USER-GENERATED CONTENT AS WORD-OF-MOUTH

The objective of this research is to identify two harvestable word-of-mouth (WOM) proxies and test their construct validity. Bivariate measures of association of user-generated content (UGC) data compiled from Facebook.com on sixty-one firms across nine markets suggest the WOM proxies were positively correlated, maintaining varying relationships with firms' stock market performance. Study two uses time-series analysis to demonstrate that these WOM proxies change in tandem with stock prices, implying that they are sensitive to firm behaviors and that UGC is a leading indicator of stock market performance. As such, the findings provide managers with a tool to more accurately assess impressions of the firm.