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This study examines the dynamic relationships between firm-generated content (FGC), user-generated content (UGC), traditional media, and offline light vehicle sales. Data were collected from the official Facebook and Twitter pages of 30 U.S. car brands from 2009 to 2015. Our results suggest that Facebook and Twitter are heterogeneous in terms of their effect on offline vehicle sales; FGC is more effective than UGC for influencing offline light vehicle sales; viral impressions from Facebook and Twitter are essential, although effects vary for the various social media platforms, FGC, and UGC; and a firm’s marketing efforts and UGC both have a long-term effect on sales, with the long-term effect of a firm’s marketing efforts outlasting that of UGC. We also documented the within-Twitter synergistic effect between FGC and UGC for offline car sales and cross-channel substitution relationships between FGC and both Facebook and traditional media and Twitter and traditional media. Our study implies that managers who attempt to maximize multichannel marketing for offline sales of durable goods should consider (1) the nature of each platform, (2) the number of potential audiences each platform can reach, and (3) the user basis of each platform.

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User-generated content (UGC) at online platforms serves as a critical data source in the service industry as it can be accessed in real-time and reflect customers' changing focus on service aspects. Drawing upon the importance-performance analysis framework, we propose a methodology to derive service quality metrics by utilizing the heterogeneous sources of UGC with customized text mining techniques and examining the effectiveness of these quality metrics. UGC data related to major U.S. airlines were collected from non-social media (Skytrax) and social media platforms (Twitter) from 2014 to June 2019. The results suggest that the topic distributions and the UGC-derived weighted service quality (WSQ, which represents the weighted sentiment based on service aspects) significantly vary between the non-social media and social media platforms. In addition, the WSQ scores derived from two platforms are significant indicators of the objective service quality measurement (i.e., airline quality rating) with stronger predictive power from the social media derived WSQ score.