Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer brands the ability to spread positive electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) for the purposes of building awareness and acquiring new customers. However, the credibility of eWOM is threatened of late as marketers increasingly try to manipulate eWOM practices on SNS. A greater understanding of eWOM credibility is necessary to better enable marketers to leverage true consumer engagement by generating credible peer-to-peer communications. Yet, to date there is no one framework synthesising which factors constitute eWOM credibility in the online environment. This paper revisits the word of mouth credibility literature and proposes a new credibility framework -the 4Cs of eWOM Credibility: Community, Competence, Content, and Consensus.

Purpose This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model. Findings Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses. Research limitations/implications The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites. Practical implications The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors. Originality/value This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.

The consumer purchasing journey has evolved. The current paper revisits the practitioner-led "Moments of Truth" model used by a number of successful multinationals (initially Procter & Gamble and subsequently Google). "Moments of Truth" (MOT) describe key instances of contact between a potential customer and a brand.The new model integrates variables such as shared brand experience and searchable electronic word of mouth (e-WOM). This short paper establishes the cycle of e-WOM influence as recommendations are shared and searched among digitally connected consumers, and explains how marketers can successfully manage these MOTs.

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This chapter combines two streams of scholarship—social media marketing and influence, and market organization—to examine two case studies of patient activism in the context of Irish drug pricing. The first is the provision of Orkambi, a drug for cystic fibrosis, which was approved in Ireland after eleven months of state/pharma negotiations held in a context of public debate and social media campaigning by people living with cystic fibrosis, their loved ones, and their advocates. The second case concerns the provision of Spinraza, a drug for patients with spinal muscular atrophy. In each case the chapter identifies key actors and tracks their social media activity with a view to identifying key turning points in the debate, relational links, and shifts. Ultimately the goal is to understand how activist organizations and individuals organize and reorganize the pharmaceutical market and the collective good through their actions and interactions on social media.