Challenges and Opportunities of Consumer Empowerment in Online Reputation Management

This chapter addresses the role of consumer empowerment in a social media context and its influence on the building of an online reputation. The main objective of the research herein is to delineate the “new” power of consumers when they operate within social media, such as blogs, social network sites, opinion platforms, and/or reputation-based systems, etc. To this end, the chapter aims to answer the following research questions: “What are the different categories and features of online consumer empowerment?” and “What is the role of empowered consumers in maintaining/developing a favourable online brand/ corporate reputation?” From a practical standpoint, the identification of the decisive factors that support a firm’s e-reputation can indicate how an organisation could benefit from online consumer empowerment, without being overwhelmed by it. Moving to conceptual implications, the prime value of this chapter is that it attempts to narrow the gap in the field in terms of existing research and suggests online reputation management as an interpretative key of a modern conceptualisation of e-marketing.

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