Measuring the value of electronic word of mouth and its impact in consumer communities

Abstract

Marketing practitioners have recognized a need to measure customer-generated media in addition to the traditional marketing metrics. Message boards, chat rooms, blogs, and virtual brand communities have become important venues for customer-generated media.These communities can be modeled as two distinct, albeit connected, networks: social and informational. These networks change over time under the influence of online word of mouth. This study introduces adapted PageRank (APR), a new metric for measuring the value a community assigns each word-of-mouth instance and the value the community assigns to the members that create them. That metric is used to empirically support a model explaining how highly-valued information builds the social network. These communities are egalitarian in assigning value to informational content, without regard to the status of its source, and highly-valued content explains 10% of social network growth.