Gaia Rubera, Research Ideas to Better Understand Companies and Social Media

SOCIAL MEDIA HAVE CHANGED EVERYTHING: THE LAST TIME WE HAVE SEEN SUCH A DISRUPTION WAS WHEN THE INTERNET WAS INTRODUCED TO THE PUBLIC, SAYS THE MARKETING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR. THERE COULD NOT BE A BETTER TIME TO BE A RESEARCHER

In 2008 Gaia Rubera was Assistant Professor of Marketing at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Her students urged her to use Twitter, she did it reluctantly. “I thought it was stupid, but I eventually decided to use it because I did not want to feel the generation gap”. Eight years later, Rubera is Associate Professor at Bocconi’s Department of Marketing and one of her research areas is social media. “Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are largely unexplored fields. We can not rely on researchers who came before us and laid a framework for our explorations. We must build a literature from scratch. It’s a long, yet gratifying process”. Students react: registrations to her Social Media Marketing course, the first on the subject at Bocconi University, have tripled since the spring of 2016.
 
Mentions and irony
 
Rubera’s work on social media follows two lines of research. The first one is the transformation of enterprise communication. “I have investigated how brands interact with each other using Twitter mentions. According to the old marketing theory this is nonsense: why would you advertise another brand to your followers? Yet it is perfectly reasonable within the social network frame where businesses can leverage the power of word-of-mouth for marketing purposes”. Her research has subsequently focused on Twitter exchanges between brands and their dissatisfied consumers. Criticism on social media can be harmful because of its widespread exposure. “The theory tells us that companies should do everything in their power to restore the relationship with their clients, but sometimes the opposite strategy works better. Being ironic or even mistreating a consumer satisfies a basic need of Twitter users: being entertained. Thus the company can attract new clients”.
 
A different line of research concerns the use of big data to make predictions. In an ongoing research, Rubera and Paola Cillo are analyzing tweets to measure the chance of success of a startup. “According to the theory of innovation, you are bound to succeed if your mindset is similar to your potential consumers’: products should be developed by those who see the world from the end user’s perspective. This theory has never been tested because you can not identify and interview thousands of potential consumers. Twitter data allows us to identify them and measure their mindsets”. The social network created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey allows data download, even if with some restrictions: you can get no more than 3,200 tweets per user for free and you can search tweets posted with a keyword or an hashtag in the last ten days. Data are collected using Application Programming Interfaces (API) through programming languages such as Python. “At the Social Media Marketing course (hashtag #SMMB) students learn how to use Python. I show them how social networks have changed marketing activities and try to define a theoretical framework”. It is what Gaia Rubera has done since childhood. “I began thinking out theories when I was a child. I still do. I could not do anything else”.
 
Reality and passions
 
Having discovered the work of John Nash during the last year of high school, Rubera enrolls in Business Administration at Bocconi. She understands what she wants to do in life during a lecture on cognitive bias. A PhD in Business Administration and Management at Bocconi brings her to the University of Southern California and then to Michigan State. “It was supposed to be a six months stay in the U.S. It lasted six years”. Her interest in social media arises once she returns to Bocconi. “I began to use Twitter and I liked it so much that I thought I had to find an excuse to use it”, she says, laughing. “That is the beauty of our work: we can turn the objects of our passion into research topics”.
 
Rubera says that the academic research on social networks has not yet developed its full potential and not just because a large quantity of data has not yet been collected nor analyzed. “In Marketing, we are still studying old problems using new data. The only way to advance knowledge is through asking new questions and building a theoretical framework. Social media have changed the scene. The last time we have seen such a disruption has been when the internet was introduced to the public. There could not be a better time to be a researcher”.

by Claudio Todesco