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1. Introduction
In the past decades, the internet has received a significant level of attention by academics, business practitioners, government and media (Pomirleanu et al., 2013). Managerially, the advent of the internet allowed producers and customers to communicate directly on a single online platform. Consequently, firms of any size and type are necessarily called today to access the network to survive and communicate their existence (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008). Internet becomes in this way a key tool across a variety of contexts (Lamberton and Stephen, 2016).
In particular, among the different research lines concerning the Internet, Digital and Interactive marketing, the approach of the tourist studies is worthy of investigation (Cioppi et al., 2016; Smithson et al., 2011) since different authors (De Pelsmacker et al., 2018; Melo et al., 2017; Micera and Crispino, 2017; Xie et al., 2014; Smithson et al., 2011; Litvin et al., 2008) identified three research streams related to:
the importance, for firms, to be present in the online sphere (online presence);
the relation between firms’ online visibility and their overall performances (online visibility); and
the increasing influence assumed by the electronic word-of-mouth and customers’ online reviews (online reputation).
Given the attention dedicated to these topics by the recent tourist studies, the main purpose of this paper is to generalize the analysis of these research streams by verifying if the business and management literature has already systematized these concepts and defined specific constructs and indexes for their conceptualization and measurement.
2. Objectives and design of the research
Specifically, the research design is composed by two different phases: in a first one, the specialized literature (Internet, digital and interactive marketing-focused) will be investigated to identify possible online presence, visibility and reputation conceptualizations and measurements. In the second phase (if no results emerge), the research will be extended to the global business and management literature.
Hence, the research questions of the article will be the following:
Does the literature focused on the Internet, Digital and Interactive marketing investigate the online presence, visibility and reputation topics?
Does a definition of the online presence, visibility and reputation concepts, unanimously shared by the business and management scientific community, exist?
Does an index, unanimously accepted by the...