Negative emotions in social media as a managerial challenge

Harri Jalonen

Dr., Adjunct professor, Principal lecturerTurku University of Applied Sciencesharri.jalonen@turkuamk.fi

@Jalonen

Harri Jalonen

How and why negative emotions are

expressed and shared in social media?

-a literature review, 43 articles

Locus of POWERshifts from the firm

to the collective

Socialmedia

Locus of VALUEproduction shifts from

the firm to the customer

Locus of ACTIVITYshifts from the desktop

to the Web

(Berthon et al., 2011)

NEGATIVITY BIAS (Kanouse 1984, Cacioppo & Berntson 1994)

NEGATIVE INFORMATION IS DIAGNOSTIC(Jones et al. 2009)

(Adapted Russell, 1980)

’CIRCUMPLEX’

Results (1/6)

Demography of sharing and expressing negative emotions

-young people express more negative emotions compared to older people

-gender does not predict whether the use of social media creates negative

emotions

-men express more high arousal and women more low arousal negative

emotions than their opposite sexes

Results (2/6)

Culture of expressing and sharing negative emotions

The reviewed literature does not confirm any significant relationship between

national cultural differences and negative emotional expressions.

-subcultures; e.g. rant-sites, dedicated to dispersing negative information related

to organisations’ behaviour or bad product/service experiences

Results (3/6)

Drivers of expressing and sharing negative emotions

-internal; independent of any intentional actors and/or events

-external; induced by intentional actors and/or events

Results (4/6)

Platforms of expressing and sharing negative emotions

Different social media sites differ in their ability to induce expressing and sharing

negative emotions.

-anonymity

-mobile devices

Results (5/6)

Motivation to express and share negative emotions in social media

Different social media sites differ in their ability to induce expressing and

sharing negative emotions.

-people ventilate for themselves

-consumers ventilate for altruistic reasons, particularly helping others

-consumers ventilate to help companies to improve their performance

Results (6/6)

Dynamics of sharing negative emotion in social media

Negative emotions constitute avalanches/groundswells.

-nonlinear dynamics & clusterisation of negative emotions

-global & local

Sentiment analysis

MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

TimeTime

ProblemValue

“Something

negative

happens”

CompanyCustomer

Customer relation and power relation

EXIT – VOICE(Hirchman, 1970)“Something

negative

happens”

MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

‘Voice’ is better than ‘silence’understand the potentially positive

consequences of negative emotions

Silence Voice

Individual

Collective

Unnoticed dissatisfaction

Customer engagement

Dousing a fire

Detrimentalescalation

MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

Thank you!

Voice@Jalonen

Harri Jalonen