Exploring the “Twitter Effect:” An Investigation of the Impact of Microblogging Word of Mouth on Consumers’ Early Adoption of New Products Thorsten Hennig-Thurau Marketing Center Muenster University of Muenster 48143 Muenster, Germany & Cass Business School, City University London London EC1Y 8TZ, UK Phone (+49) 251 83 29954 Fax (+49) 251 83 22032 Email:
[email protected] Caroline Wiertz Cass Business School City University London London EC1Y 8TZ, UK Phone (+44) 20 7040 5183 Fax: (+44) 20 7040 8262 Email:
[email protected] Fabian Feldhaus Marketing Center Muenster University of Muenster 48143 Muenster, Germany Phone (+49) 251 83 29954 Email:
[email protected] Acknowledgments: The first and second author contributed equally to the project. The authors thank Andre Marchand as well as the participants of research seminars at Cass Business School, the University of Muenster, the University of Hamburg, the Technical University of Munich, HEC Paris, and the 2010 UCLA/Bruce Mallen Scholars and Practitioners Workshop in Motion Picture Industry Studies for their constructive criticism on previous versions of this manuscript. They also thank Benno Stein and Peter Prettenhofer for their help with the WEKA analysis, Mo Musse and Peter Richards for their IT help and Chad Etzel from Twitter for supporting the data collection. Finally, the authors are grateful for research funds provided by Cass Business School and City University London that supported this project. Keywords: Word of mouth communication, microblogging, Twitter, early adoption. Working Paper, March 5, 2012 1 Exploring the “Twitter Effect:” An Investigation of the Impact of Microblogging Word of Mouth on Consumers’ Early Adoption of New Products ABSTRACT Microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) through Twitter and similar services constitutes a new type of word-of-mouth communication that combines the real-time and personal influence of traditional (offline) word of mouth (TWOM) with electronic word of mouth’s (EWOM) ability to reach large audiences.