Opinion seeking in a social network-enabled product review website: a study of word-of-mouth in the era of digital social networks

ABSTRACT This paper challenges a long-held assumption of prior research – that online word-of-mouth is anonymous and impersonal – by examining shoppers’ opinion seeking in the context of using a product review website connected to a digital social network (SN). Motivated by the need to account for the idiosyncratic resources available in each shopper’s SN, we distinguish between two types of opinion-seeking behaviours: (i) exploiting, seeking peers’ opinions in one’s core network (ie, online friends), and (ii) exploring, seeking peers’ opinions from one’s extended network (ie, strangers). Using SN theory, we specify what drives these behaviours, and how they influence shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences in an online product selection task. A free-simulation study, conducted with a restaurant review website connected to the Facebook SN, provided three key insights: (1) Exploitation has a stronger beneficial effect on shoppers’ utilitarian and hedonic experiences than exploration, (2) there is a strong positive influence of social capital (both structural and relational) on shoppers’ propensity to engage in exploitation, and (3) high social capital does not induce the expected extensive substitution of exploration with exploitation. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of online shoppers’ opinion seeking in the increasingly prevalent SN-enabled settings.