Det fria ordets makt: En kvantitativ studie om effekten av kommentarer i anslutning till artiklar på nyhetssajter. Vad händer när elektronisk w-o-m blandas med traditionell pr?

Sammanfattning: This thesis treats the topic of user-generated comments connected with news stories on news sites, meaning electronic word-of-mouth combined with PR. The writers have examined how different types of comments affect consumers' perception of the article and also what communication effects these comments generate in terms of attitudes, purchase intent and word-of-mouth intent. The results interesting to the news site owners, is that lots of comments and negative comments generate a negative effect by making the actual article less credible, attractive and worth reading (relative to the subsequent comments). On the positive side, serious comments imply that the news story is perceived as more interesting, than a news story followed by non-serious comments. From a brand equity perspective, the interesting results show that few comments compared to lots of comments, generate a better attitude to the brand, even though there is no difference in how positive or negative the comments are. Negative comments imply a poorer attitude to the brand than positive comments do. Attitudes are also affected by the number of comments following a news story. A lot of negative comments show bigger negative effect on the attitude than few negative comments do. Interestingly, lots of positive comments do not imply a better positive effect on attitudes, than few positive comments do. The conclusion is therefore that few comments are most beneficial and preferable than lots of comments - both from the news site, as well as from a brand perspective. Negative feedback compared to positive, results in a lower valuation of both the news article as well as the brand mentioned in the article. This is an indication that positive and negative comments each generate different communication effects. Surprisingly, however, was that the negative comments did not give rise to an increase in word-of-mouth intent compared with positive comments. The seriousness of the comments proved not to enhance the impact of the communication, neither for the positive nor the negative comments, although existing theory that describes the quality of sources is critical to its efficacy. For brand owners, it is worth taking into consideration not only to appreciate high quality word-of-mouth, but also to take into account that low quality comments can be damaging to the brand.