With the emergence of social media and Web 2.0, broadcasting in the online environment has evolved into a new form of marketing due to the much broader reach enabled by information technology. This paper quantifies the effect of artists' broadcasting activities on a well-known social media site for music, MySpace, on music sales. We employ a panel vector autoregression model to investigate the interrelationship between broadcasting promotions in social media and music sales, while controlling for influential factors such as advertising in traditional media channels, album prices, new music releases, user-generated content, and artist popularity. We characterize two types of broadcast messages in the MySpace context, personal and automated . We find that broadcasting in social media has a significant effect on sales even after controlling for the aforementioned factors, and more important, the effect mainly comes from personal messages rather than automated messages. We also show that the timing and content of personal messages play a role in affecting sales. Our findings point to the importance of conducting captivating conversations with customers in social media marketing.
In this study, we focus on the factors that influence online innovation community members' continued participation in the context of open source software development (OSSD) communities. Prior research on continued participation in online communities has primarily focused on social interactions among members and benefits obtained from these interactions. However, members of these communities often play different roles, which have been examined extensively, albeit in a separate stream of research. This study attempts to bridge these two streams of research by investigating the joint influence of community response and members' roles on continued participation. We categorize OSSD community members into users and modifiers and empirically examine the differential effects of community response across these roles. By analyzing a longitudinal data set of activities in the discussion forums of more than 300 OSSD projects, we not only confirm the positive influence of community response on members' continued participation but also find that community response is more influential in driving the continuance behavior of users than that of modifiers. In addition, this research highlights the importance of modifiers, a key subgroup of OSSD participants that has been largely overlooked by prior research.
Online intermediaries have recently started offering database services to donors and certification services to nonprofit organizations through the Internet. We conceptualize a donor-to-nonprofit (D2N) marketplace as an online intermediary that offers these two services and examine its effect on fund-raising strategies of nonprofit organizations using an analytical model based on spatial competition under incomplete information with donor search. We characterize the signaling equilibria where certification of quality conveys information about organizational effectiveness in generating socially valuable services. Interestingly, the emergence of the D2N marketplace may lead to a drop in total net fund-raising revenues in the market, despite the fact that the intermediary's database service eliminates search costs for some donors. We also explain why such a marketplace may deliberately lower the accuracy of its certification process.
In this paper, we consider the problem of generating effective information- gathering, communication, and decision-making (lCD) strategies for a distributed expert problem-solving (DEPS) system. We focus on the special case of a dual-processor DEPS system and present a decision-theoretic model that enables the characterization of feasible, efficient, and optimal lCD strategies. In view of the tremendous amount of computing needed to generate optimal strategies for problems of practical size, we develop useful heuristic procedures for constructing high-quality efficient lCD strategies. We illustrate the use of the model and the solution procedure through an example.
This article presents a systematic methodology for requirements analysis in database design. The procedure begins with an interview with the user/decision maker. The responses collected during the interview are analyzed to represent, by means of a diagram, the data and processing requirements for the activity under consideration. The diagram uses two fundamental constructs, events and states, as building blocks. It depicts any temporal or causal relationships, as well as logical operators, that may be present in the process underlying the activity. The representation is compact and easy to follow. An experimental study is described to illustrate the applicability of the methodology.