Dr. Bill Kettinger and Dr. Robin Poston Published in European Journal of Information Systems

For release:  August 12, 2015

Dr. Bill Kettinger, professor and the holder of the FedEx Chair of Excellence, and Dr. Robin Poston, associate professor and interim director of the Business Information & Technology department, recently had their paper published in the European Journal of Information Systems. The paper entitled "The Effect of Online Social Value on Satisfaction and Continued Use of Social Media" was coauthored with Dr. Tao "Eric" Hu, former FCBE doctoral student and current associate professor at King University.

In this paper, the authors recognize that social media offers customers a unique service value proposition. As such, they developed a measure of the online social value that customers gain from using online social media. The measure calculates the utilitarian and hedonic benefits relative to what customers must sacrifice in effort and risk in using social media. Their measure successfully predicts satisfaction and continued use of online social media, such as Facebook. This research is the first to introduce an empirically derived customer service value calculus for social media and it is anticipated that it will help service providers by identifying factors predicting satisfaction that they can employ to improve product offerings to keep customers coming back.