Purpose: The paper aims to explore the influence of cybersecurity on the semantic orientation of the sports consumers. Focusing on both sport and esports, this study finds the social media factors contributing in the sentiment formation and commenting behavior on Twitter and proposes a scheme for attitude modulation through identification of highly engaged nano-influencers.Design/methodology/approach: Experimental design was used as the research methodology. Data mining from Twitter using RStudio software was conducted using the keyword “cybersecurity” during the time of pandemic. Final corpus of 31,891 tweets were considered for the study. Initial sentiment analysis has been conducted to explore the consumer's emotional inclination towards cybersecurity. Further through generalized equation modeling the impact of social media attributes over the consumer's posting behavior has been analyzed.Findings: The research findings reveal that users are inherently positive towards cybersecurity adoption in sports and the factors such as number of tweets, number of positive words contained in these tweets and the authenticity of the information source boost the pre-established tweeting behavior. However, the influx of information from non-organizational sources such as trending topics and discussions have negative impact over the users.Originality/value: This study is first to explore the role of nano-influencers as communication moderators over digital social platforms. This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiments formation over social media and offers a scheme of selection of nano-influencers to modulate the pre-established sentiments of the users. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and selection of nano-influencers for practicing marketing managers.

The integration of sensors and internet to the supply chain has created a new window in the supply chain management called as virtual supply chain which bears the features such as real-time tracking and monitoring of goods flow in the physical supply chain. The food supply chain is one of the delicate supply chains due to perishability, which can be due to various physical and biological factors, also the stringent safety and sustainability requirements of the product. The use of sensors and IT technology enables real-time data collection of the changes that take place in the food supply chain. The paper presents the integration of blockchain to the current virtual supply chain thus eliminating or changing the roles of intermediaries in the virtual supply chain and facilitating transparency, integrity, and authenticity of the data in the food supply chain.

Purpose: Based on the concepts confined in Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study investigates users' attitudes towards adoption of a blockchain-based framework in the esports industry that proposes a scheme of rewarding stakeholders for their invested attention along with blockchain technology's inherent protocols.Design/methodology/approach: The present study uses RStudio (Version 1.3.1093) package RedditExtractoR for scraping and analysis of the discussion referring to the keyword “Verasity” on the Reddit website. The final corpus of 1,913 user comments was considered for the study. Sentiment analysis was initially conducted to explore the semantic orientation of the users concerning Verasity. This was followed by generalized equation modeling to analyze the impact of social media attributed to the users' commenting behavior.Findings: The study found that Redditors, in general, have a positive attitude towards the adoption of a blockchain-based esports platform. This was validated through the empirical findings. The regression model states that there is a significant positive impact of the positivity in the comments over the Redditors' attitude and in their commenting behavior.Originality/value: This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiment formation over social media concerning a blockchain-based esports framework. The study also establishes an empirical relationship between the social media attributes and the commenting behavior of Redditors. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and the selection of highly influential Redditors for practicing marketing managers.

Social news sites have enabled news identification and its promotion through crowdsourcing and provided users with the capabilities to discuss topics. Compared to social media, social news sites are information-rich and possess their own social network. Reddit has been classified as a social news website and possesses similar characteristics to other websites in the domain. These include Slashdot, Digg, and StumbleUpon. This paper provides a broad analysis of spectators’ sentimental (or emotional) behaviour surrounding the 2020 Summer Olympics on Reddit. The study measures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spectator sentiments and proposes a scheme for sensitising Redditors’ behaviour by crowdsourcing the influencers present in the Redditor pool.