This section discusses limitation that might have influenced on the results and suggests further research directions. The biggest limitation of the study was the small size of the data. First, there were only 99 observations in the data, which might cause regression analyses to be unreliable in some cases. Mainly this might cause that some of the results are not significantly relevant even though those would have been if the data was larger. Small data size was especially a problem when studying the independent variable story, where the positive observations were only found from articles and blogs published in the website. Therefore we propose that despite our re-sults that story would not effect on virality, it actually does.
Second, the lack of observations made it impossible to perform statistically significant regression analysis on website likes. The data would have con-tained only 34 observation, which is the total sum of articles and blog posts published in company’s website. This caused that all of the eWOM activities were not able to take into consideration and part of the study like was planned. The study should be implemented again with a larger data so that these problems could be eliminated. This could also help to the lack of nor-mal distribution, which might also that cause some of the hypotheses were rejected falsely.
The data was collected from a one case company and all the content was related to sports. This could lead to the fact that the results are not general-izable to other industries and companies. The study should be performed again with multiple companies from different industries to get more reliability for the results. Despite this, the findings support mainly earlier studies, which would talk from behave of the reliability of the results.
All in all, the coders found the job quite hard especially with adjectives in-teresting and entertaining. They described the job as followed: “Yes, I think many of these articles and videos interesting, maybe even too many. There
should be a scale that would make it possible for me to classify some of the posts more interesting than another.” “It is hard to say if I am entertained.
Yeah, like watching and reading this stuff, but I guess that I am not super entertained, I just find this subject interesting and many of these advices helpful.” If the study would have used for example five point Likert scale, there might have been more significant results, because the level of emotion would have been taken into account better. The situation would have also been completely different if these coders would not have been interested in sports and getting tips and advices, in other words part of the target audi-ence of the company.
The theoretical background revealed some possible factors that could effect on virality, but lacks in the data and the research method made studying those impossible. Based on the literature we were able to make following consumptions that could work as subjects for future research:
A1) Consumers share content that helps them to earn social currency, look better in the eyes of others.
A2) Consumers share content that is important to them and helps them to express who they are.
A3) Content that is more top of mind and has more environmental cues is shared more.
A4) Content that makes people feel like insiders increases virality.
A5) Content that triggers high-arousal emotions increases virality.
A6) Content that makes consumer go into a flow state is shared more.
A7) Content that is of public products is shared more than private.
To be able to study consumptions A1, A2, A4 and A6 the data should have been based on a consumer questionnaire. For consumption A3 there is no established research method and the lack of different high and low-arousal emotions made it impossible to study A5. It was our intention to study con-sumption A7 by categorizing content that included mention, picture or video of a product into public and private products. The idea was to do this by
analyzing whether products were more often used in public or private situa-tions. In action it did not work out because all the products involved were private in their nature. Therefore this content characteristic could not be an-alyzed.
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