blogging
As an online social activity that has gone mainstream media, blogging significantly influences social media services. Blog service innovation as a social media service imperative is increasingly becoming acknowledged in social networking communities. This research systematically examines the dimensions of blog service innovation and identifies the key dimensions in social media services from the perspectives of blog users that can assist the efforts of social media service providers in enhancing blog functions and service performance.
Past research has predominantly been concerned with e-commerce innovation, for instance, Wu and Hisa, 2004 or internet service quality without sufficiently addressing blog service innovation with its embedded dimensions. Papastathopoulou and Hultink also surveyed new blogging service development literature from 1982 to 2008, where initial literature concentrated and focused on issues like critical success factors and the process of new service development.
Conversely, from a pragmatic point of view, given the evolving nature of social media services at a very fast pace, innovation strategies for services need to welcome the anticipatory expectations and needs of blog users along with new value propositions.
Social media refers to a collection of web-based applications that facilitate social interaction between users. A common social networking service enables people to share contact details, text, images, and videos with their friends and/or followers, like blogs. Therefore, Facebook and similar systems are rich sources of social network data Hansen et al., 2010. Facebook has also expanded its social media services to include blogging, chat, e-mail, groups, and entertainment Facebook, 2013.
In marketing activities, knowing customer preferences can assist companies in holding on to existing customers and developing new ones. The current research employed a user-centric approach, consistent with the fact that the best blogging service innovation project has to be market-orientated Jaw et al., 2010 Perry, 2002. Additionally, service innovation informs value creation through communal customer-provider relationships, and creative social media service providers ought to work towards promoting service with blog users.
Related Theory
Blogging is an internet-based second-generation activity that has gained popularity over the last few years. As diary-type websites, blogs provide news and observations chronologically listed on the website, together with commentaries and recommended links. Temporally and content-wise, blogs are a model of an online social network, which is an updated web-based journal consisting of reverse chronological lists of dated entries. Other researchers explored why blogging persist in posting and sharing information on their blogs. Efimova posited that people persist in blogging due to reasons like curiosity, a need to enhance information management and learning ability, and a general interest in sharing ideas with others. Specifically, bloging enable people to share their lives with close friends.
Service innovation
Being one of the key drivers of competitiveness for the majority of service companies, service innovation is gaining more prominence thanks to its potential contribution to competitive advantage and organizational performance. However, new service development is a challenging process reasons for innovation failure could be multifarious. Innovation is a product, service, or concept that an individual deems to be novel.
Thompson defined innovation as the creation, adoption, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, services, social media. During the innovation diffusion process, a new idea diffuses from its point of invention or creation to its final users or adopters. Customer-oriented or market-oriented companies can become more innovative in providing better value to customers and better performance. This showed that service innovation has a strong influence on behavioral intention and customer experience and also a mediating influence of customer experience on customer service innovation and behavioral intention.
Scale development process
Based on the Churchill paradigm and other scale development research, the BLOG-S-INNO scale was created with both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The KJ method was used in the research to come up with the preliminary scale. A sample of items to measure blogging service innovation was gathered by conducting an open-ended questionnaire survey to identify the cognition of blog service innovation among qualified participants. The participants were inquired about their expectations or demands of blog service innovation. The pretest and initial purification were emphasized in the study, and the study purified the scale. The study conducted scale validation and critical items analysis.
Analytical findings of formal test
The Cronbach’s value of the BLOG-S-INNO scale was 0.915, and excluding items did not enhance the value. Items’ item-total correlations ranged between 0.305 and 0.679, and 0.30 was a reasonable corrected item-total correlation that indicated that the BLOG-S-INNO scale showed adequate reliability. To test the validity of the scale, a one-factor solution was examined using AMOS 5.0 software to identify if the scale had just one component.
The initial model did not have a good fit. Hence, exploratory factor analysis was carried out to yield a multi-factor solution. Bartlett’s test of sphericity and Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy were applied to identify if the data were suitable for exploratory factor analysis. Kaiser stated that a KMO between 0.80 and 0.89 is worthy.
In using the principle component analysis to derive the factors, criteria for the selection of variables included an eigenvalue greater than one and a factor loading greater than 0.5 after varimax rotation. Analytical findings showed that KMO ¼ 0.889 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity p-value was 0.001, Six items, application of blogs, free use, entertainment, organized hyperlinks, public interest, and subject classification with factor loadings of o0.5 were excluded.
Five new factors emerged, i.e., system-operation-related innovation, service-privacy-related innovation, webpage-content-related innovation, social-technology-related innovation, and diversification-related innovation. Variance explained, as defined by Zikmund, is a proportion of the original variable’s variance explained by each factor. Variance explained by the first factor, system-operation-related innovation, was 33.67 percent, the largest proportion of variance explained. Thus, system-operation-related innovation explains greater variance in the variable of blog service innovation than other factors. Analytical results in Table II indicate that the BLOG-S-INNO scale possessed acceptable construct validity.
Conclusions
The research concludes that while blogging usage keeps growing, there are not enough conventional blog functions, and there are several abundant blog services, including technology compatibility, humanization, social networking, co-broadcasting, and entertainment. It was needed and anticipated by bloggers, social media users, and social media services to co-create novel services and functions to meet the demands of bloggers and blog browsers. In addition, promoting blog service innovation is a significant problem that needs to be solved by systematic scale studies for investigating the potential of blogging service innovation in social media service providers.
Originally, the 18 items of the BLOG-S-INNO scale consisted of two primary categories: blogging-oriented service innovation and blog-platform-oriented service innovation. Those innovative blog functions and services, such as interactive innovation, blog content innovation, and websites, will be developed by bloggers and social media services through technology innovation. These findings agree with Moller et al., who maintained that service innovation generates value for customers, and value can be generated by both customers and service firms.
Bitner et al. also added that service innovation must concentrate on the design of the customer experience efficiently utilizing holistic functions to satisfy or surpass customer expectations. On the other hand, to analyze the BLOG-S-INNO scale in comparison with measurement items in the web portals service quality scale introduced by Yang et al. and the WebQual scale introduced by Loiacono et al.
Humanization, personalization, ease of use, interactivity, integration, professionalization, completeness, page layout, social function, diversified functions, and data storage were some of the 18 items in the BLOG-S-INNO scale, which were applied to the two-service quality scale, while the other items, such as blog service innovation miniaturization, design flexibility, filtering, technology compatibility, co-broadcasting, copyright control, and information sharing, were self-created through qualitative and quantitative research.