest that allow customers to provide their feedback and impressions through commentaries or voting instruments (e.g., ‘‘Likes’’). The persistent engagement affordance addresses the immediacy of conversations, as well as their reach and scale, thus enabling a degree of real-time interaction that was previously simply unattainable by hotels. There is virtually no delay between an event occurrence—for example, a new floral arrangement is created in the lobby and its picture is posted on Pinterest—and the time at which it is shared with interested customers. However, this technology is not neutral and unchanging. Persistent engagement is available to tourism service firms that have conducive characteristics (e.g., a rooftop pool where local customers can gather for sunset aperitifs). The persistent engagement affordance was widely recognized among our informants. Respondents felt that persistent engagement allowed hotels to create lively relationships with their customer bases and to become part of conversations that would otherwise occur outside of the firm’s area of influence.

186


Customized engagement Customized engagement represents the possibility of interacting with customers based on prior knowledge of individual-level information. This information includes the customer’s preferences, past conversations, networks of relationships and influences. The value of customized engagement stems from the possibility to effectively personalize organizational communication and service, thus treating customers as individuals. An example of customized engagement was provided by the staff in charge of digital marketing at one high-performing leisure hotel: ‘‘Even customers who have stayed here, who have given permission to utilize their contact information; we can ask them to be friends on FB and therefore we can keep in touch with them and offer personalized service.’’ The social media functionalities that enable this affordance are those allowing personal profile visibility (e.g., Facebook pages) and personal connections (social graphs), preference monitoring (e.g., Foursquare check-ins, TripAdvisor reviews), and ongoing measurements of influence (e.g., Klout scores). For example, when a customer checks into a hotel, the staff has the ability to immediately see the previous check-ins, tips and reviews from this customer. This affordance is at the heart of some recent industry innovations. For example, while leveraging the ability to measure a person’s social media impact, the Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino launched an influencer reward program in the fall of 2010, The Klout Klub. During registration, The Palms might upgrade or provide special treatment to patrons with high Klout scores in an effort to receive favorable mentions in the future. Respondents felt that the customized engagement affordance increased the potential depth of interactions that hotels have historically experienced with their guests, as well as the a-prior knowledge of their guests’ individual interests and preferences. Triggered engagement Triggered engagement represents the possibility of instigating customer encounters based on an external, customer-initiated event. This affordance can help firms to develop innovative practices and discover new value-creation opportunities that are prompted by customer initiatives or customer-initiated interactions. As the staff in charge of digital marketing at one of the low-performing business hotels stated: ‘‘If a customer in the bar tweets, I can communicate with that person in real-time.’’ The social media functionalities that enable this affordance are social graphing instruments that support inter-user connectivity and permit activity tracking. Social media also allow hotels to set thresholds for monitoring individual activity and to be notified when certain events take place. For example, large venues that host conferences often monitor tweeter keywords referring to the property or the currently hosted conference in an effort to detect and react to valuable events and feedback (e.g., conference attendees that complain about room temperatures or slow Internet connectivity). Respondents felt that the triggered engagement affordance creates the opportunity for a degree of responsiveness that was previously simply unattainable by hotels. With triggered engagement, the hotel staff can spring into action immediately in response to a guest-initiated event. Discussion With this study, we have contributed to the growing literature on social media in tourism. Specifically, we used the affordance perspective to understand the unique features of social media in the tourism context (Chan & Guillet, 2011; Hudson & Thal, 2013). Thus, the attention is on customer engagement and the role of affordances in enabling it. In this section, we will first discuss our findings with respect to the differential propensities of high-performing and low-performing hotels to recognize affordances. We will then discuss the paradoxical effects that each of the three affordances identified by our informants might have on a firm’s customer engagement efforts. Previous research has suggested that the effects of social media are neither predictable nor unequivocal (Asur & Huberman, 2010). This non-deterministic notion is central to the affordance perspective and consistent with our results. We thus contribute to a theoretical understanding of this lack of mono-directional results, as we found that social media affordances were idiosyncratically distributed among


187

hotels within a homogenous set of classes. To simplify, while we were able to clearly categorize the initiatives described by our informants in three specific affordance classes (i.e., 1, 2, 3) the actual initiatives were different. For example, we can categorize these different initiatives in the permanent engagement affordance class: a) ‘‘What we try to do through the social media is to bring local clientele here, that is, from Milan, and start a dialogue with them’’ (the chief marketing officer of a LP hotel). b) ‘‘It [Facebook] has the same economic function as a classified in a newspaper. . ..in the sense that. . .I can get to a general market on FB’’ (the chief marketing officer of an HP hotel). We will also highlight fruitful areas of future research in this evolving area of scientific inquiry. Our results lend support to the notion that high-performing hotels have a superior ability to identify social media affordances through coperception. To clarify, high-performing hotels are systematically better able to identify opportunities for action in the social media space, compared to their lowperforming competitors. This finding corroborates the notion that coperception of affordances is a necessary prerequisite for action (Gibson., 1986). The innovation literature has shown that organizations search for innovations in a landscape of possible opportunities and then engage in a selection process to prioritize their actions (Tushman, Anderson, Quarterly, & Sep, 2007). Through a coperception of technological capabilities and the firm’s characteristics, an organization can articulate the affordance (Zammuto et al., 2007) and successfully implement a specific social media initiative. As we discussed earlier, social media represent a prototypical example of generative digital artifacts (Yoo, 2012). Specifically, these media are more extensible and less controllable than earlier generations of information technologies. The wider impacts that this dynamic technology push on tourism innovations still require investigation (Hjalager, 2010). Our exploratory findings regarding the different ways to engage customers demonstrate how flexibility is crucial to an understanding of the potential impacts of social media on innovation processes and organizational science. Under these circumstances, the willingness and ability to engage in experimentation and learning might be critical to success (Bærentsen & Trettvik, 2002). The mixed effects of social media affordances on customer engagement In this section, we will address each of the three social media affordances for customer engagement that were introduced by our informants and focus on what we still do not understand about these affordances and their effects. By treating the interaction between human action and technological capability as the unit of analysis (Hutchby, 2001), the affordance perspective will provide specific social media affordances (Majchrzak et al., 2013) in the context of customer engagement in a tourism domain. We will organize this discussion around each of the three affordances identified by our informants (persistent engagement, customized engagement and triggered engagement) and will describe the positive and negative aspects of each. Persistent engagement enables organizations to maintain an ongoing dialogue with customers by exploiting the connectivity, content creation and sharing functionalities of social media. Our informants mentioned initiatives that were grounded in the persistent engagement affordance to describe how they sought to establish dialogues with guests and prospective guests. Persistent engagement might have positive and negative effects on customer engagement. On the positive side, it might lead to rapid content co-creation as the staff and mainly customers contribute content to shared and semipublic social media venues. Moreover because persistent engagement relies on connectivity, content is created when customers comment on the firm’s postings or react to fellow customers’ contributions (Park & Allen, 2013). These interactions can develop a sense of community and shared purpose that heightens previous and potential guests’ emotional involvement, thus strengthening their ties with the organization (or the destination). The degree of co-creation affects customer satisfaction, loyalty and spending (Grissemann & Stokburger-Sauer, 2012). Furthermore, through persistent engagement, the firm can foster a deeper knowledge about the product, location, and surroundings in customers. This knowledge development can occur in both the quantity and quality dimensions. In the first dimension, persistent engagement leads to the availability of significant amounts of multimedia content (e.g., recipes for local drinks). In the second dimension, given its crowdsourced nature, the guestcreated content is generally considered to be less biased and more trustworthy (Sparks & Browning, 2011; Bronner & De Hoog, 2010).

188


While persistent engagement can be quite beneficial for organizations in the tourism industry, it might also prove detrimental. Persistent engagement is naturally a public action, and social media drastically limit the firm’s control over the content, thus allowing virtually unlimited openness and message sharing (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Ward & Ostrom, 2006). Management under these conditions is a novel challenge for organizations and is tantamount to management in a state of constant, real-time media exposure, in which every guest is a potential reporter and every action is almost immediately visible to a wide audience (Treem & Leonardi, 2012). Thus, the detriment and challenges of managing negative comments or persistent negativity and the ability to balance both the openness of content and the speed at which it disseminates through the community is critical. The potential scrutiny and publicity, the lack of control in this context, and the lack of tested principles for persistent engagement in social media (Wei et al., 2013) might lead organizations to a sort of paralysis. This is not unlike the phenomenon uncovered by organizational theory researchers whereby organizations that face uncertainty and the inability to properly evaluate the cost-benefits of their actions might become static and postpone investment decisions (Bourgeois & Eisenhardt, 1987). Although recent studies have provided an initial understanding of virtual communities (Wang et al., 2002) and the importance of customers as operant resources in value co-creation processes within the tourism industry (Hamilton & Alexander, 2013; Shaw, Bailey, & Williams, 2011), the mixed potential effects of the customer engagement affordance suggest that as tourism scholars, we should reexamine the established processes of customer communication and influence. Given that the evolution and widespread adoption of personal information technologies will continue unabated, we expect that the engagement in the context of brand communities (Brodie, Hollebeek, et al., 2011; Brodie, Roderick, et al., 2011) and the opening of brands to greater customer influence will only accelerate (Piccoli, 2010). Therefore, we should address research questions about the changing natures of firm-customer relationships. We need to ask the following questions: what are the roles of firms, customers and partners in developing the perception of a tourism brand? What are the roles of firms, customers and partners in generating demand for a specific firm’s product or for a destination? How should players in the tourism industry organize to best navigate the democratization of customer relationships? Customized engagement Customized engagement represents the possibility of interacting with customers on the basis of prior knowledge of individuals’ information through personal profile visibility, connections, preferences, and the influences of current and prospective customers. Customized engagement can have mixed effects on customer engagement. On the positive side, it may lead to achieving a high level of customization by monitoring the personal information posted by social media members and may help to obtain an in-depth understanding of each customer’s needs (Sigala, 2003). Previous studies have addressed the beneficial effects of service personalization (Ball, Coelho, & Vilares, 2006) and have shown that customers are more satisfied when an organization can better target its message through accurate recommendations and relevant content (Liang, Lai, & Ku, 2007). The wealth of personal data shared by customers through social media could be instrumental to the provision of tailored messages and services. Moreover, through customized engagement, a firm can reinforce a customer’s sense of identification with the firm’s own social media communities (Qu & Lee, 2011). While customized engagement can be quite beneficial for tourism organizations, it may also prove detrimental. Significant research has addressed the potential negative outcomes that stem from privacy concerns (Leung et al., 2013) when organizations are perceived as overstepping their boundaries (Spangler, Hartzel, & Gal-Or, 2006). This is a particularly difficult area to manage in social media because individuals volunteer personal information in public spaces, but an individual’s perception is that they are providing such information to ‘‘friends.’’ Consequently, the use of this information by hotels might hamper, rather than consolidate, their relationships and ability to engage with customers. As more and more interpersonal relationships move to the information space, the customized engagement affordance will increase both the potential rewards and risks of customer engagement in social media. Tourism scholars have an opportunity to be at the forefront of research in this area


189

because travel is a deeply emotional product and personalization has been a hallmark of hospitality and tourism since its inception. We need to ask the following questions: what are the perceived boundaries of personal information and personal information uses in service exchanges? Are there systematic differences between customer segments with respect to their propensities to welcome customized engagement efforts? How should a firm structure its internal and boundary-spanning operations to ensure the optimal management of customer relationships in public or semi-public social media venues? Triggered engagement Triggered engagement represents the possibility of instigating customer encounters that are based on an external, customer-initiated event by leveraging social graphing instruments and the ability to set and manage alerts. Triggered engagement could have mixed effects on customer engagement. On the positive side, it might improve firms’ abilities to interact with customers at crucial times during service encounters. An individual’s ability to make optimal decisions in a given situation (e.g., a service encounter) is limited by the limited capacity of the human senses to perceive environmental cues and events (Chauhan, 2007). Organizations that miss important environmental signals are more vulnerable to surprises and less able to satisfy customers’ needs (Zeithaml, Berry, & Parasuraman, 1993). We posit that social media could extend the boundaries of organizational perceptions through triggered engagement. Thus, social media could potentially serve as intelligence gathering and alerting mechanisms to help overcome the existing limitations of a firm’s perceptual systems. For example, the airline Jet Blue (Sebastian, 2013) and the restaurant chain Morton’s Steakhouse (Morphy, 2011) have recently gained significant attention from the press for their proactive uses of Twitter as a customer service alert system. Organizations that recognize and successfully leverage triggered engagement can minimize their reaction times and limit expectation-delivery gaps, thereby improving service (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Malhotra, 2002). Triggered engagement may also help tourism organizations to increase their anticipation capabilities and become more proactive because managers can analyze the gathered data over time to uncover trends and systematic problems (Leung et al., 2013). While triggered engagement could be a powerful opportunity for organizations that seek to be more proactive, it could also prove detrimental. Privacy concerns, such as those discussed for the customized engagement affordance, might also limit the effectiveness of triggered engagement. This concern is partially mitigated by the fact that triggered engagement might not always rely on personal information and would therefore limit the perceived sensitive nature of the transaction. However, proactive responses to information that a guest has not directly aimed at the firm might trigger a ‘‘big brother’’ effect and annoy (or enrage) customers. Moreover, given the uncertain information quality of public social media data, it might be hard to verify the credibility of a message (Buhalis, 1998), which could lead to operational and service failures. The mixed potential effects of the triggered engagement affordance suggest that tourism scholars have a great opportunity to re-evaluate the research on intelligence gathering and market orientation (Narver & Slater, 1990). Specifically, we need to understand how intelligence gathering changes when organizations have real-time access to customer communications. How should firms organize their intelligence gathering efforts? Beyond the information-gathering component, we need to understand how to optimally utilize the information without overstepping sensible boundaries. We also need to understand how different customer characteristics influence the perception of a ‘‘big brother’’ effect. Some customers might value an organization’s ability to serve them proactively, while others might perceive the organization as intrusive. What communications are likely to engender one or the other reaction? Conclusion In this study, we sought to contribute to the understanding of social media and social media use in the tourism industry. We have accomplished this by introducing the theoretical lens of affordance to this area of scholarly inquiry. Affordance is a powerful concept in analyses of socio-technical phenom-

190


ena and is new to research within the tourism context. Affordance enables the simultaneous understanding of technology and organizational characteristics, and social media use in the tourism industry represents an optimal context for the affordance perspective. We extended prior research on customer engagement (Wei et al., 2013) by examining the process of recognition (proprioception, exteroception and coperception) through which tourism organizations begin to engage customers in a social media context. Finally, we identify three distinctive social media affordances that support customer engagement in a tourism domain: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. Despite the generally positive attitudes of our informants, we argue that these affordances have paradoxical effects and could both hamper and contribute to customer engagement. This study also has its limitations. The first limitation is related to the research context. The qualitative and empirical data analysis was undertaken with data collected from a small number of companies. To further foster the multidisciplinary debate yet maintain a link with practice, future researchers may want to explore gathering data from a larger sample. This further research could refine or expand upon our findings in several ways. Larger scale survey research could be used to triangulate our data and statistically confirm our findings at a more general level. In addition, studies in different organizational or industry settings could potentially increase the applicability of the theoretical findings. In the discussion, we proposed theoretical arguments that extended our findings to provide a basis for future empirical research. While our work is theoretical in nature, it also has implications of interested to tourism and hospitality industry operators. Specifically, we contribute to understanding the dynamics of guest engagement through social media. Our findings underline the fact that operators must be keenly aware of the interplay between the technology features of social media and the goal-oriented actions. We believe that work in the area of social media holds great promise for tourism scholars who seek to advance our theoretical understanding of the role of social media in tourism ventures, as well as to make tangible contributions to management practices in this industry.

Acknowledgement Financial support from the Regional Law 7 Agoust 2007, n., 41 ‘‘Promozione della ricerca scientifica e dell’innovazione tecnologica in Sardegna’’ is gratefully acknowledged.

References Aral, S., Dellarocas, C., & Godes, D. (2013). Introduction to the special issue—social media and business transformation: A framework for research. Information Systems Research, 24, 3–13. Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2010). In B. A. Huberman, (Ed.), Predicting the future with social media. Computing, 1(1), 492–499. Bærentsen, K. B., & Trettvik, J. (2002). An activity theory approach to affordance. In NordiCHI 02 proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human computer interaction (pp. 51–60). Ball, D., Coelho, P. S., & Vilares, M. J. (2006). Service personalization and loyalty. Journal of Services Marketing, 20(6), 391–403. Banyai, M. (2012). Social media in travel, tourism, and hospitality: Theory, practice and cases. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(3), 1746–1747. Bourgeois, L. J., & Eisenhardt, K. M. (1987). Strategic decision processes in Silicon Valley: The anatomy of a ‘‘living dead’’. California Management Review, 30(May), 143–159. Bowden, J. L.-H. (2009). The process of customer engagement: A conceptual framework. The Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 17(1), 63–74. Brodie, R. J., Hollebeek, L. D., Juric, B., & Ilic, A. (2011). Customer engagement: Conceptual domain, fundamental propositions, and implications for research. Journal of Service Research, 14(3), 252–271. Brodie, Roderick J., Ilic, A., Juric, B., & Hollebeek, L. (2011). Consumer engagement in a virtual brand community: An exploratory analysis. Journal of Business Research, 66(1), 105–114. Bronner, F., & De Hoog, R. (2010). Vacationers and eWOM: Who posts, and why, where, and what? Journal of Travel Research, 50(1), 15–26. Buhalis, D. (1998). Strategic use of information technologies in the tourism industry. Tourism Management, 19(5), 409–421. Bynum Boley, B., Magnini, V. P., & Tuten, T. L. (2013). Social media picture posting and souvenir purchasing behavior: Some initial findings. Tourism Management, 37, 27–30. Cabiddu, F., Lui, T. W., & Piccoli, G. (2013). Managing value o-creation in the tourism industry. Annals of Tourism Research, 42, 86–107.


191

Chan, N. L., & Guillet, B. D. (2011). Investigation of social media marketing : How does the hotel industry in Hong Kong perform in marketing on social media websites ? Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 28(4), 37–41. Chauhan, C. (2007). The perception of perception. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 25(16), 2329–2330. Chemero, A. (2003). An outline of a theory of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181–195. Cox, C., Burgess, S., Sellitto, C., & Buultjens, J. (2009). The role of user-generated content in tourists’ travel planning behavior. Journal of Hospitality Marketing Management, 18(8), 743–764. Crocker, J. (2013). Going places with DoubleTree by Hilton: Digital engagement in the travel market. . DeSanctis, G., & Poole, M. S. (1994). Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: Adaptive Structuration Theory, 5(2), 121–147. Dholakia, U. M., & Durham, E. (2010). One café chain’s facebook experiment. Harvard Business Review, 88(3), 26. Edensor, T. (2006). Sensing tourist spaces. In C. Minca & T. Oakes (Eds.), Travels in paradox: Remapping tourism (pp. 23–45). Lanham, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.. Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. In A. M. Huberman & M. B. Miles (Eds.), Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532–550. Gibson, J. J. (1972). A theory of direct visual perception. In J. R. Royce & W. W. Rozeboom (Eds.), The psychology of knowing (pp. 215–240). Gordon and Breach. Gibson, J. J. (1979). In C. University (Ed.), The ecological approach to visual perception of experimental psychology human perception (Vol. 39, p. 332). Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. London: Routledge. Google (2013). Worldwide data. Google Analytics. Gorry, G. A., & Westbrook, R. A. (2011). Can you hear me now? Learning from customer stories. Business Horizons, 54(6), 575–584. Grissemann, U. S., & Stokburger-Sauer, N. E. (2012). Customer co-creation of travel services: The role of company support and customer satisfaction with the co-creation performance. Tourism Management, (0). Hamilton, K., & Alexander, M. (2013). Organic community tourism: A cocreated approach. Annals of Tourism Research, 42, 169–190. Haven, B. (2007). Marketing’s new key metric: Engagement (pp. 1–15). Cambridge, MA. Hjalager, A.-M. (2010). A review of innovation research in tourism. Tourism Management, 31(1), 1–12. Hollebeek, L. D. (2011). Demystifying customer brand engagement: Exploring the loyalty nexus. Journal of Marketing Management, 27(7–8), 785–807. Hudson, S., & Thal, K. (2013). The impact of social media on the consumer decision process: Implications for tourism marketing. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30(1–2), 156–160. Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology, 35(2), 441–456. Hvass, K. A., & Munar, A. M. (2012). The takeoff of social media in tourism. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 18(2), 93–103. Jarvenpaa, S. L. (1989). The effect of task demands and graphical format on information processing strategies. Management Science, 35(3), 285–303. Kane, G. C., Alavi, M., Labianca, G. (Joe), & Borgatti, S. P. (2014). What’s different about social media networks: a framework and research agenda. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 38(1). Kang, M., & Schuett, M. A. (2013). Determinants of sharing travel experiences in social media. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30(1–2), 93–107. Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. education (Vol. 79, p. 440). Sage. Kumar, V., Aksoy, L., Donkers, B., Venkatesan, R., Wiesel, T., & Tillmanns, S. (2010). Undervalued or overvalued customers: Capturing total customer engagement value. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 297–310. Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routine, meet flexible technologies: affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 147–167. Leonardi, P., & Barley, S. (2008). Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing. Information and Organization, 18(3), 159–176. Leung, D., Law, R., van Hoof, H., & Buhalis, D. (2013). Social media in tourism and hospitality: A literature review. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30(1–2), 3–22. Liang, T.-P., Lai, H.-J., & Ku, Y.-C. (2007). Personalized content recommendation and user satisfaction: Theoretical synthesis and empirical findings. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23(3), 45–70. Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2002). Issues and challenges in ubiquitous computing. Communications of the ACM, 45(12), 63–65. Majchrzak, A. (2009). Comment: Where is the theory in wikis? Management Information Systems Quarterly, 33(1), 18–21. Majchrzak, A., & Markus, L. (2012). Technology affordances and constraint theory of MIS. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Majchrzak, A., Faraj, S., Kane, J., & Azad, B. (2013). The contradictory influence of social media affordances as online knowledge sharing. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 38–55. Månsson, M. (2011). Mediatized tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), 1634–1652. Markus, M. L., & Silver, M. S. (2008). A foundation for the study of IT effects: A new look at DeSanctis and Poole’s concepts of structural features and spirit. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 9(10), 609–632. Michaels, C. F., & Carello, C. (1981). Direct Perception. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). In: S. Publications, (Ed.), Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (Vol. 2nd, p. 352) Beverly Hills Sage Publications. Mollen, A., & Wilson, H. (2010). Engagement, telepresence and interactivity in online consumer experience: Reconciling scholastic and managerial perspectives. Journal of Business Research, 63(9–10), 919–925. Morphy, E. (2011). The exquisite timing of Morton’s tweet response. Forbes. Retrieved from . Narver, J. C., & Slater, S. F. (1990). The effect of market orientation on business profitability. Journal of Marketing, 54(4), 20–35.

192


Park, S.-Y., & Allen, J. P. (2012). Responding to online reviews: Problem solving and engagement in hotels. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 54(1), 64–73. Park, S.-Y., & Allen, J. P. (2013). Responding to online reviews: Problem solving and engagement in hotels. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 54(1), 64–73. PhoCusWright (2011). Social media in travel 2011: traffic, activity and sentiment. Piccoli, G. (2010). Information technology and the future of hospitality brand management (pp. 1–12). PhoCusWright. Qu, H., & Lee, H. (2011). Travelers’ social identification and membership behaviors in online travel community. Tourism Management, 32(6), 1262–1270. Sashi, C. M. (2012). Customer engagement, buyer-seller relationships, and social media. Management Decision, 50(2), 253–272. Schmallegger, D., & Carson, D. (2008). Blogs in tourism: Changing approaches to information exchange. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 14(2), 99–110. Sebastian, M. (2013). Southwest and JetBlue exchange words on Twitter. Pr Daily News. Retrieved from . Shaw, G., Bailey, A., & Williams, A. (2011). Aspects of service-dominant logic and its implications for tourism management: Examples from the hotel industry. Tourism Management, 32(2), 207–214. Sigala, M. (2003). Developing and benchmarking internet marketing strategies in the hotel sector in Greece. Journal of Hospitality Tourism Research, 27(4), 375–401. Spangler, W. E., Hartzel, K. S., & Gal-Or, M. (2006). Exploring the privacy implications of addressable advertising and viewer profiling. Communications of the ACM, 49(5), 119–123. Stoffregen, T. A. (2003). Affordances as properties of the animal – environment system. System, 15(2), 115–134. Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. M. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Book (Vol. 2nd, p. 312). Sage. Treem, J. W., & Leonardi, P. M. (2012). Social media use in organizations: Exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association (Communicat., Vol. 36). Tushman, M. L., Anderson, P., Quarterly, A. S., & Sep, N. (2007). Technological discontinuities and organizational environments. Science, 31(3), 439–465. Tussyadiah, I. P., & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2009). Mediating tourist experiences access to places via shared videos. Annals of Tourism Research, 36(1), 24–40. Van Doorn, J., Lemon, K. N., Mittal, V., Nass, S., Pick, D., Pirner, P., & Verhoef, P. C. (2010). Customer engagement behavior: Theoretical foundations and research directions. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 253–266. Vivek, S. D., Beatty, S. E., & Morgan, R. M. (2010). Customer engagement: Exploring customer relationships beyond purchase. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 20(2), 122–146. Vosu, E., & Kaaristo, M. (2009). An ecological approach to contemporary rural identities: The case of tourism farms in south-east Estonia. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 3(1), 73–94. Wagner, C., & Majchrzak, A. (2007). Enabling customer-centricity using wikis and the wiki way. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23(3), 17–43. Wang, Y., Yu, Q., & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2002). Defining the virtual tourist community: Implications for tourism marketing. Tourism Management, 23(4), 407–417. Ward, J. C., & Ostrom, A. L. (2006). Complaining to the masses: The role of protest framing in customer-created complaint web sites. Journal of Consumer Research, 33(2), 220–230. Warren, W. H. (1984). Perceiving affordances: Visual guidance of stair climbing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10(5), 683–703. Wei, W., Miao, L., & Huang, Z. (2013). Customer engagement behaviors and hotel responses. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 33, 316–330. Williams, E. (2009). Evan Williams on listening to twitter users. TED Conference. Retrieved from . Xiang, Z., & Gretzel, U. (2010). Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism Management, 31(2), 179–188. Yoo, Youngjin., Boland, R. J., Jr., Lyytinen, K., & Majchrzak, A. (2012). Organizing for innovation in the digitized world. Organization Science, 23(5), 1398–1408. Yoo, K.-H., & Gretzel, U. (2011). Influence of personality on travel-related consumer-generated media creation. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 609–621. Yoo, Y. (2012). Digital materiality and the emergence of an evolutionary science of the artificial. In P. M. Leonardi, B. Nardi, & J. Kallinikos (Eds.), Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zammuto, R. F., Griffith, T. L., Majchrzak, A., Dougherty, D. J., & Faraj, S. (2007). Information technology and the changing fabric of organization. Organization Science, 18(5), 749–762. Zeithaml, V. A., Berry, L. L., & Parasuraman, A. (1993). The nature and determinants of customer expectations of service. Journal of the academy of Marketing Science, 21(1), 1–12. Zeithaml, V. A., Parasuraman, A., & Malhotra, A. (2002). Service quality delivery through web sites: A critical review of extant knowledge. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 30(4), 362–375.