IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS FOR PSYOP

Social media has become one of the primary modes of communication throughout the world, especially in developed countries. Nearly every user of social media in its various forms or applications has an audience he or she can influence and a set of influencers from which he or she receives information. U.S. Psychological Operations (PSYOP) personnel focus on influencing foreign target audiences in their audience’s own language but have been slow to adapt to the use of social media as a means of influence. Drawing from principles used in influencer marketing, we ask, How can U.S. PSYOP forces and their partners best identify social media influencers with whom they can partner in their effort to change the behavior of foreign target audiences? Through this study, we identified the main factors for influence on social media using both quantitative and qualitative analysis and developed a decision-making tool to identify the key communicators, in particular social media influencers, who can elicit the desired behavioral change in a target audience. The seven-category influencer scorecard we created provides a low-tech, situationally adaptable method for identifying influencers with whom U.S. PSYOP can partner to execute a PSYOP series.Major, United States ArmyMajor, United States ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Online Marketing of Cultural Tourism: A Case Study of a 5A Ancient Town

For Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), the use of social media marketing has become their most important marketing tool.This paper discusses the online marketing process of cultural tourism through the thematic analysis method, and reveals the online marketing content of cultural tourism from three stages: pre-tour marketing, in-tour marketing and post-tour marketing.Research shows that the marketing of cultural tourism on social media is mainly through the self-established IP of tourism-related stakeholders and tourists to automatically generate or forward high-quality cultural tourism content, generate certain influence and attract a group of fans, from which trust can be built by interacting with uploaders. The results imply that the high quality cultural tourism content is the key to the success of online marketing, therefore, both the tourism destination organizations and the tourism enterprises should do a good job in the content generatio

The applications of social media in sports marketing

n the era of big data, sports consumer's activities in social media become valuable assets to sports marketers. In this paper, the authors review extant literature regarding how to effectively use social media to promote sports as well as how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions. Methods: The literature review method. Results: Our findings suggest that sports marketers can use social media to achieve the following goals, such as facilitating marketing communication campaigns, adding values to sports products and services, creating a two-way communication between sports brands and consumers, supporting sports sponsorship program, and forging brand communities. As to how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions, extent literature suggests that sports marketers to undertake traffic and engagement analysis on their social media sites as well as to conduct sentiment analysis to probe customer's opinions. These insights can support various aspects of business decisions, such as marketing communication management, consumer's voice probing, and sales predictions. Conclusion: Social media are ubiquitous in the sports marketing and consumption practices. In the era of big data, these ＂footprints＂ can now be effectively analyzed to generate insights to support business decisions. Recommendations to both the sports marketing practices and research are also addressed

Who's Feeding the Kids Online? Digital food marketing to children in Ireland: Advertisers’ tactics, children’s exposure and parents’ awareness

Obesity in children and young people is a global health challenge. The widespread marketing of unhealthy foods (food and non-alcoholic drinks high in fat, sugar and salt, or HFSS) plays a causal role in unhealthy eating and obesity. Food and eating is typically presented as an issue of ‘choice’. However, this disregards the fact that current obesogenic environments use many tactics to promote unhealthy foods, interfering with people’s ability to make good choices. This study examined: 1. Content appealing to children and young people on websites of top food and drink retail brands in Ireland 2. Marketing techniques on Facebook: Pages of food brands that have the highest reach among young teens, the first such study of which we are aware 3. Parents’ awareness of digital food marketing to their children in an online, two-stage survey with digital marketing examples and open-ended response options

The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. have their own logics, dynamics and different audiences. This book analyses how the users of these social networks, especially those of YouTube and Instagram, become content prescribers, opinion leaders and, by extension, people of influence. What influence capacity do they have? Why are intimate or personal aspects shared with unknown people? Who are the big beneficiaries? How much is vanity and how much altruism? What business is behind these social networks? What dangers do they contain? What volume of business can we estimate they generate? How are they transforming cultural industries? What legislation is applied? How does the legislation affect these communications when they are sponsored? Is the privacy of users violated with the data obtained? Who is the owner of the content? Are they to blame for ""fake news""? In this changing, challenging and intriguing environment, The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing discusses all of these questions and more. Considering this complexity from different perspectives: technological, economic, sociological, psychological and legal, the book combines the visions of several experts from the academic world and provides a structured framework with a wide approach to understand the new era of influencing, including the dark sides of it. It will be of direct interest to marketing scholars and researchers while also relevant to many other areas affected by the phenomenon of social media influence

“Bacanora for Bats”: a Multispecies Ethnography in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands

This dissertation presents a multispecies ethnography that explores the relationships among agaves, bats and humans in the border region shared by Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, USA. The work follows the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae); Agave angustifolia, which is the species of agave used to make bacanora; and the human stakeholders who have become increasingly entangled in these bat-agave relationships. This ethnography de-centers the human actor bringing bats and agaves into the center of the story to provide alternative ways to understand human relationships with other species. In doing so, the ethnography challenges dominant assumptions about the human-nature divide. The first part of the dissertation explores these bat-agave-human relationships more generally. Part two takes a closer look at how the bacanora industry, along with binational conservation efforts, are shaping these human-nonhuman entanglements in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. Nectar-feeding bats and agaves have co-evolved for millions of years. Lesser long-nosed bats forage for agave nectar, passing pollen from plant to plant, during their migration from southern Mexico to southern Arizona. This mutualistic relationship is threatened by habitat loss and climate change. Additionally, the growing bacanora industry in the state of Sonora is now one of the primary threats to the agave-bat relationship. Bacanora is a type of mezcal originating from the mountains in eastern Sonora. It is a culturally significant beverage that supports local livelihoods in the most marginalized region of the state. As demand for the agave distillate grows, wild agave stocks are disappearing at an unsustainable rate due to overharvesting. This multispecies ethnography follows the entanglements of the lesser long-nosed bat, Agave angustifolia and several human stakeholder groups—bacanora producers, the bacanora regulatory council and binational conservation organizations—at this time of rapid change. Qualitative data gathered from the Sonora-Arizona borderlands provides a depth and richness to these interspecies interlinkages at the local level. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews yield a diversity of stories that illustrate the complexity of changing interspecies connections within a transboundary region. This ethnographic illustration of bat-agave-human entanglements intentionally avoids oversimplified, reductionist interpretations, offering instead a valuable, nuanced understanding of these multispecies relationships that may help local stakeholders and policy makers on both sides of the border consider equitable and sustainable policy relating to the bacanora industry and conservation efforts

Internet Mediated NGO Activity: How Environmental NGOs use Weibo in China

This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws on both the political science and media and communication fields to analyse how Chinese environmental NGOs use the microblogging site, Sina Weibo, in their online activism. The study of NGOs and how they use the internet in China is widespread. However, in many cases, the way that NGOs in China work, both online and offline, has been analysed through the lens of traditional civil society and internet studies literature, which has mostly focused on the ability of NGOs, and the internet, to give rise to significant political change, and even democratisation.Through a mixture of thematic, network, and organisational analysis, this thesis investigates the communicative functions, themes, and use of interactive features in posts on Weibo, including the use of hashtags, retweets and @mentions. At the organisational level, the ways that NGOs engage with different actors, both online and offline, including fellow NGOs, government departments, their followers, and potential donors are interrogated using four case studies. These analyses found that although the political space afforded to environmental NGOs in China is severely constrained, and the operations of the NGOs could not be seen as overtly activist or confrontational in the traditional sense, the NGOs do in fact retain a certain amount of autonomy and are able to carve out some political space for themselves. The findings of this thesis therefore challenge the notion that NGOs in China are co-opted organisations without autonomy from the state and suggests that there is scope for digital activism by NGOs in an authoritarian context, even though the online and offline political space they inhabit may be tightly regulated and controlled