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1. Introduction
Customer engagement has emerged in the last few years as a topic of great interest to managers and consultants in diverse industries and companies worldwide as evidenced by the large number of white papers, blogs, discussion forums, commentaries, seminars, and symposia generated by a general search for the terms (see, e.g. [48] Wikipedia, 2011). Increasing interest in customer engagement has paralleled the continued evolution of the internet and the emergence of new digital technologies and tools that has been dubbed Web 2.0, especially social media like wikis, blogs, micro blogging sites like Twitter, bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, video sites like YouTube, virtual worlds like Second Life, and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn (see, e.g. [49] Wirtz et al. , 2010). The interactive nature of social media with its ability to establish conversations among individuals and firms in communities of sellers and customers and involve customers in content generation and value creation has excited practitioners with its potential to better serve customers and satisfy their needs.
Practitioners have been at the forefront of attempts to understand, define, and build customer engagement (e.g. [2] Advertising Research Foundation, 2008; b9 b10 b11 b12 EIU, 2007a, b, c, d; [15] Forrester Consulting, 2008; [16], [17] Gallup, 2009, 2010). Surveys of managers in private as well as public sector companies across the world sponsored by Adobe, a software company whose stated objective is to develop the tools for companies to connect with customers ([1] Adobe, 2008), indicate that companies are striving to create a high level of customer engagement defined as "an intimate long-term relationship with the customer" (b9 b10 b11 b12 EIU, 2007a, b, c, d).
Implicitly, managers appear to view customer engagement along exchange relationship dimensions ranging from short- to long-term and cursory to intimate.
In general, exchange relationships may span a continuum from short-term discrete exchange in markets to long-term relational exchanges within organizations ([29] Macneil, 1981). As exchange relationships evolve from market-mediated exchange to organization-mediated exchange, more intimate and enduring relational exchanges take place. The most intimate long-term relationship perhaps occurs when a supplier and customer merge to form one organization, replacing a market exchange with a hierarchical or organizational exchange.
Markets and organizations are alternative mechanisms for satisfying needs and...