Customer engagement in an online social platform: A conceptual model and scale development

The rise of new media channels in the last few years has changed the ways customers communicate and exchange information. Managing customer relationship through social media engagement has become an important component of successful electronic marketing strategies. Though the concept of customer engagement has received considerable attention in the business community, there is a paucity of theory-guided empirical research in customer engagement in an online social platform. More importantly, there is a lack of consensus regarding its definition, forms, dimensionality, and operationalization. This study addresses these limitations in part by theoretically conceptualizing and empirically validating a scale to measure customer engagement in an online social platform. In this research-in-progress paper, we present our conceptual model of customer engagement and propose a rigorous approach in scale development and validation. The authors believe that this research will contribute to the development of online community literature and add to the repository of rigorous research instruments for researchers to use.