Johannes Knoll, Holger Schramm
Advertising in social media. The influence of user generated content on advertising effects
The web and especially its use changed fundamentally over the past decade. While at the beginning of the internet as a mass medium the usage could be characterized as comparatively passive, there is today a variety of interaction and participatory possibilities which enable users to actively produce content themselves and exchange information more or less publicly. Interconnection, participation, and thus collaboration of users mark the social character of this so-called social web or web 2.0 (Schenk & Scheiko, 2011). A current study shows that such participatory devices have been proliferating on the Internet. About 90% of all web users in Germany enter social media at least from time to time and about 70% produce content themselves, for example by uploading a video or posting a commentary (Schenk & Seiko, 2011). As a result, this user-generated-content is omnipresent in the web and people can encounter an enormous amount of opinions, feelings or behaviours regarding almost every topic imaginable. Interestingly, there is growing evidence that people use this user-generated-content to select or evaluate information online, especially information that is not user-generated but created by professionals or companies like, for instance, advertising (e.g. Walther, DeAndrea, Kim, & Anthony, 2010; Metzger, Flanagin, & Meeders, 2010). Since more and more people “like” certain brands on facebook, comment on advertising videos on YouTube, or post an advertising campaign on their social network profile, the question how this surrounding user-generated-content affects online advertising becomes more and more pressing. Advertising practitioners have already recognized this issue and still often hesitate to deal with the integration of advertising in social media, since they lack knowledge about effects and consequences (Uzunoğlu, 2011). This is largely due to missing scientific research. While there is a large amount of studies on advertising effects online (Ha, 2008), they mostly focus on the advertising banners or videos themselves but neglect the surrounding context. Hence, this presentation wants to draft a first model connecting online advertising, user-generated-content, and their effects on web users by incorporating social influence theories from social psychology. In addition, first results of an experimental study are presented. The study investigates how advertising in social network sites and its effects are affected by surrounding user-generated-content.