More than the Tone: The Impact of Social Media Opinions on Innovation Investments

Wenping Zhang, Lele Kang, Qiqi Jiang, Yiyang Bian

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Social media is a valuable knowledge source for firm innovation. Extending the literature of both social media and innovation management, we attempt to examine how the valence and volume of usergenerated content (UGC) from social media influence firm organizational innovation behaviours. In this research-in-progress study, we have reviewed the existing literatures and proposed three hypotheses. Firstly, we propose that valence of UGC from social media has a U-shaped relation with firm innovation investments. In particular, compared with neutral UGC, both negative and positive contents are found to push firms to invest more in innovation. Secondly, we argued that such a curvilinear relation is mitigated with an increase in volume of UGC. Last but not least, we argued that firm investment in innovation improves firm performance. To validate our proposed hypotheses, we have designed an innovative framework of sentiment analysis and collected a large dataset including 5-year panel with 886 listed firms and their relevant 6.2 million micro-blogs. The preliminary results from applying sentiment analysis into the collected dataset are reported in this study. In the future, we will validate our hypotheses with more sophisticated estimation models and strict robustness check. The potential contribution to theory and practice is also discussed.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationECIS 2018 Proceedings
Number of pages11
Place of PublicationAtlanta, GA
PublisherAssociation for Information Systems. AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)
Publication date2018
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event26th European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2018: Beyond Digitization – Facets of Socio-Technical Change - University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Duration: 23 Jun 201828 Jun 2018
Conference number: 26
http://ecis2018.eu/

Conference

Conference26th European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2018
Number26
LocationUniversity of Portsmouth
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityPortsmouth
Period23/06/201828/06/2018
Internet address
SeriesProceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems
ISSN0000-0034

Keywords

  • Social media
  • Innovation investment
  • Valence
  • Volume
  • Firm performance

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