Bad Outcomes from Good Practice within Emergent Negative Online Engagement

Abstract

Social media is a complex, interactive and co-creative environment where marketers seek to promote brand values. The construct of online consumer engagement (OCE) has emerged as a key metric of social media marketing outcomes. Research has focused on positive OCE resulting and there is limited insight into the critical drivers of negative OCE. This paper draws on both Practice Theory and Justice Theory to identify a range of customer and organisational interaction practices during episodes of negative OCE within the customer services Facebook pages of retail banks. Results indicated instances of where “good” customer services practices have turned “bad” when applied to the social media context. The empirical work advances the theoretical concept of OCE to suggest that it may be targeted at a broader network of actors than has been conceptualised.