Abstract

Social media, a new form of electronic media for social engagement and interaction, are becoming important means of communication and valuable assets for both individuals and organizations. Used by millions of online consumers and many leading business practitioners, social media, however, has remained largely unexplored by business researchers. This study, therefore, seeks to broaden our understanding by investigating weblog success in achieving readership popularity. Drawing on the techno-social perspective of media and the cognitive psychology concepts of mindfulness and mindlessness, we conjecture that readership popularity of a social media site is associated with its technology-dependent, content-dependent and context-dependent characteristics. To validate the proposed research model, a set of very popular weblogs will be studied over a period of time. We will adopt a methodology which includes an objective evaluation of the sites and a survey of individual readers.

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