“Exploring the Power of Electronic Word-of-Mouth in the Services Industry”

Introduction
User opinions about service experiences have been extensively acknowledged to play a key role in influencing the consumption decisions of other customers. The widespread adoption of Internet technologies has amplified enormously the volume and the potential impact of such customer generated content in the form of Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM). This book brings together a comprehensive sample of research work addressing state-of-the art experiences in the utilization of eWOM for informing decision making in service businesses.
The utility of eWOM can be addressed from distinct perspectives such as brand building, product and service marketing, customer feedback analysis for service and product improvement, social trends and trendsetting, sentiment analysis, among other. Studies regarding these distinct perspectives are usually found in their own specialized publications which makes difficult to have a comprehensive view of the challenges and potential of eWOM. Moreover, eWOM studies usually involve a narrow perspective due to the time required to analyse meaningful sets of costumers' feedback. The publication proposed here therefore aims to integrate distinct perspectives. This constitutes a timely and exclusive contribution as it captures the essence of eWOM as a whole just when the emergence of (semi-)automated ICT tools is imperative due to the ever vaster amounts of information available: specialized blogs and magazines, social networks, company's websites, services aggregators, etc.

The editors seek chapters addressing different dimensions of analysis to shed light in the relevant features of eWOM in order to foster the development of adequate ICT tools to (semi-)automatically and effectively process such sources. The existence of adequate ICT tools allows scaling up the amount of data effectively processed and to systematically extract value from such data.

This book aims to offer a comprehensive selection of recent research chapters that address the utilization of user generated content, with the dual purpose of: offering an ample perspective of the variety of applications of such information for customer and company decision making; and illustrating that range of state of the art approaches and technologies that can be used for an effective information extraction and analysis of data.