Understanding Attitude and Behavior of Canadian Consumers Toward Organic Wine

The main objective of this study is to identify the determinants of organic wine purchase and understand their effect in order to illustrate what influences whether Canadian consumers are willing to buy this special type of wine. The data for this study were collected across Canada by means of an online self-administered consumer questionnaire survey. Our major findings indicate that the attitude toward organic wine is defined mainly by consumers’ health consciousness and is negatively influenced by the wine involvement pleasure experienced with regular wine. Interestingly, Canadians are not forming positive attitudes toward organic wine based on their knowledge of organic production and its offering. The main predictors of organic wine purchase are attitude toward organic wine and wine involvement interest. Unexpectedly, price consciousness was not found to be a good predictor of organic wine purchase.     

Acceptance of Genetically Modified Foods with Health Benefits: A Study in Germany

A study was carried out in Germany in order to assess consumers' acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods with health benefits (bread, yohurt and eggs). Acceptability of GM foods increases when its source does not involve animal products such as eggs. Three factors have been identified as direct antecedents of the acceptance of GM foods: respondents' attitude towards biotechnology, health consciousness, and time pressure, being the first one the most salient one. Price consciousness has an indirect positive impact (mediated by health consciousness) upon acceptance of GM products. Males were more likely to accept GM foods with health benefits.     

Moderating Role of Brand Familiarity in Cross-Media Effects: An Information Processing Perspective

Abstract

Cross-media advertising campaigns have become commonplace in today's multimedia environment. Drawing from the multiple source effect theorization, this study explores the underlying mechanism of media synergistic effect from an information processing perspective. Brand familiarity is proposed as a moderator of cross-media effects: people with different levels of prior brand-related knowledge tend to process advertisements in diverse cognitive routes. An experiment found that for an unfamiliar brand, media synergy outperformed repeated exposures via a solo medium in terms of raising message credibility and generating more positive thoughts, while similar effects were not seen on a familiar brand.     

An Investigation of the Success of Targeting Newspapers and Efficiency of Advertising in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Segmentation and targeting have been considered a central component of marketing strategy for any organization for decades. This study considers the ability to utilize Irish print media to successfully target a high value segment. The aim of this study is twofold: first, to examine reader profiles of Irish daily papers and, second, to consider the accuracy of claimed target readers. Data from the Joint National Readership Survey was utilized to profile readers of the major newspapers available in Ireland. Results suggest once actual circulation size is taken into account there is unlikely to be any advantage in buying advertising space in a publication that claims to target a specific target reader with a smaller circulation, rather than buying advertising in a large circulation mainstream tabloid.     

Social Media as the Missing Link: Connecting Communities of Practice to Business Strategy

Communities of Practice (CoP) have long been considered powerful Knowledge Management (KM) mechanisms. CoP, however, are often viewed independently from organizational goals and structures, as they are primarily seen as a means of individual knowledge sharing and learning. In this article, we argue that CoP supported by social media have great potential to contribute to organizational goals, such as business strategy. We seek to support this statement through an embedded case study that includes 54 CoP within a prominent multinational engineering firm. This investigation explores the extent to which CoP contribute to business strategy. The paper's contribution is in providing five guidelines for practice that outline how CoP can be best designed to contribute to business strategy and how social media can serve as the “missing link” to execute those guidelines.     

Social Technologies,Informal Knowledge Practices,and the Enterprise

This article focuses on the ways in which social technologies facilitate informal knowledge sharing in the workplace. Social technologies include both common technologies such as email, phone, and instant messenger and emerging social networking technologies, often known as social media or Web 2.0, such as blogs, wikis, public social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), enterprise social networking technologies, etc. We know social technologies support informal interactions over digital systems and influence informal social connections among people within and across organizational boundaries. To understand the role of social technologies in informal knowledge practices, we pursue a field study of knowledge workers in consulting firms to investigate the role of social technologies in their informal knowledge sharing practices. Our theorizing from the data is guided by the conceptual premises of sociomateriality to better understand the ways social technologies are integrated with common knowledge practices. Findings highlight five knowledge practices supported by the use of social technologies. Building from these findings we offer conceptual insights regarding the material performance of different social technologies as an assemblage.     

Knowledge and Knowledge Management in the Social Media Age

Social media comprise the set of tools identified as blogs, wikis, and other social networking platforms that “enable people to connect, communicate, and collaborate.” These tools create a dynamic, complex information infrastructure that enables easier, faster, and more widespread sharing of information. These affordances make possible phenomena such as viral processes, and they can change how we are able to work and organize. This article explores the impact of this emerging knowledge ecosystem (KE) on some prominent characteristics of knowledge and knowledge management (KM) models through an exploratory critical review of popular epistemological perspectives and conceptual foundations underlying KM models. We find that this emerging KE requires a revisiting of both the social aspects of knowledge creation and some popular notions of enterprise knowledge management.     

Organizational Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies: An Empirical Analysis

While Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networks have been popular in the consumer space, there is significant variation in adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in business. Yet, little is known about why firms adopt Web 2.0 technologies. There is a paucity of empirical research examining the antecedents of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in organizations. Drawing on the Technological-Organizational-Environmental theoretical framework, our study presents and empirically tests a model of factors associated with organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. We find that importance to open standards is positively associated with the propensity for adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. Further, larger organizations are found to have a higher propensity for adoption. Finally, industry knowledge intensity is found to be positively associated with a higher propensity for adoption. Our results suggest that open architectures, firm size, and industry knowledge intensity play pivotal roles in Web 2.0 technology adoption. The study sheds light on antecedents of organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and can help researchers and practitioners build an understanding of what factors are likely to motivate firms to adopt Web 2.0 technologies.     

A Multilevel Perspective of Tensions Between Knowledge Management and Social Media

In this article, we discuss the tensions that are perceived in organizations as the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter challenge past approaches to knowledge management initiatives in organizations. We address these perceived tensions using a three-level conceptual framework: the macro- (organizational) level, the meso- (group) level, and the micro- (individual) level. In our discussion, we posit that perceived tensions arise when managers seek to maintain their traditional roles at the macro- (organization) level, yet social media affordances enable these roles to be performed at the micro- (individual level) and mesolevels. Shifts in the extent of the meso-level connections beyond the immediate organizational boundaries enable a wider community of practice than before. As a consequence, traditional management roles may give way to more flexible roles, with greater individual responsibilities for control and more sense-making and knowledge access taking place at the mesolevel. Our contribution is three-fold. In our article, we examine four key organizational factors (roles, ownership, control, and value) using a three-level conceptual model; associate the perceived tensions that arise in organizations with implicit shifts in these variables that accompany the use of social media; and suggest that shifts in emphasis in roles and control at each level can be instrumental in resolving perceived tensions as knowledge management efforts encompass social media.     

Ontology-based approach for identifying the credibility domain in social Big Data

ABSTRACT

The challenge of managing and extracting useful knowledge from social media data sources has attracted much attention from academics and industry. To address this challenge, semantic analysis of textual data is focused on in this paper. We propose an ontology-based approach to extract semantics of textual data and define the domain of data. In other words, we semantically analyze the social data at two levels: the entity level and the domain level. We have chosen Twitter as a social channel for the purpose of concept proof. Ontologies are used to capture domain knowledge and to enrich the semantics of tweets, by providing specific conceptual representation of entities that appear in the tweets. Case studies are used to demonstrate this approach. We experiment and evaluate our proposed approach with a public dataset collected from Twitter and from the politics domain. The ontology-based approach leverages entity extraction and concept mappings in terms of quantity and accuracy of concept identification.