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1. Introduction
Modern sustainable business practices and strategies are influenced by changes in information technologies (ITs) (Hua, 2016; Law et al., 2015), which are also considered crucial for gaining competitive advantage in service sector industries including the hospitality industry (Bilgihan et al., 2011; Pereira-Moliner et al., 2016). In recent years, the impact of online information research on hotels has been acknowledged (Buhalis, 2003) with the growing use of social media as a promotional, selling and service innovation platform for hotels (Chan and Law, 2006; Sarmah and Rahman, 2017). Although the extant literature is rich about the role of hotel websites as a part of the digital strategy (Baloglu and Pekcan, 2006), effective utilization of social media to develop new services (O’Connor, 2010) through customer–firm co-creation still lacks research attention.
Social media have emerged as an important platform for interactions and exchange of multidimensional information, including comments, reviews, invitations, images, photos and videos (Uratnik, 2016). These online communities are flexible, fluid and represent a broad range of cultural concerns and social affiliations (Brown et al., 2007). In recent years, the use of social media has encouraged firms to engage with prospective consumers (Lee and Suh, 2016; Filieri and McLeay, 2013), as well as increased the firms’ ability to influence buying behavior (Vermeulen and Seegers, 2009). As the proliferation of social media applications continues, hotel firms have an opportunity to determine customers’ wants and needs and to invite customers to co-create new services with them. Technology, including IT, online platforms, and social media, has revolutionized the global market and, perhaps even more importantly, provided new opportunities to engage customers to disseminate valuable ideas, feedback and other useful information (Zhang et al., 2015). However, the ubiquity of social media is changing user interaction in the context of service innovation (Uratnik, 2016). Social media is enabling customers to co-create new services in collaboration with the service firm by engaging through social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Kaur, 2016). In this study, we extend the service-ecosystem approach (Vargo and Akaka, 2012) to study co-creative hotel service innovation, and further to explain how it can provide a theoretical lens for understanding technology-mediated co-creative service innovation (CCSI) activities using social media in the context of...