In recent years, the mode of consumer communication has taken dramatic turns over last decades. Especially, how consumer collect, exchange, and use information has changed significantly (Hennig-Thurau et. all 2010; MacIaran and Catterall, 2002). Among many technological innovations, the Internet completely disrupted the conventional communication medium of marketer, and the digital innovations empowered customers to talk back and talk to each other (Deighton and Kornfeld 2009). Such trend gave the birth of new media—eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia (Hennig-Thurau et. all 2010). In the context of new media, users assumed various roles. Consumers are retailers and customers in eBay, authors in Wikipedia, producers and directors of visual media in YouTube, and communicators in Facebook. They no longer passively receive information. Rather, they became the creator of user-generated contents and the consumer of vast information generated from networks of users. They are the prosumer of new media, who is a produce and consumer of a prosumption (Ritzer et al. 2012). New media allow participants to interact, communicate, share ideas, and build relationships (Chan and Guillet 2011; Chu and Kim 2011; Kaplan and Haenlein 2010).  The Participants often have intimate knowledge of other participants by reviewing their virtual profiles, and they often have a personal knowledge of the other within the network. The bond among members of social media network can be varying by tie strength (Mittal et al 2008; Chu and Kim 2011). Participants access vast information from the others with weak tie, and highly relevant advises from the one with strong ties function as influential advices (Vital and Ellison, 2012).

Nevertheless, the plethora of new media research and attention is somewhat confounding. Despite rising interests of social media from business world and prospective forecasting of social media’s financial benefits (Hof 2011), such optimism can be anything but speculation, given the unclear nature of social media, especially in terms of return on investment that is irrelevant to the conventional measure (Fisher 2009) and the absence of theoretical consensus in new media research.

This study aims to provide an insight of current new media research. Using content analysis of prior to 2012 literature in academic fields, the analyses in the current study will be classified into 1) the focus of study, which refers to identifying whether new media is a primary theme of the publication, 2) research method analysis, which refers to analyzing whether empirical or conceptual approach was applied, 3) academic discipline, and 4) new media usability, which refers to analyzing the extent of new media usage.

References

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Chan, N. L., & Guillet, B. D. 2011. Investigation of social media marketing: how does the hotel industry in Hong Kong perform in marketing on social media websites? Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, 28: 345-368.

Chu, S.-C., & Kim, Y. 2011. Determinants of consumer engagement in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in social networking sites. International Journal of Advertising, 30(1): 47-75.

Fisher, T. 2009. ROI in social media: a look at the arguments. Database Marketing and Customer Strategy Management, 16(3): 189-195.

Hof, R. 2011. Online Ad Spend to Overtake TV by 2016, Forbes.                                                       [http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/08/26/online-ad-spend-to-overtake-tv/]

Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1): 59-68.

Ritzer, G., Dean, P., & Jurgenson, N. 2012. The coming age of the prosumer. The American Behavioral Scientist, 56, 379-398.

Hennig-Thurau, T., Malthouse, E. C., Friege, C., Gensler, S., Lobschat, L., Rangaswamy, A., & Skiera, B. 2010. The impact of new media on customer relationships. Journal of Service Research, 13(3): 311-330.

Maclaran, P., & Catterall, M. 2002. Researching the social web: marketing information from virtual communities. Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 20(6): 19-326.

Mittal, V., Huppertz, J. W., & Khare, A. 2008. Customer complaining: the role of tie strength and information control. Journal of Retailing, 84(2): 195-204.

Vital, J., & Ellison, N.B. 2012. There’s a network out there you might as well tap: exploring the benefits of and barriers to exchanging informational and support-based resources on Facebook. New Media & Society, 0(0), 1-17.