How to Engage Consumers in Social TV Websites
Social media are a great source of knowledge for companies. However, the active involvement of consumers on the Web must be stimulated: consumers must feel stimulated, inspired and involved with others peers. In other words, they must feel socially engaged, so that they become really active social media users. Although men seem to be more sensitive to the 'social' question with respect to women, personal attributes are not enough to explain the difference across consumers. Also, the company must offer differentiated contexts to allow consumers to easily connect and share the sense of community.
A paper by Margherita Pagani (Department of Marketing) and Alessandra Mirabello (Accenture) entitled The Influence of Personal and Social-Interactive Engagement in Social TV Web Sites, forthcoming in International Journal of Electronic Commerce (vol. 16, issue 2, pp. 41-68; doi 10.2753/JEC1086-4415160203), faces this question by showing the importance of experiential engagement in the context of social media, particularly in social TV websites.
Social commerce is a new form of e-commerce, which uses social media networks to support user interaction and user contribution to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services. All the social technologies are incrementally changing the consumer's involvement and the existing relations among users on the Web. Social media allow consumers to freely discuss the brand on the brand's own site, so that consumers themselves become a trusted information source for each other, and this knowledge exchange complements now the information from brand advertising. Accordingly, the novelty and the popularity of Internet television systems, such as YouTube, iTunes, AmazonUnbox or Hulu, make the traditional Internet and TV model change as well as the marketing strategies whereby advertisers need to consider new models for interaction and social services.
Through this empirical research, Pagani and Mirabello focus on the role of consumer engagement since it can be a good predictor of social media usage and thus it can suggest interesting avenues to develop new platforms enabling customers to connect with one another and encourage consumer engagement. It is not surprising that consumers utilize differently the Web and they show sometimes passive, sometimes active behaviors.
As first step, the authors disentangle personal and social-interactive engagement: the first one is typically influenced by the individual qualities, while the second one is driven by the enjoyment of participating and socializing online and by the feeling of Web community embeddedness.
As main purpose, the paper tests whether the two types of engagement (personal and social) determine the passive or active consumers' use of social media and whether some social media features might lead to different involvement. In doing so, Pagani and Mirabello collected data from an online survey distributed across a sample of more than 800 social media users, belonging to different social TV sites such as Joost, Justin Tv, Veetle Tv, Hulu and others, across United States and Europe.
The interesting results confirm that experiential engagement drives the consumers' usage of social media. The results of this research highlight that personal and social interactive engagement drive active and passive consumers' behavior and therefore enable (or hamper) the sense of community, the intrinsic enjoyment, and the participation experience of different users in social TV websites settings.
Personal engagement has a positive influence on active and passive use, meaning that if the engagement with the content is high, the user prefers to share experience with peers. Similarly, the social-interactive engagement affects positively both types of engagement and has great opportunity for social commerce. Moreover, gender also seems to have an additive effect: males are even more sensitive than women to the engagement influence. However, engagement must be stimulated: comparing different sources of TV websites the results clearly demonstrate that the participation is strongly enhanced by the tools offered within the Website to socialize and communicate.