  The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor
consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in real-time by mining publicly
available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new
ability is the development of appropriate WOM metrics and the identification of
relationships between such metrics and consumer behavior. Along these lines
this paper introduces a metric of a purchasing population's propensity to rate
a product online. Using data from a popular movie website we find that our
metric exhibits several relationships that have been previously found to exist
between aspects of a product and consumers' propensity to engage in offline WOM
about it. Our study, thus, provides positive evidence for the validity of our
metric as a proxy of a population's propensity to engage in post-purchase
online WOM. Our results also suggest that the antecedents of offline and online
WOM exhibit important similarities.
