Presentation at 10th European Conference on Management Leadership and Governance (ECMLG2014).

1. Negative emotions in social media as a
managerial challenge
Harri Jalonen
Dr., Adjunct professor, Principal lecturer
Turku University of Applied Sciences
harri.jalonen@turkuamk.fi
@Jalonen
Harri Jalonen
How and why negative emotions are
expressed and shared in social media?
-a literature review, 43 articles

2. Locus of POWER
shifts from the firm
to the collective
Social
media
Locus of VALUE
production shifts from
the firm to the customer
Locus of ACTIVITY
shifts from the desktop
to the Web
(Berthon et al., 2011)

3. NEGATIVITY BIAS (Kanouse 1984, Cacioppo & Berntson 1994)
NEGATIVE INFORMATION IS DIAGNOSTIC
(Jones et al. 2009)

4. (Adapted Russell, 1980)
’CIRCUMPLEX’

5. Results (1/6)
Demography of sharing and expressing negative emotions
-young people express more negative emotions compared to older people
-gender does not predict whether the use of social media creates negative
emotions
-men express more high arousal and women more low arousal negative
emotions than their opposite sexes

6. Results (2/6)
Culture of expressing and sharing negative emotions
The reviewed literature does not confirm any significant relationship between
national cultural differences and negative emotional expressions.
-subcultures; e.g. rant-sites, dedicated to dispersing negative information related
to organisations’ behaviour or bad product/service experiences

7. Results (3/6)
Drivers of expressing and sharing negative emotions
-internal; independent of any intentional actors and/or events
-external; induced by intentional actors and/or events

8. Results (4/6)
Platforms of expressing and sharing negative emotions
Different social media sites differ in their ability to induce expressing and sharing
negative emotions.
-anonymity
-mobile devices

9. Results (5/6)
Motivation to express and share negative emotions in social media
Different social media sites differ in their ability to induce expressing and
sharing negative emotions.
-people ventilate for themselves
-consumers ventilate for altruistic reasons, particularly helping others
-consumers ventilate to help companies to improve their performance

10. Results (6/6)
Dynamics of sharing negative emotion in social media
Negative emotions constitute avalanches/groundswells.
-nonlinear dynamics & clusterisation of negative emotions
-global & local

11. Sentiment analysis
MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
TimeTime
ProblemValue
“Something
negative
happens”

12. CompanyCustomer
Customer relation
and power relation
EXIT – VOICE
(Hirchman, 1970)
“Something
negative
happens”
MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
‘Voice’ is better than ‘silence’understand the potentially positive
consequences of negative emotions

13. Silence Voice
Individual
Collective
Unnoticed
dissatisfaction
Customer
engagement
Dousing
a fire
Detrimental
escalation
MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

14. Thank you!
Voice
@Jalonen
Harri Jalonen