Abstract
With the advent of online social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, negative messages about a product or an enterprise can spread faster, reach a greater degree of dissemination, and will be able to influence the attitude and behaviour of customers. Quickly, a serious amount of economic damage can arise caused by such negative word of mouth. This paper examines various strategies on how firms can adequately cope with and react to negative word of mouth in online environments. For this, a diffusion model is presented that incorporates not only the content of a message and aging but also the phenomenon of triggering older messages. To evaluate the activities and reactions both technical and economic indicators are used. The results show that it is advantageous for firms to invest more time in designing a good counter message than to react as quickly as possible or to use more seeds. In addition, reacting with a big number of seeds can even cause more damage than just doing nothing. In some situations, it is therefore beneficial for firms not to take any measure.
First Page
2136
Last Page
2152
Recommended Citation
Beşer, Alper; Lackes, Richard; and Siepermann, Markus, (2017). "SILENCE IS GOLDEN – WHEN FIRMS SHOULD REACT TO NEGATIVE WORD OF MOUTH". In Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Guimarães, Portugal, June 5-10, 2017 (pp. 2136-2152). ISBN 978-989-20-7655-3 Research Papers.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2017_rp/136