Aeri Lee (Research Prof., Barun ICT, Research Center)

Kyung Kyu Kim (Prof., Graduate, School of Information, Yonsei Univ.)

As the business environment has become more networked due to developments in ICT, the relationship and role between the firm and users (or customers) has evolved. The traditional user role in the firm-centric view was mainly a consumer who passively buys or uses products and services provided by firms; while in the emerging view, the user role is a collaborator or value cocreator who actively participates in firms’ value innovation. Thus, these days, user roles as value co-creators have become crucial for firms to sustain a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, as the number of social networking service (SNS) users increases exponentially, firms are utilizing SNSs to solicit user participation for value co-creation. In order to facilitate user contributions to value co-creation activities, firms make efforts to provide users with diverse interaction experiences in SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter, expecting them to play diverse roles such as product conceptualizer, designer, developer, tester, supporter, and marketer.

This study aims to examine the factors influencing users’ intentions to continue to participate in value co-creation in the context of corporate SNS by focusing on multi-dimensional interaction experiences (i.e., pragmatic, sociability, identity, usability, and hedonic interaction). More specifically, this study investigates the phenomenon of which SNS users play diverse roles in value co-creation in corporate SNSs, and it verifies that specific interaction experiences can have more impact on increasing value co-creation, depending on the types of user roles.

The results of this study indicate that all interaction experiences (except sociability) in corporate SNSs significantly influence the intention to continue to participate in value co-creation. In addition, the results show that specific dimensions of interaction experiences in corporate SNSs are likely to be more important in some roles than others. For instance, when a user plays the role of product conceptualizer, the shared information about the product posted in the corporate SNS encourages customers to to initiate new product ideas and contribute to the product conceptualization process; the easy two-way communication gives users in this role a sense of self-efficacy. Thus in the role of a product conceptualizer, the three interaction experiences – ragmatic, identity, and usability – can have more influence increasing participation of value co-creation in corporate SNSs. The findings of this study suggest that firms should utilize SNS platforms to provide users with various interaction experiences and encourage continuous user involvement in value co-creation activities.