Making the FTC ☺: An Approach to Material Connections Disclosures in the Emoji Age

In examining the rise of influencer marketing and emoji’s concurrent surge in popularity, it naturally follows that emoji should be incorporated into the FTC’s required disclosures for sponsored posts across social media platforms. While current disclosure methods the FTC recommends are easily jumbled or lost in other text, using emoji to disclose material connections would streamline disclosure requirements, leveraging an already-popular method of communication to better reach consumers. This Note proposes that the FTC adopts an emoji as a preferred method of disclosure for influencer marketing on social media. Part I discusses the rise of influencer marketing, the FTC and its history of regulating sponsored content, and the current state of regulation. Part II explores the proliferation of emoji as a method of communication, and the role of the Unicode Consortium in regulating the adoption of new emoji. Part III makes the case for incorporating emoji as a method of disclosure to bridge compliance gaps, and offers additional recommendations to increase compliance with existing regulations

Just Do It: Sport Apparel Branding on Twitter

Collegiate athletic departments are experiencing large financial growth in part to their relationships with sport apparel brands. The big three apparel companies of Nike, adidas, and Under Armour control all athletic department apparel contracts within the Power 5 conferences. This study examined what benefits apparel companies receive from their connection to collegiate basketball teams by analyzing the frequency and use of the brand name and brand hashtag on Twitter by fans of fifteen collegiate sport organizations. Through the lens of the social capital theory, the researcher found a limited connection between the sport apparel brands and the individual basketball teams. The finding suggested that sport apparel brands need to develop a new social media strategy in order to better connection with the collegiate basketball fans in an online environment

Sports events and social media marketing

Sport marketing is the specific application of marketing principles and processes to sports products and services. In 2014 the biggest sports event in the world, the FIFA World Cup, took place in Brazil. Billions of spectators around the world saw Germany win the trophy in Rio de Janeiro for the fourth time in history. Yet unlike in previous World Cups, conversation was not only taking place at the numerous public viewings which were held in open spaces like bars and restaurants. For the entire tournament social media like Facebook or Twitter were playing a dominant role in all aspects. With 672 million tweets on Twitter and three billion conversations on Facebook, this was the most social World Cup as well as the most social mega sports event so far. It did not matter whether it were users, athletes or companies, everyone was trying to catch up on the conversation to be informed or inform others about their opinion or latest news. This paper analyzes the implementation of social media marketing during mega sports events with a focus on Adidas’ and Nike’s social media campaigns in the frame of the FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil. The analysis shows that social media marketing in the frame of mega sports events gains importance. Those companies finding topics that affect people personally with a relationship to their products achieve success through social media marketing

Co-Following on Twitter

We present an in-depth study of co-following on Twitter based on the observation that two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are also similar, even though they might not share any direct links or a single mutual follower. We show how this observation contributes to (i) a better understanding of language-agnostic user classification on Twitter, (ii) eliciting opportunities for Computational Social Science, and (iii) improving online marketing by identifying cross-selling opportunities. We start with a machine learning problem of predicting a user's preference among two alternative choices of Twitter friends. We show that co-following information provides strong signals for diverse classification tasks and that these signals persist even when (i) the most discriminative features are removed and (ii) only relatively "sparse" users with fewer than 152 but more than 43 Twitter friends are considered. Going beyond mere classification performance optimization, we present applications of our methodology to Computational Social Science. Here we confirm stereotypes such as that the country singer Kenny Chesney (@kennychesney) is more popular among @GOP followers, whereas Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) enjoys more support from @TheDemocrats followers. In the domain of marketing we give evidence that celebrity endorsement is reflected in co-following and we demonstrate how our methodology can be used to reveal the audience similarities between Apple and Puma and, less obviously, between Nike and Coca-Cola. Concerning a user's popularity we find a statistically significant connection between having a more "average" followership and having more followers than direct rivals. Interestingly, a \emph{larger} audience also seems to be linked to a \emph{less diverse} audience in terms of their co-following.Comment: full version of a short paper at Hypertext 201

An Investigation of Engagement in the Context of Employer Branding and Social Media

The purpose of the study is to examine how companies are applying employer branding in social media and how these activities affect potential employees’ engagement. Engagement on social media has been analyzed according to the cognitive, emotional and behavioral dimensions using a mixed method content analysis

The language of English and Polish corporate tweets : a corpus analysis

The following analysis investigates selected properties of the language of the tweets used in the interaction with consumers on English and Polish brand profiles. The analysis examines the structure of tweets, word frequency, as well as the frequency of informal and non-standard language items, language mistakes, the use of emoticons and hashtags. The study contrasts the language used by English and Polish representatives and reveals a number of similarities and differences between the corpora. What the corpora share is a high frequency of conventional politeness acts and language structures reflecting a customer-oriented tone of the interaction. Differences are observed in the frequency and use of informal and non-standard structures, emoticons and hashtags, as well as in the structure and complexity of the tweets. The study indicates a lower formulaicity and a greater individualization of the interaction on the Polish profiles.Niniejsza analiza jest poświęcona cechom językowym tweetów występujących w interakcji z klientami na profilach angielskich oraz polskich firm. Analiza obejmuje badanie struktury tweetów, frekwencji słów, występowania elementów nieformalnych i niestandardowych, błędów językowych, użycia emotikonów oraz hashtagów. Badanie porównuje język stosowany przez reprezentantów firm angielskich oraz polskich i wyszczególnia szereg podobieństw oraz różnic pomiędzy analizowanymi korpusami. Cechą wspólną dla tweetów angielskich i polskich jest wysoka frekwencja aktów grzecznościowych oraz struktur odzwierciedlających nakierowanie na klienta w dyskursie. Różnice dotyczą frekwencji występowania i użycia języka nieformalnego, struktur niestandardowych, emotikonów oraz hashtagów, jak również struktury i złożoności tweetów. Badanie wskazuje na niższy poziom formuliczności i większą indywidualizację interakcji na polskich profilac

Building online content on offline moments: opportunities for brands in social media

Purpose: Creating online content on the brand page that is considered attractive and interesting is key. Thus, the purpose of this is to investigate the impact of moment marketing as a communication strategy for content creation under the umbrella of interactive marketing on equity measures of the brand. Furthermore, the paper strives to differ between high brandmoment fit and low brand-moment fit and understand effects on existing versus differentiated brand associations. Methodology/Approach: The experimental study evaluated a total of 320 respondents that were randomly assigned to one of four brands in Germany of the industries sporting goods/apparel, alcoholic beverages, cosmetics and retail/supermarkets. The experimental condition was tested against a controlled condition for its impact on consumer-based brand equity via simple linear regression and comparing means. Data collection was carried out via a standardized online-survey. Findings: The results of the experimental study show that moment marketing has an equal impact on consumer-based brand equity compared to a regular brand post. However, brand posts related to an event have the potential to increase online participation (reactions toward the brand post, commenting and sharing the post) to a greater degree than a regular brand post. Furthermore, it was shown that existing brand associations are strengthened independent of the fit of the event with the brand whilst there has been shown no effect on differentiated associations whatsoever. Added value: Regarding existing literature, this research contributes by providing new insights on the effects that moment marketing has on consumer-based brand equity constructs. This study acts as preliminary research in this field and thus has great scientific relevance.Objetivo: Para os profissionais de marketing que atuam nas redes sociais é essencial saber quais características fazem o “Branded Content” popular bem como quais fatores condicionam a interação com o consumidor. Desta forma, torna-se essencial a criação de conteúdos que sejam considerados atrativos e interessantes na página da marca. O objetivo deste é investigar o impacto do “Moment Marketing” como estratégia de comunicação para criação de conteúdo sob a égide do marketing interativo na medição de equidade da marca. Além disso o trabalho busca estabelecer uma diferenciação entre high brand-moment fit e low brand-moment fit e entender os efeitos nas associações de marca já existentes em comparação com as diferenciadas. Metodologia/Abordagem: O estudo experimental avaliou um total de 320 entrevistados, que foram designados de forma aleatória para uma de quatro marcas Alemãs das seguintes indústrias: Esportes material/aparelhos, bebidas alcoólicas, cosméticos e varejo/ supermercados. A condição experimental foi testada em comparação a uma condição controlada via regressão linear simples e meios de comparação no que diz respeito a seu impacto no consumer-based brand equity. A coleta de dados foi realizada via pesquisa online padronizada. Descobertas: Os resultados do estudo experimental mostram que o “Moment Marketing” tem o mesmo impacto no consumer-based brand equity se comparado a uma postagem comum. Entretanto as postagens de marca associados a um evento, tem o potencial de aumentar a participação online (reações em direção ao post de marca, comentários e compartilhamento do post). Além disto, impactos na equidade da marca dentro do “Moment Marketing” são maiores quando nota-se um maior ajuste entre o momento e a marca. Por outro lado, associações de marca já existentes podem se fortalecidas com low ou high brandfit, associações diferenciadas não é devido à brand-moment fit. Valor Adicionado: Este estudo atua como uma pesquisa preliminar em seu campo de estudo e portanto possui grande relevância científica. Resultados desta pesquisa contribuem para descobertas em campos relacionados ao marketing de conteúdo digital e marketing interativo, sendo assim, a primeira pesquisa que define mais a fundo as características do conteúdo publicado nas redes sociais, indo além da separação de conteúdo gerado por empresas e por usuários contido em estudos anteriore

What do you think of the return of dungarees?: Social media interactions between retail locations and their customers

Social media presents new digital interaction opportunities and challenges to urban retail locations such as shopping malls, centres and streets. Platforms such as Facebook facilitate online communication with, and between, customers that is not possible through traditional media and marketing techniques. Using data gathered from the Facebook pages of six urban retail locations over 12 months, this paper considers the possible factors that shape online customer engagement and conversation. In particular, we present a thematic analysis of content in shared posts, and discuss how characteristics of a retail location and the structure of the consumer community shape these posts. Our findings are used to form suggestions to further investigate engagement between customers and retail locations via social media