How to Respond to Help Requests in Marketing Campaigns on Social Network Sites: A Communication Privacy Management Perspective

SNSs are becoming a preferred venue to conduct marketing campaigns to promote brands, products, and services. Therefore, it is imperative for merchants and SNS providers to substantively understand individual users’ response to help requests in a marketing campaign in SNSs. Drawing on the communication privacy management theory and privacy calculus perspective, this paper examines the main and interaction effects of privacy assurance from a merchant and relationship closeness with a sender on a recipient’s participation behaviors through the recipient’s privacy assessments in terms of privacy concerns and social rewards. A lab- controlled experiment was proposed to test the hypotheses in this short paper. A pilot study of 43 subjects confirmed the validity of experiment setting, and shows preliminary strong evidences to support the proposed hypotheses. Both theoretical and practical implications of the findings are expected