Opinion seeking in a social network-enabled product review website: a study of word-of-mouth in the era of digital social networks

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges a long-held assumption of prior research – that online word-of-mouth is anonymous and impersonal – by examining shoppers’ opinion seeking in the context of using a product review website connected to a digital social network (SN). Motivated by the need to account for the idiosyncratic resources available in each shopper’s SN, we distinguish between two types of opinion-seeking behaviours: (i) exploiting, seeking peers’ opinions in one’s core network (ie, online friends), and (ii) exploring, seeking peers’ opinions from one’s extended network (ie, strangers). Using SN theory, we specify what drives these behaviours, and how they influence shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences in an online product selection task. A free-simulation study, conducted with a restaurant review website connected to the Facebook SN, provided three key insights: (1) Exploitation has a stronger beneficial effect on shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences than exploration, (2) there is a strong positive influence of social capital (both structural and relational) on shoppers’ propensity to engage in exploitation, and (3) high social capital does not induce the expected extensive substitution of exploration with exploitation. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of online shoppers’ opinion seeking in the increasingly prevalent SN-enabled settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Online word-of-mouth
• social network
• opinion seeking
• online friends
• structural capital
• relational capital

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The authors are grateful to the editors for their guidance and to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Shoppers may also rely on visual cues, such as the mere presence of information items on the website, as a basis to rate their product search experience irrespective of them acting on the cues or not. To assess the robustness of our findings to such alternative explanation, we considered control variables that captured the number of restaurant tags accessible to subjects in their relative close vicinity (ie, within two steps away from friends). Tags were descriptors, either positive (ie, “like” tags such as “original”, “tasty”, “efficient service”, “modern”, “mindful service”, and “good portions”) or negative (ie, “dislike” tags such as “slow”, “unfriendly”, “crowded”, “loud”, “dirty”, and “too pricy”) that reviewers chose in a list as part of their reviews. Thus, tags represent information cues that are relevant to the task and, possibly to shoppers’ evaluation, while remaining independent from exploitation and exploration. Adding either or both variables in the regression did not change the direction or significance of the other coefficients, providing additional evidence for the robustness of our results.