I examine a sample of articles from the German online news magazine Spiegel Online and find that controversial content is shared less often on Facebook while it is actively discussed on discussion boards. These results are important for a number of decisions.
First, most content providers start to pay less attention to discussion boards as interaction platforms with their readers or even abolish them and encourage their readers to switch to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ like the technology news provider Re/code or the German online newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Süddeutsche Zeitung restricted, for example, the commenting function to three articles per day13. The readers were then very displeased about this decision (Breithut 2014).
This research also contributes to the debate about anonymous communication on the Internet (Davenport 2002). Many content providers require registration with real names instead of pseudonyms these days and many news magazines are rethinking the commenting functions on their websites (Pérez-Pena 2010). The results show that under the condition of anonymity, the users are more willing to discuss controversial topics and openly reveal their opinion. From a global societal perspective, it is important that the critical topics are not getting lost in the spiral of silence. As argued by the advocates of identity disclosure, people tend to say nasty and ugly things or behave aggressively when they feel unobserved or their behavior is not accountable to their personalities. But I believe it is necessary for the well-being of democracy and the formation of a free public opinion that people can voice their opinions also under the condition of anonymity. Social media teams should, for example, sort out user comments that violate the netiquette. The strategy of some content providers to require registrations with real names – as required by the most social media – is not appropriate and hinders an open discourse. Under the non-anonymous sharing mechanisms, people therefore tend to share rather conformist content.
13 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kolumne/ihre-sz-lassen-sie-uns-diskutieren-1.2095271
This study is not without limitations. First, the results are based on observational data from only one magazine and the generalizability of the findings should be tested for other content providers and other social media. Second, there might be a selection bias. The users of discussion boards could substantially differ from users that participate in social media and thus the differences with respect to online conversations might be due to user heterogeneity. Third, the results of the study are not necessarily causal. To address these shortcomings, future research might analyze data from different content providers, test the generalizability of the findings, and conduct laboratory experiments to test the causality of the effects.
5 PAYING INCENTIVES FOR SOCIAL SHARING
145.1 Introduction
This study analyzes how the payment of incentives affects social sharing, particularly the willingness to make referrals and writing of consumer reviews. As discussed in Section 2.7.9, some online and offline retailers and service providers pay incentives for the consumers to generate more social sharing occurrences. While most of the research on social sharing incentivization focuses on the impact of different incentives on making referrals (Jin and Huang 2014; Wirtz et al. 2013), this study addresses how the incentive may generally affect (1) the likelihood to refer, (2) overall content evaluation and (3) writing of a consumer review as a particular form of social sharing messages.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that paying incentives motivates the customers to be more likely to refer the content and to put more effort into the writing of reviews. The theory on money-market relationship supports this idea (Fiske 1992; Heyman and Ariely 2004), as incentives might dissolve social relationship norms. On the other hand, as shown in several studies from the field of behavioral economics (for summary, see e.g. Kamenica (2012)), paying incentives could backfire on the companies’ intentions. The customers might think that a company is trying to bribe him or her into generating a positive word of mouth so that the customers might be less willing to refer the content or to write a consumer review or might even write less positive reviews. Moreover, the customers might indeed feel that the company rewards them for their service and consequently write positively biased reviews, which is not so bad for the company at first glance. However, in the long run, other customers might become aware of such paid reviews (as they are written in a more professional manner) and will gradually lose confidence in those reviews. This would threaten or even ruin the entire concept of word of mouth marketing.
The following three field experiments address therefore this question. In all three studies, the customers were asked to evaluate the services of a car dealership and of a university cafeteria.
Hereby, the subjects in the treatment group received a monetary incentive for their next purchase;
the subjects in a control group were not rewarded for their service. As discussed in Section 2.2, social sharing is important in any purchase decision, but it is especially crucial in the service context, because services represent information goods for which their quality judgement is not possible before consumption (Nelson 1970).
The Section 5 is structured as follows. First, I present the conceptual model and derive hypotheses. Afterwards, I describe the experimental design and report the results from the three field studies. Finally, I discuss the overall findings.
14Parts of this study are presented as Heimbach and Kim (2016) “The Effects of Monetary Incentives on Word of Mouth Generation” on the 45th Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), in Oslo, Norway, 24-27 May 2016.
5.2 Hypotheses Development
As discussed in Section 2.2, consumers’ decision to engage in social sharing is a „function of the cost/ benefit analysis by the potential influencer“ (Gatignon and Robertson 1986). Previous research identifies motives, such as showing professional expertise, helping others, pursuing self-enhancement motives (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Sundaram et al. 1998) and also simply venting negative emotions related to the experience with the content (Berger 2014). The costs related to the decision to engage in social sharing are time, effort spent on and social costs of communication (Gatignon and Robertson 1986). Therefore, people who engage in social sharing constitute a population subsample for which the benefits outweigh the costs. Consequently, if companies are paying incentives in exchange for making referrals and writing reviews, they change the cost-benefit ratio of consumers and thus they will also attract additional consumers who would not have engaged in social sharing otherwise. Thus:
Hypothesis 1: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they are more willing to engage in social sharing.
The effects of paying incentives on the overall evaluation and on the message valence are unclear. It mainly depends on which types of customers will be attracted to engage in social sharing, if any. The previous research on social sharing messages reports that only consumers that are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with the content generate such messages (Anderson 1998; Bowman and Narayandas 2001; Mazzarol et al. 2007). People who exhibit moderate levels of satisfaction are rather not willing to engage in social sharing. If companies are paying incentives, they also might attract customers with moderate levels of satisfaction. This would decrease consequently the average evaluation and valence, if the groups of customers who engage in social sharing are extremely satisfied and this will increase the average evaluation and valence if the customers are generally rather unsatisfied. If the customers who engage in social sharing are equally dispersed, the overall evaluation would stay unchanged. Table 27 shows these hypothetical scenarios. Consider three customers who would share their content evaluation under an unpaid condition (1 = very bad, 5 = very good). Assuming that a forth customer with a moderate evaluation would be willing to give an evaluation; we can observe different outcomes with respect to the new overall evaluation. These scenarios assume, however, that the payment of incentives does not influence customers who would share their evaluations without receiving monetary or non-monetary rewards. However, the very offering of a reward could alienate extremely satisfied customers because they might feel themselves offended and bribed. Also, it could be possible that unsatisfied customers under the paid-condition might feel being compensated for the poor content quality and evaluate less critical. Therefore, I formulate three competing hypotheses:
Hypothesis 2a: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, the likelihood to refer and the average evaluation will decrease.
Hypothesis 2b: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, the likelihood to refer and the average evaluation will increase.
Hypothesis 2c: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, the likelihood to refer and the average evaluation will remain unchanged.
Customers’ evaluation under the unpaid condition
Mean evaluation + customer with moderate level of evaluation
Evaluation change
(1,1,1) (1+1+1)/3 = 1 +3 (1+1+1+3)/4 = 1.5
(5,5,5) (5+5+5)/3 = 5 +3 (5+5+5+3)/4 = 4.5
(1,3,5) (1+3+5)/3 = 3 +3 (1+3+5+3)/4 = 3
Table 27. Calculation example
While investigating how the incentives affect human behavior, one should consider that human social interactions take place under two modes: money-market and social-market relationships (Fiske 1992; Heyman and Ariely 2004). Money market is associated with business transactions where money is usually involved in immediate exchange of content of similar values. In contrast, social market refers to friendship relationships where the transactions do not involve money.
Heyman and Ariely (2004) show in three laboratory experiments that individual willingness to help increases with the increasing payment level (money-market). Thus, customers may put more effort into the writing because they are rewarded for their service, leading to:
Hypothesis 3: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they write longer messages.
Hypothesis 4: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they write more readable messages.
Hypothesis 5: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they write two-sided messages.
While putting more effort into the writing on one hand, the professionality within the money-market may push back all emotionality which is usually perceptible in a message, i.e. incentives might prime customers to market exchange norms and see product evaluations as a kind of business transactions. Thus:
Hypothesis 6: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they write less emotionally.
Hypothesis 7: If the customers receive a monetary incentive, they write more factual messages.
These hypotheses are then tested in the following three field experiments.