Leveraging Facebook data to map and analyse the diffusion of offline word-of-mouth

Though marketing academics and practitioners alike acknowledge the importance of capturing and measuring word-of-mouth (WOM), recent advances in this field focus primarily on online interactions, thus neglecting offline conversations and the social-structural context within which they are embedded. Using Social Network Analysis, we marry friendship network data from Facebook.com with self-reported conversation data associated with a WOM-Marketing campaign to explore the influence of social-structural context on the diffusion of offline word-of-mouth. The sampling, data-gathering, and analytic aspects of friendship network analysis are described and illustrated with a field case study. Data are collected using a specially developed Facebook app. In addition to describing the structure of friendship networks, we show how WOM is embedded in those networks and the role played by tie strength in message dissemination, producing insights that are new to marketing academics and potentially useful to marketing managers.