محاسبه BSEM از اثر شبکه و توانمندسازی مشتری مداری بر اعتماد به رسانه های اجتماعی و محیط شبکه

This paper presents a stochastic model that identifies network effect and customer orientation empowerment as strong antecedents of trustworthiness and trust in social media network environment. As Trust is emerging as a critical influencer of consumer behavior in organizations, social media has become the facilitator or the enabler of this influence. This paper aims to explore and examine the relationships amongst the antecedents of trust in the context of the social media network environment via Bayesian estimation and testing of the structural equation model. In facilitating the estimation of the stochastic model, a survey was conducted on 255 social media users. A series of statistical analyses were conducted prior to the estimation using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Results showed that network effect and customer orientation empowerment were significant predictors of trustworthiness and trust. Bayesian MCMC results confirmed that the findings were consistent with the literature.

The notion of trust, often used interchangeably with confidence and reliance, is generally agreed to be an essential element of successful relationships. According to Simmel (1978) “without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong as, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation”. It is therefore assumed that the party being trusted will protect the interest of the trusting party. In most circumstances, trust is mutual but sometimes it is not always the case. For example, one would expect an Auto Teller Machine (ATM) banking facility to behave exactly how it was meant to function. In order words, expectations connote trust in the functionality of the machine. Anomalies from the ATM will put the trust into question. In this case, trust is seen as the functionality inherent to the machine. Contrarily, trust is viewed differently in an airline industry. Consumers often rely on the reputation of an airline company and trust that they will reach their intended destinations safely and comfortably. This reliance and confidence connote organizational trust. Consequently trust is an important concept in families, organizational and societal interactions and communications. Bok (1978), as cited in Marsh (1994), highlighting the significance of trust stated that “trust is a social good to be protected just as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged the society as a whole suffers and when it is destroyed societies falter and collapse”. With today’s technology, the interactions and communications which convey trust are more rigorous and robust. For instance, the introduction of social media has enabled robust communications and interactions within layers of networks and social groups. Today, social media networks are used by governments to reach their citizenry, businesses to reach their customers, friends to reach other friends, police to track criminal, schools to facilitate learning, etc. Investment in social media usage has dramatically increased. According to Barnes (2010), “companies clearly intend to continue immersing themselves” in the social media platform as this approach has been successful for their business. Nielsen (2010) inaugural report on Asia pacific regions supports the use of social media as a platform for businesses because consumer decisions are largely based on their trust on friends, family and online product reviews; all of which are found in the social media network environment. Lately, Malaysian consumers are spending a lot of time in social media networking. This phenomenon is consistently relevant to the trend as Asia Pacific region has witnessed a tremendous growth in social media usage ( ComScore, 2010), Asian penetration rate of social networking sites was 67% for Malaysia ranking 4th behind Philippines (87%), Indonesia (84%) and Singapore (77%) respectively (ibid). Since trust is emerging as a critical influencer of consumer behavior (Al-Oufi, Kim, & Abdulmotaleb, 2012), the understanding of its impact in the social media networks in Malaysia will enable organizations to effectively manage their social media marketing efforts. As a result, it is worthwhile to study what are the antecedents of trust and the impact of trustworthiness in a social media network environment. As Shaw (1997) would say, “a solid foundation of trust best enables high performance companies and teams to adapt to changing circumstances and to deliver hard business results”. Many literatures outline several antecedents of trust (see Appendix 1), Nevertheless this paper draws from the Kharouf and Sekhon (2008) model of trustworthiness that divides trust into two antecedents; i.e. the high level and the low level antecedents. As an extension of the model by Kharouf and Sekhon (2008), we propose that network effect and customer empowerment orientation are significant predictors of trustworthiness and trust specifically in the social media network environment. This is discussed in the literature. In view of the above this paper aims to explore the antecedents of trust in the context of the social media network environment and then examines the relationships amongst these antecedents via Bayesian estimation and testing of the structural equation model. It is our hope that the outcome and resulting model developed from this study will help organizations evaluate or gauge the use of social media networks when integrating with the marketing communication mix strategies.

This research examined the influence of network effect and customer orientation empowerment on trustworthiness and trust in a social media network environment. In order to examine the model, structural equation modeling was applied to test the hypotheses, which were later confirmed using Bayesian MCMC. The findings conclude that network effect, customer empowerment orientation and trustworthiness were antecedents of trust. These three former constructs had positive associations on trustworthiness and trust. This study has several important implications. Firstly, with the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they are now becoming important tools for businesses. Many organizations now actively use social working tools to promote and market their companies’ products and services. Although previous literature such as Gefen, Karahanna and Straub (2003) examined the antecedents of trust in e-commerce, studies focusing on trust in the context of social networking remain sparse. Unlike previous studies on e-commerce, social networking tools operate in an environment where there is strong presence of network effects. Users on social networking tools are able to share information very easily to other users in the network. How the ability for users to share information with others and their influence on trust however, was not empirically studied by many researchers. This research confirmed that trust in social network can be enhanced by its network effects. Thus it is importance for organizations to increase its network effects if they want to improve the trustworthiness. This can be achieved by ensuring that the social network media selected is linked with other networks, allowing users to share information easily, and promote the organization’s social networking sites to users. Secondly, this research confirms the importance of consumers empowerment as suggested by previous researchers (e.g. Ramani & Kumar, 2008), but in the context of social network. Unlike other marketing tools, social network applications allow users to have more control of their choices, such as their abilities to post comments, share information, or praise or criticize services/products. Therefore in order to increase trust, companies should ensure that their social networking sites provide the options for users to post and share this information. If company decides to delete certain comments or allow restrict users to share certain information on the social networking sites, it may in fact reduce the company’s trustworthiness. Thirdly, this study also contributes methodically. The study concludes that the instrument used in the survey measures the antecedents of trust in a meaningful way. Although the sample size of the study was rather small to generalize the population in Malaysia, the model had a good fit. SEM was a feasible approach to empirically measure and test the associations of the hypothesized model. As SEM uses a stringent test of models via MLE and works well with relatively small sample sizes, a robust approach like BSEM can provide more flexibility in substantively ascertaining the associations of parameter estimates. The BSEM results suggested that there is substantive evidential support that the associations between network effect and trustworthiness, network effect and trust, customer empowerment orientation and trustworthiness, and customer empowerment orientation and trust were positive. The BSEM approach also concluded that convergences in the posterior distributions (of the parameter estimates) were rapidly achieved via MCMC procedure.