The effect of the ego in sharing the content of the negative viral marketing spread through social media (e-om)

After the 20th century a new social environment called social media has been introduced to people's social circles and they started to reflect their second world and identities created thorugh the internet via these tools. By means of the internet, the growth of the communication, and the rapid growth of the power of the internet, loads of messages have started to reach to and spread among many individuals. This spread has been seen as a higher level of traditional oral expansion in the marketing. This rapid transmission of these messages lead to the introduction of the commercial and social events to the internet and the viral communication and marketing phenomenon has been founded. While the viral messages in the social media are sometimes seen as a positive element of marketing of certain organizations and institutions, they sometimes emerge as harmful contents damaging individuals, companies, and institutions and these contents spread very rapidly in terms of characteristics, interests of individuals, and sensitiveness of the individuals. Individuals have different sense of ego from the birth and they vary from their own social environment since they are born to the characteristics of an individual. These egos started to show themselves after the launching of social media after the 20th century and individuals created their second world inside these social environments in which they exist or determine the content according to how they want to be seen. This study consists of theory and application sections and aims to show the level of sharing negative commercial and social viral messages in relation to the characteristics of individuals. In the theory section of the study, a literature search has been done about viral marketing, oral marketing, the development of the internet and the social media, and the ego. In the research section, in order to determine how a person shares the negative messages about commercial and social contents a survey has been applied and distributed to the individuals. In applying the survey, the RIC scale created by Kashima and Hardie (2000) has been used. The scale has been translated into Turkish by Ercan (2011) The datas collected after getting answers from 320 people have been analyzed by SPSS software. As a result of the datas obtained, it has been concluded that there is a moderate connection between the ego and desire to share the negative commercial and social viral content in the social media.