Marketing scholars and practitioners are keenly interested in brand engagement in social media because brand engagement has strong links to brand equity. However, much of the marketing literature focuses on customer brand engagement and often in a consumer market setting. This paper advances this literature in two ways by (1) focusing on employees, not customers, as important stakeholders who frequently engage with brands on social media, and by (2) observing brand engagement in a business-to-business context. We develop a conceptual framework based on a theory of word choice and verbal tone to understand the content of engagement observations (i.e., reviews) that breaks into five content dimensions-activity, optimism, certainty, realism, commonality-and four calculated dimensions-insistence, embellishment, variety, and complexity. Then, we examine over 6300 job reviews authored by employees of B2B firms to explore the differences in the way employees engage with both highly-ranked, and-rated brands versus low-ranked and-rated brands. We find that there are significant differences in nearly all the theoretical dimensions, yet the effect sizes are much larger between high versus low review ratings compared to high versus low B2B brand ranking. We close with some important managerial implications and future research directions.

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, we identify two key drivers of employee brand engagement using the content analysis tool DICTION-namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2 x 2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stake-holders engage with brands.

Among the deluge of online data generated by users in the form of text on social media sites, health care reviews are among the most common, and potentially, the most insightful. Patients review and comment on the experiences with procedures as varied as hysterectomies, colonoscopies, and chemotherapy. In their attempts to reduce the uncertainty associated with medical treatments, many patients nowadays also turn to social media, where they rely on the experiences articulated by other patients. In this study, IBM Watson is used to examine how knee replacement patients talk about their emotions and express sentiment through their comments online. Then, a latent class cluster modeling procedure is used to segment these patients into distinct groups, according to their emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), sentiment, and their overall satisfaction with knee replacement surgery. The findings show how qualitative online data can be transformed into quantitative insights regarding underlying market segments, which could then be targeted through different strategies by both marketers and health care practitioners.