Designing Mobile Social Networking Applications for Effective Dissemination of Commercial Messages: The Social Network Paradigms Perspective

How to leverage on the enormous mobile phone user networks to perform targeted propagation of commercial messages (i.e., discount coupons) that will lead to positive commercial outcomes (e.g., favorable responses)?This study answers the question by focusing on the proposal, design, and empirical assessment of the deployment of Mobile Social Network Application (MSNA) for commercial purposes, e.g., disseminating discount coupons. MSNA is a form of mobile application that traditionally supports mobile phone users in constructing a public or semi-public profile, and in establishing relationships and communicating with a list of other users with whom they share a connection (Beer 2008; Boyd and Ellison 2007). While in the recent years a sizable amount of research has been conducted on the technical details of MSNA (e.g., Miluzzo et al. 2008, Tsai et al. 2009) and user behaviors (e.g., Humphreys 2008, Sadeh et al. 2009), specific studies on the commercial impacts of MSNA remain lacking, an area where it is lagging far behind despite its rapidly increasing popularity. Indeed, a special call has been made in the recent issue of Nature (Kwok 2009) for more applied research effort to be devoted to the commercial potential of mobile phone applications.The study intends to forge a link in the m-commerce literature by proposing an integrative model that entails three key system features of MSNA, namely the profile-based, spatial-based and temporal-based features, as the determinants of the favorable consumer behavioral responses needed to be effective in disseminating commercial messages. This project is pivoted on the social network paradigms (Valente 2006) to propose an overarching tenet that the use of MSNA, by fostering and bridging networks of high-affinity people, would yield more far-reaching and targeted transmission of commercial product information like discount coupons. Our study will consist of two parts. Part I will focus on 1) the development of the theoretical model of the MSNA and its effectiveness in commercial message dissemination, and 2) conducting an empirical investigation (in Hong Kong) focusing on understanding whether the different MSNA features have impacts on the propagation and acceptance of the commercial messages. Part II will use the results of Part I to conduct a large-scale field experiment to further understand the impacts of the MSNA features and their combinations on the propagation of commercial messages and the consumers’ responses (in Mainland China). Finally, we derive managerial implications for merchants seriously considering the use of MSNA for commercial purposes.