Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
research-article

Deciphering word-of-mouth in social media: Text-based metrics of consumer reviews

Published: 10 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, social media provide an unparalleled platform for consumers to share their product experiences and opinions through word-of-mouth (WOM) or consumer reviews. It has become increasingly important to understand how WOM content and metrics influence consumer purchases and product sales. By integrating marketing theories with text mining techniques, we propose a set of novel measures that focus on sentiment divergence in consumer product reviews. To test the validity of these metrics, we conduct an empirical study based on data from Amazon.com and BN.com (Barnes & Noble). The results demonstrate significant effects of our proposed measures on product sales. This effect is not fully captured by nontextual review measures such as numerical ratings. Furthermore, in capturing the sales effect of review content, our divergence metrics are shown to be superior to and more appropriate than some commonly used textual measures the literature. The findings provide important insights into the business impact of social media and user-generated content, an emerging problem in business intelligence research. From a managerial perspective, our results suggest that firms should pay special attention to textual content information when managing social media and, more importantly, focus on the right measures.

References

[1]
Abbasi, A., Chen, H. C., and Salem, A. 2008. Sentiment analysis in multiple languages: Feature selection for opinion classification in web forums. ACM Trans. Info. Syst. 26, 3, 1--34.
[2]
Airoldi, E., Bai, X., and Padman, R. 2006. Markov blankets and meta-heuristics search: Sentiment extraction from unstructured texts. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 3932, 167--187.
[3]
Andreas, K. M. and Michael, H. 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Bus. Horizons 53, 1, 59--68.
[4]
Antweiler, W. and Frank, M. Z. 2004. Is all that talk just noise? The information content of internet stock message boards. J. Finance 59, 3, 1259--1294.
[5]
Asquith, P. and Mullins, D. 1986. Equity issues and offering dilution. J. Finan. Econ. 15, 1--2, 61--89.
[6]
Bagnoli, M., Beneish, M. D., and Watts, S. G. 1999. Whisper forecasts of quarterly earnings per share. J. Account. Econ. 28, 1, 27--50.
[7]
Bikhchandani, S., Hirshleifer, D., and Welch, I. 1992. A theory of fads, fashion, custom, and cultural-change as informational cascades. J. Polit. Econ. 100, 5, 992--1026.
[8]
Boiy, E. and Moens, M. F. 2009. A machine learning approach to sentiment analysis in multilingual web texts. Infor. Retriev. 12, 5, 526--558.
[9]
Chaney, P. K., Devinney, T. M., and Winer, R. S. 1991. The impact of new product introductions on the market value of firms. J. Business 64, 4, 573--610.
[10]
Chen, H. 2010. Business and market intelligence 2.0. IEEE Intell. Syst. 25, 6, 2--5.
[11]
Chen, Y. and Xie, J. 2008. Online consumer review: Word-of-mouth as a news element of marketing communication mix. Manag. Sci. 54, 3, 477--491.
[12]
Chen, Y., Wang, Q., and Xie, J. 2011. Online social interactions: A natural experiment on word-of-mouth versus observational learning. J. Market. Res. To appear.
[13]
Chevalier, J. and Goolsbee, A. 2003. Measuring prices and price competition online: Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Quant. Market. Econ. 1, 203--222.
[14]
Chevalier, J. A. and Mayzlin, A. 2006. The effect of word-of-mouth on sales: Online book reviews. J. Market. Res. 43, 3, 345--354.
[15]
Chung, W. 2009. Automatic summarization of customer reviews: An integrated approach. In Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems.
[16]
Das, S., Martinez-Jerez, A., and Tufano, P. 2005. eInformation: A clinical study of investor discussion and sentiment. Financ. Manag. 34, 3, 103--137.
[17]
Das, S. R. and Chen, M. Y. 2007. Yahoo! for Amazon: Sentiment extraction from small talk on the web. Manag. Science 53, 9, 1375--1388.
[18]
Dave, K., Lawrence, S., and Pennock, D. M. 2003. Mining the peanut gallery: Opinion extraction and semantic classification of product reviews. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the World Wide Web.
[19]
Dellarocas, C. 2003. The digitization of word-of-mouth: Promise and challenges of online feedback mechanisms. Manag. Science 49, 10, 1407--1424.
[20]
Dellarocas, C., Zhang, X. Q., and Awad, N. F. 2007. Exploring the value of online product reviews in forecasting sales: The case of motion pictures. J. Interact. Market. 21, 4, 23--45.
[21]
Duan, W. J., Gu, G., and Whinston, A. B. 2008. Do online reviews matter? An empirical investigation of panel data. Decision Support Syst. 45, 4, 1007--1016.
[22]
Efron, M. 2004. Cultural orientation: Classifying subjective documents by vocation analysis. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Style and Meaning in Language, Art, and Music.
[23]
Esuli, A. and Sebastiani, F. 2006. SentiWordNet: A publicly available lexical resource for opinion mining. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.
[24]
Forman, C., Ghose, A., and Wiesenfeld, B. 2008. Examining the relationship between reviews and sales: The role of reviewer identity disclosure in electronic markets. Info. Syst. Res. 19, 3, 291--313.
[25]
Gentzkow, M. and Shapiro, J. M. 2006, Media bias and reputation. J. Political Econ. 114, 2, 280--316.
[26]
Gao, Y., Mao, C. X., and Zhong, R. 2006. Divergence of opinion and long-term performance of initial public offerings. J. Financ. Res. 29, 1, 113--129.
[27]
Ghose, A. and Ipeirotis, P. G. Forthcoming. Estimating the helpfulness and economic impact of product reviews: Mining text and reviewer characteristics. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.
[28]
Godes, D. and Mayzlin, D. 2004. Using online conversations to study word-of-mouth communication. Market. Science 23, 4, 545--560.
[29]
Godes, D., Mayzlin, D., Chen, Y., Das, S., Dellarocas, C., Pfeiffer, B., Libai, B., Sen, S., Shi, M. Z., and Verlegh, P. 2005. The firm's management of social interactions. Market. Letters 16, 3-4, 415--428.
[30]
Hair, J., Anderson, R., Tatham, R., and Black, W. 1995. Multivariate Data Analysis, Prentice-Hall.
[31]
Herr, P. M., Kardes, F. R., and Kim, J. 1991. Effects of word-of-mouth and product-attribute information on persuasion—An accessibility-diagnosticity perspective. J. Consum. Res. 17, 4, 454--462.
[32]
Holthausen, R. and Leftwich, R. 1986. The effect of bond rating changes on common stock prices. J. Financ. Econo. 17, 1, 57--89.
[33]
Hotelling, H. 1929. Stability in competition. Econ. J. 39, 153, 41--57.
[34]
Hu, Y. and Li, W. J. 2011. Document sentiment classification by exploring description model of topical terms. Comput. Speech Lang. 25, 2, 386--403.
[35]
Kahn, B. and Meyer, R. 1991. Consumer multiattribute judgments under attribute uncertainty. J. Consum. Res. 17, 4, 508--522.
[36]
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47, 3, 263--291.
[37]
Kennedy, A. and Inkpen, D. 2006. Sentiment classification of movie reviews using contextual valence shifters. Comput. Intell. 22, 2, 110--125.
[38]
Kullback, S. and Leibler, R. A. 1951. On information and sufficiency. Annals Math. Stat. 22, 1, 79--86.
[39]
Lavrusik, V. 2011. Facebook like button takes over share button functionality. http://mashable.com/2011/02/27/facebook-like-button-takes-over-share-button-functionality/.
[40]
Li, N. and Wu, D. D. 2010. Using text mining and sentiment analysis for online forums hotspot detection and forecast. Decision Support Syst. 48, 2, 354--368.
[41]
Li, X. X. and Hitt, L. M. 2008. Self-selection and information role of online product reviews. Info. Syst. Res. 19, 4, 456--474.
[42]
Lin, J. H. 1991. Divergence measures based on the shannon entropy. IEEE Trans. Info. Theory 37, 1, 145--151.
[43]
Liu, B., Hu, M., and Cheng, J. 2005. Opinion observer: Analyzing and comparing opinions on the web. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the World Wide Web. 342--351.
[44]
Liu, Y. 2006. Word-of-mouth for movies: Its dynamics and impact on box office revenue. J. Market. 70, 3, 74--89.
[45]
Liu, Y., Chen, Y., Lusch, R., Chen, H., Zimbra, D., and Zeng, S. 2010. User-generated content on social media: Predicting new product market success from online word-of-mouth. IEEE Intell. Syst. 25, 6, 8--12.
[46]
Liu, Y., Huang, X., An, A., and Yu, X. 2007. ARSA: A sentiment-aware model for predicting sales performance using blogs. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 607--614.
[47]
Mason, C. H. and Perreault, W. D. 1991. Collinearity, power, and interpretation of multiple-regression analysis. J. Market. Res. 28, 3, 268--280.
[48]
Mishne, G. 2005. Experiments with mood classification in blog posts. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Stylistic Analysis of Text for Information Access.
[49]
Mishne, G. 2006. Multiple ranking strategies for opinion retrieval in blogs. In Proceedings of the Text Retrieval Conference.
[50]
Mizerski, R. W. 1982. An attribution explanation of the disproportionate influence of unfavorable information. J. Consum. Res. 9, 3, 301--310.
[51]
Mullainathan, S. and Shleifer, A. 2005. The market for news. Amer. Econ. Rev. 95, 1031--1053.
[52]
Nasukawa, T. and Yi, J. 2003. Sentiment analysis: Capturing favorability using natural language processing. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Capture. 70--77.
[53]
Nigam, K. and Hurst, M. 2004. Towards a robust metric of opinion. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text. 598--603.
[54]
Pang, B. and Lee, L. 2005. Seeing stars: Exploiting class relationships for sentiment categorization with respect to rating scales. In Proceedings of the Meeting of the Association for Computer Learning. 115--124.
[55]
Pang, B. and Lee, L. 2008. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundat. Trends Info. Retriev. 2, 1--2, 1--135.
[56]
Pang, B., Lee, L., and Vaithyanathan, S. 2002. Thumbs up? Sentiment classification using machine learning techniques. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 79--86.
[57]
Popescu, A. M. and Etzioni, O. 2005. Extracting product features and opinions from reviews. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 339--346.
[58]
Sarvary, M. and Parker, P. 1997. Marketing information: A competitive analysis. Market. Science 16, 1, 24--38.
[59]
Subasic, P. and Huettner, A. 2001. Affect analysis of text using fuzzy semantic typing. IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst. 9, 4, 483--496.
[60]
Subrahmanian, V. S. and Reforgiato, D. 2008. AVA: Adjective-verb-adverb combinations for sentiment analysis. IEEE Intell. Syst. 23, 4, 43--50.
[61]
Sun, M. 2009. How does variance of product ratings matter? (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract _id=1400173).
[62]
Surowiecki, J. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books, New York.
[63]
Tan, S. B. and Zhang, J. 2008. An empirical study of sentiment analysis for chinese documents. Expert Syst. Appl. 34, 4, 2622--2629.
[64]
Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., and Kappas, A. 2010. Sentiment strength detection in short informal text. J. Amer. Soc. Info. Sci. Tec. 61, 12, 2544--2558.
[65]
Thomas, M., Pang, B., and Lee, L. 2006. Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from congressional floor-debate transcripts. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing. 327--335.
[66]
Tumarkin, R. and Whitelaw, R. F. 2001. News or noise? Internet postings and stock prices. Financ. Anal. J. 57, 3, 41--51.
[67]
Turney, P. D. 2001. Thumbs up or thumbs down?: Semantic orientation applied to unsupervised classification of reviews. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. 417--424.
[68]
West, P. and Broniarczyk, S. 1998. Integrating multiple opinions: The role of aspiration level on consumer response to critic consensus. J. Consum. Res. 25, 1, 38--51.
[69]
Wiebe, J., Wilson, T., Bruce, T., Bell, M., and Martin, M. 2004. Learning subjective language. Computat. Linguist. 30, 3, 277--308.
[70]
Wilson, T., Hoffmann, P., Somasundaran, S., Kessler, J., Wiebe, J., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Riloff, E., and Patwardhan, S. 2005. OpinionFinder: A system for subjectivity analysis. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference/Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
[71]
Wilson, T., Wiebe, J., and Hoffmann, P. 2009. Recognizing contextual polarity: an exploration of features for phrase-level sentiment analysis. Computat. Linguist. 35, 3, 399--433.
[72]
Wilson, T., Wiebe, J., and Hwa, R. 2004. Just how mad are you? Finding strong and weak opinion clauses. In Proceedings of the 19th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 761--769.
[73]
Woods, B. 2002. Should online shoppers have their say? E-Commerce Times. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/20049.html.
[74]
Wooldridge, J. 2002. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data, MIT Press.
[75]
Yang, C., Tang, X., Wong, Y. C., and Wei, C.-P. 2010. Understanding online consumer review opinion with sentiment analysis using machine learning. Pacif. Asia J. Assoc. Info. Syst. 2, 3, 7.
[76]
Yi, J., Nasukawa, T., Bunescu, R., Niblack, W., and Center, C. 2003. Sentiment analyzer: Extracting sentiments about a given topic using natural language processing techniques. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 427--434.
[77]
Yu, H. and Hatzivassiloglou, V. 2003. Towards answering opinion questions: Separating facts from opinions and identifying the polarity of opinion sentences. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 129--136.
[78]
Zhang, C. L., Zeng, D., Li, J. X., Wang, F. Y., and Zuo, W. L. 2009. Sentiment analysis of chinese documents: From sentence to document level. J. Amer. Soc. Info. Sci. Tec. 60, 12, 2474--2487.
[79]
Zhang, Z. 2008. Weighing stars: Aggregating Online product reviews for intelligent e-commerce applications. IEEE Intell. Syst. 23, 5, 42--49.
[80]
Zhu, F. and Zhang, Z. 2010. Impacts of online consumer reviews on sales: The moderating role of product and consumer characteristics. J. Market. 74, 133--148.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Methods for aggregating investor sentiment from social mediaHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-03434-211:1Online publication date: 17-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Review Valence Impact on Jello Shot SalesAdvances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce10.1007/978-3-031-62135-2_23(225-235)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Examining the Accommodation Experience in Historical Buildings with Content Analysis: Amasya Mansions ExampleExamining the Accommodation Experience in Historical Buildings with Content Analysis: Amasya Mansions ExampleJournal of New Tourism Trends10.58768/joinntt.14028204:2(28-40)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 3, Issue 1
April 2012
119 pages
ISSN:2158-656X
EISSN:2158-6578
DOI:10.1145/2151163
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 April 2012
Accepted: 01 January 2012
Received: 01 January 2012
Published in TMIS Volume 3, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Word-of-mouth
  2. consumer reviews
  3. sentiment analysis
  4. social media
  5. text mining

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)76
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8
Reflects downloads up to 09 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Methods for aggregating investor sentiment from social mediaHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-03434-211:1Online publication date: 17-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Review Valence Impact on Jello Shot SalesAdvances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce10.1007/978-3-031-62135-2_23(225-235)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Examining the Accommodation Experience in Historical Buildings with Content Analysis: Amasya Mansions ExampleExamining the Accommodation Experience in Historical Buildings with Content Analysis: Amasya Mansions ExampleJournal of New Tourism Trends10.58768/joinntt.14028204:2(28-40)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023
  • (2023)PIMA: Parameter-Shared Intelligent Media Analytics Framework for Low Resource LanguagesApplied Sciences10.3390/app1305326513:5(3265)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Sentiment Analysis in Information Systems Research: Extending the Task-Technology Fit TheorySSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4526322Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Twitter-patter: how social media drives foot traffic to retail storesJournal of Marketing Analytics10.1057/s41270-023-00209-712:3(551-569)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Social media analytics for business-to-business marketingIndustrial Marketing Management10.1016/j.indmarman.2023.09.012115(110-126)Online publication date: Nov-2023
  • (2023)E-marketing, Technological Capabilities, and Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in North East NigeriaInnovation-Driven Business and Sustainability in the Tropics10.1007/978-981-99-2909-2_21(361-383)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Citizen-Centered Public Policy making Through Social Media in Local Governments: A Research on Twitter Accounts of Metropolitan Municipalities in TurkeyCitizen-Centered Public Policy Making in Turkey10.1007/978-3-031-35364-2_14(251-270)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
  • (2022)Sentiment Analysis in Crisis Situations for Better Connected GovernmentResearch Anthology on Implementing Sentiment Analysis Across Multiple Disciplines10.4018/978-1-6684-6303-1.ch006(116-135)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media