Management Summary Research Study „How Real-Time Social Media Engagement Shapes Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction in Hospitality“
Social media have become crucial for hotels to personalize communication in real time, yet the understanding of how real-time engagement influences both value co-creation and co-destruction remains limited. Adopting a time-as-process lens, this paper examines how the temporal dynamics of past experiences, present perceptions, and future anticipations interact within ongoing, situated real-time engagements, identifying critical moments of value co-creation and co-destruction. Drawing on a vignette-based role-playing design, the study simulates customer-manager interactions during a social media storm (SMS) to analyze how these temporal flows unfold in practice. The findings identify moments of engagement shaping value co-creation and co-destruction, providing hospitality managers with a more comprehensive understanding of how real-time social media engagement impacts service personalization and its potential outcomes in terms of both positive and negative value exchanges.
Hospitality managers are advised to shift from linear, reactive recovery toward a process-based real-time management approach to capture ongoing value co-creation benefits. By deploying personalization and evidence-based transparency at these switch-points, managers can connect the “recalled past” (reputation) with the “anticipated future” (trust), transforming potential co-destruction into co-creation. Finally, we introduce a real-time SMS management framework that operationalizes our recommendations by linking key identified critical SMS moments to targeted real-time managerial actions.
Target groups of stakeholders: Academics and Practitioners