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30th anniversary issue
Edited by Jeryl Whitelock and John W. Cadogan
Introduction
The use of social media among Fortune 500 companies surged in 2012. According to a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, as many as 73 percent of these companies now have an official corporate account in Twitter, while 66 percent have a corporate Facebook page. In addition, as of 2011, 28 percent of the companies had blogs at the corporate level, representing the largest increase since 2008 ([2] Barnes et al. , 2012). This increase is indicative of a long-term trend toward social media use among corporations (as well as individual brands) becoming the norm.
Social media have been defined as a series of technological innovations in terms of both hardware and software that facilitate inexpensive content creation, interaction, and interoperability by online users ([5] Berthon et al. , 2012). Social media differ from traditional computer-mediated communications in three primary ways: a shift in the locus of activity from the desktop to the web (meaning greater accessibility); a shift in locus of value production from the firm to the consumer (deriving from increased interaction/interactivity); and a shift in the locus of power away from the firm to the consumer ([5] Berthon et al. , 2012). A typical classification of social media includes collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), blogs, user-generated content communities (e.g. Flickr; YouTube; Youku/Toduo), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook; Cyworld), virtual game worlds (e.g. EverQuest), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life) ([23] Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Furthermore, social media goes to mobile, breaking ground in traditional time-location restrictions.
This paper addresses the use of social media in international advertising and how research can be designed to better understand how social media can be done. Our objectives are threefold. First, we draw on the extant literature to identify major theoretical foundations that can be used to better understand the importance of social media in the context of international advertising research. Second, we provide an overview of prior research in social media advertising from a cross-cultural (or multinational corporation's) perspective. While this literature review is not designed to be comprehensive, it focusses on several key relevant studies, and, thus, serves as an important basis for our discussion. Third, we provide suggestions for...