Webinars
MSI Webinar: How Firms Can Steer Social Media Conversations
When faced with negative sentiment, firms should focus on staying on topic, displaying empathy, and moving the conversation to private channels through direct messaging. These techniques are crucial for moving negative sentiment in a positive direction.
However, firms often overlook the opportunity to build on neutral or positive sentiment, which makes up the majority of social media posts in our data. For these scenarios, firms should use authentic and personal responses to deepen user engagement. Authenticity, characterized by the use of genuine, transparent, and personal language, is especially effective in amplifying positive sentiment. For example, signing posts with a first name (rather than initials or nothing) adds a personal touch that lifts user sentiment further.
This study offers a roadmap for firms to steer online conversations in a favorable direction, whether managing complaints or reinforcing positive engagement. By aligning their responses with user sentiment and incorporating empathy, authenticity, and personalization, firms can build stronger, more positive relationships with their audience.
speaker
Harald van Heerde (Ph.D., University of Groningen, the Netherlands) is a Research Professor of Marketing at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. Harald specializes in econometric models to improve marketing decision-making. His wide-ranging research interests include social media marketing, mobile apps, digital marketing, marketing strategies to build brands and brand equity, retailing, sports and entertainment marketing, and disruption caused by product harm crises, price wars, and the business cycle. Van Heerde has widely published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Harald is the recipient of 10 best paper awards, from the Journal of Marketing Research (2x), Journal of Marketing (2x), Marketing Science (2x), and the International Journal of Research in Marketing (4x). Harald has received the 2021 Churchill Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Research from the American Marketing Association (AMA), was elected as a Fellow of the AMA (2024) and as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences (2022) and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg (2024). He has 11k Google Scholar Citations and an h-index of 46. Van Heerde served as an Editor of Journal of Marketing and as an Associate Editor at Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and international Journal of Research in Marketing. Van Heerde has chaired the Marketing Dynamics Conference (2009), the Marketing Analytics Symposium Sydney focusing on academic-practitioner interactions (2020, 2022, 2023), and the ISMS Marketing Science Conference (2024). Van Heerde has attracted AU$ 1.9M in international research grants as a Chief Investigator. He is also the Executive Vice-Chairman and Program Director of the Marketing Science Hub of AiMark, a non-profit organization connecting marketing academics and household panel data partners. Van Heerde has consulted for, e.g., Edeka (Germany), Unilever (the Netherlands), Miller Brewing (US) and Fonterra (Australia / New Zealand).