Examining help requests on social networking sites: Integrating privacy perception and privacy calculus perspectives
Introduction
Jason: Hi Jack, I’m participating in X Mall’s WeChat marketing campaign to win more coupons. Please help me by voting for me through website XXXX. Many thanks!
Jack clicks on the website and finds that the campaign needs him to disclose his WeChat profile information. This is a typical case that captures a dilemma with helping friends while protecting one’s own privacy on social networking sites (SNSs).
The use of SNSs has increased dramatically in recent years, with Facebook having more than 1.23 billion active users (Facebook, 2017). SNSs allow online merchants to carry out campaigns to promote brands, products, and services (Lee and Hong, 2016, Weinberg, 2009). In China, the most frequently used marketing channels are social networking platforms (e.g., WeChat, Weibo), and WeChat’s business gross merchandise volume (GMV) is expected to hit one trillion yuan by 2019 (iResearch, 2017). On SNSs, online merchants endeavor to employ influential individual users to share campaign messages with contacts in their personal networks (Cordoba, 2001, Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). To help friends (i.e., request senders) prevail in the campaigns, request recipients are usually required to perform certain actions, such as following hyperlinks, at the cost of disclosing their profile information. Van Noort et al. (2014) reported that when faced with SNS marketing campaigns, individual users’ participation behaviors could transfer to favorable brand-use intention and high brand familiarity. As such, it is imperative for merchants and SNS providers to substantively understand individual users’ participation behaviors regarding help requests during SNS marketing campaigns.
However, the rapid growth and marketing effectiveness of these campaigns have been challenged by users’ privacy concerns over merchants collecting and disseminating personal information (Pan et al., 2017, Van Noort et al., 2014). In particular, when individual users receive help requests from friends engaged in SNS marketing campaigns, a triad of stakeholders exists: the request sender, the request recipient, and the campaign provider. Metzger (2007) suggested that when individuals believe their personal information is securely protected, they are more likely to establish connections with online merchants through online marketing campaigns. According to perception transfer theory (Delgado-Ballester and HernáNdez-Espallardo, 2008, Hong and Cho, 2011), in SNS marketing campaigns, a recipient’s privacy-related behavior vis-à-vis a help request is determined by the connection between not only the request recipient and the campaign provider but also the request recipient and the request sender.
Extant information on privacy research has mainly focused on dyadic relationships, such as those between consumers and merchants (Liao et al., 2011, Metzger, 2007), doctors and patients (Jin, 2012), and individual users and app providers (Wang et al., 2016). Despite increasing research interest and privacy issues involving triads in SNS contexts (Lee et al., 2014), there is a dearth of research elucidating the mechanisms of triadic relationships in individual users’ participation behaviors with regard to help requests in SNS marketing campaigns. Hence, the first objective of the present research was to study the influences of recipient–sender and recipient–provider connections on recipients’ privacy-related behaviors vis-à-vis help requests in marketing campaigns from a triadic relationship perspective.
It is surprising to note that despite privacy concerns, users are still likely to disclose private information. Past research has suggested that users perform mental privacy-oriented calculations when faced with privacy loss (Treiblmaier and Chong, 2012). Prior information systems (IS) studies have mainly assessed costs and benefits in relation to privacy issues (Choi et al., 2015, Dinev and Hart, 2006) and have mostly focused on online commercial transactions (Li, 2014, Sutanto et al., 2013), finding that privacy concerns and certain tangible benefits (e.g., discounts, rebates) jointly determine an individual’s privacy-related behavior. Nevertheless, being substantially different from online commercial transactions where tangible benefits are predominant, SNS marketing campaigns mainly draw on interpersonal interactions driven by intangible benefits. Surprisingly, such intangible benefits remain an underinvestigated area (Wang et al., 2017). Therefore, this study’s second objective was to identify the specific privacy costs and benefits of request recipients in evaluating help requests in SNS campaigns.
Besides the importance of the main effects of connections on privacy-related behavior, it remains unclear how these connections jointly influence privacy-related behavior. In triadic relationships, previous research has shown that an individual’s attitudes toward one party may be transferred from his/her attitudes toward the other party associated with the former (Chen et al., 2015, Stewart, 2006). Despite the suggestion in emerging literature that individuals focus more on recipient–sender connections than recipient–provider connections (De Bruyn and Lilien, 2008, Kim, 2008), there is limited research examining how the recipient–sender connection influences the effect of the recipient–provider connection on users’ privacy assessments. Hence, this study’s third objective was to examine the interaction effect of the recipient–sender connection and recipient–provider connection on privacy assessments and how privacy assessments shape individuals’ participation behaviors vis-à-vis help requests in SNS marketing campaigns.
In what follows, we will first comprehensively review the relevant literature and describe the theoretical background of the study. Then, a research model and hypotheses are proposed, the methodology is elaborated, and the data analysis results are presented. Finally, the results, the study’s theoretical and practical contributions, and directions for future research are discussed.
Section snippets
SNS campaigns and privacy
With the rapid development of SNSs, SNS providers (e.g., Facebook and WeChat) have created SNS-based marketing functions for online merchants (Jin and Huang, 2017). Individual users of SNSs establish relationships with online merchants as well as other individual users in the SNS campaign context. Based on their relationships with individual users, online merchants conduct marketing campaigns by promoting their brands or instigating viral campaigns through SNSs (Chu and Kim, 2011). Online
Research model and hypotheses
Based on the theories of privacy calculus and perception transfer, this study aimed to explain the influences of privacy assurance and relationship closeness on privacy concerns and the social rewards that finally shape a recipient’s participation behavior regarding a help request from a sender. Fig. 1 depicts the research model.
Experimental design
To test the research model, we conducted a laboratory experiment with a two (privacy assurance: weak vs. strong) by two (relationship closeness: low vs. high) factorial design.
Regarding privacy assurance, merchants deal with collected personal information based on their privacy policies, which ideally follow guidelines from trusted third parties. For instance, EC Trust China, a privacy certification organization in China, offers a package of privacy-related standard principles and
Sample description
Among the 174 subjects, 64 were male, ranging in age from 18 to 24 and with an average of 2.7 years of WeChat use experience. There were no statistically significant differences among subjects in the four experimental conditions, suggesting the subjects’ demographics were suitably uniform under different conditions with regard to age, gender, Internet experience, and WeChat use.
Measurements
In the strong privacy assurance condition, all subjects responded “true” to the three questions, and all of those in
Discussion of the findings
The empirical results showed supportive evidence for our research hypotheses. We aimed to enrich the understanding of SNS campaign participation by considering the influence of privacy concerns and perceived social rewards. This study has established that responders’ perceptions of both costs and benefits influence their behavioral responses to help-request campaigns. We also hoped to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of SNS campaign participation by examining privacy assurance by
Conclusion
Privacy issues are increasingly associated with triadic relationships in help-request marketing campaigns on SNSs. This study is one of the first to develop a comprehensive understanding of privacy issues in help-request marketing campaigns by integrating perception transfer theory and the privacy calculus perspective. The results revealed that privacy assurance and relationship closeness jointly affected privacy concerns and social rewards and, finally, affected individuals’ participation
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive comments. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this study from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71671121, 71802147) and the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Fund (17YJC630173).
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