Why Pass On Fashion Viral Message? The Moderating Role of Consumers’ Fashion Traits, Message Traits and Individual Dynamics Traits in Social Media

Social media is being used as platforms for viral marketing. Although there is some evidence on the usefulness of viral marketing from the marketers’ perspective, little is known about the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers engaged in this marketing instrument. As the social media platform continues to grow, understanding the characteristics and motivations of key players is invaluable for marketers and communicators who deal with message strategy and media outreach. Fashion companies have noticed this change and want to be present in the social media in different ways. This research represents a comprehensive attempt to examine the factors that impact on consumer usage of social media and their behavioral intentions to forward fashion viral messages by developing an attitudinal model that integrated uses and gratification theory and elaboration likelihood model; proposing that the relationship is moderated by individual dynamic traits, message traits and consumer fashion traits. Empirical data was collected from a convenience sample of 381 college students in two southeastern universities via an online survey. Validity and reliability of research scales were assessed. Hypothesized relationships and moderating effects were tested using two-step structural equation modeling approach. Within the general model the findings show that individuals will forward a fashion viral message if they have stronger favorable utilitarian and value-expressive attitudes towards the message. Motivations did not significantly impact attitudes of the consumer with an exception of the dimension of interpersonal utility that impacts individual’s value expressive attitude. The results of moderating variables indicate that message traits (functional and experiential oriented) impact consumers’ utilitarian and value-expressive attitudes. In relation to consumer fashion traits, there was no significant difference among consumers with high or low fashion leadership and those with high or low fashion involvement. Individual dynamics traits (viral dynamics and structural social capital) showed some moderating effects on the relationships between motivations and attitudes toward a social media marketing message. The results add to existing literature related to viral marketing and validate the claim that viral marketing can be used for marketing purposes resulting in increased business for firms. Theoretical and practical implications were provided based on research findings

Are Psychological Barriers an Unseen Threat to Women in Leadership? An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis on the Underrepresentation of Women Chief Executive Officers in Healthcare

The purpose of this qualitative study, using an interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology, was to identify if six women CEOs in New York State, who worked in the for-profit, not-for-profit, ambulatory and hospital, and nursing home healthcare subsectors of the healthcare industry encountered psychological barriers, such as low self-efficacy, low self-confidence, and low self-esteem, in their ascension to the CEO role, and if so, what strategies did they use to overcome those barriers. The semistructured interviews of the CEOs were analyzed and the findings revealed four concepts reflected in Bandura’s four sources of influence: performance, vicarious learning, verbal persuasion, and psychological state. Four superordinate themes emerged: natural ability, relationships, confidence building, and devalued unconscious bias, and four subordinate themes emerged: self-advocation, mentorship, self-expressed confidence, and performance anxiety barriers. The results revealed that the participants had more influence with institutional barriers than psychological barriers in their ascension. The implications, limitations, and recommendations for further studies are discussed based on themes, analyses, and conclusions drawn from this study

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Will Never Hurt Me...Until I See Them: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Trolls in Relation to the Gricean Maxims and (IM)Polite Virtual Speech Acts

The troll is one of the most obtrusive and disruptive bad actors on the internet. Unlike other bad actors, the troll interacts on a more personal and intimate level with other internet users. Social media platforms, online communities, comment boards, and chatroom forums provide them with this opportunity. What distinguishes these social provocateurs from other bad actors are their virtual speech acts and online behaviors. These acts aim to incite anger, shame, or frustration in others through the weaponization of words, phrases, and other rhetoric. Online trolls come in all forms and use various speech tactics to insult and demean their target audiences. The goal of this research is to investigate trolls\u27 virtual speech acts and the impact of troll-like behaviors on online communities. Using Gricean maxims and politeness theory, this study seeks to identify common vernacular, word usage, and other language behaviors that trolls use to divert the conversation, insult others, and possibly affect fellow internet users’ mental health and well-being

Strength of Weak Ties Theory and College-University Marketing: A Case Study of ETSU\u27s Clemmer College

As scholarly institutions enter a new era of hyper-competition, seeking innovative ways to engage with student populations has become central to social media marketing efforts. Developing strategies and tactics to interact with existing student populations presents new challenges for marketing departments, as well as the stakeholders who are often asked to provide user-generated content. Strong ties among stakeholder relationships can enhance communication with effective outcomes; however, it is the weak ties that may have the most impact. This study draws on existing literature regarding Strength of Weak Ties Theory and faculty and student surveys in East Tennessee State University’s Clemmer College were conducted, to explore how ethos, pathos, logos, and Kairos can be leveraged in earned, owned, and shared media. This data is then used to inform future marketing campaigns that use professor-student engagement

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Art on Instagram : the impact of art-related content on followers’ and artists´self-perception of creativity

Because Instagram is such a visually oriented social media platform, it is vital to understand the influence that it may have on its users' perceptions of their own creative abilities and potential. In part because of its scale, many artists now consider that their presence on the platform is mandatory; yet, the network has also offered art enthusiasts an unparalleled opportunity to get closer to these artists and their work. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of art-related accounts on Instagram on artists and other followers who are not professional artists, especially in terms of their creativity. During the research, semi-structured interviews with artists who use Instagram were conducted, as well as focus groups with individuals who follow art-related accounts on the social media platform. The findings revealed that both artists and the followers agree that consuming artrelated content on Instagram has significant potential to aid in the creative and inspirational process. While the artists and non-artist followers’ motivations differ in a few ways, which are primarily related to artists' views of the platform as a tool for promoting and improving their work, and followers' views of the platform as a source of entertainment or distraction, they also share some motivations for following art-related content. The results also concluded that there were possible negative consequences on creativity, such as comparison and anxiety, that eventually discouraged artists, even while many were able to get creative inspiration on Instagram

The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools

In a survey of Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers, a majority say digital tools encourage students to be more invested in their writing by encouraging personal expression and providing a wider audience for their work. Most also say digital tools make teaching writing easier, despite an increasingly ambiguous line between formal and informal writing and students' poor understanding of issues such as plagiarism and fair use

On the Promotion of the Social Web Intelligence

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and effective decision-making processes. This dissertation is broadly concerned with the intelligence that can emerge from the social Web platforms. In particular, the two phenomena of social privacy and online persuasion are identified as the two pillars of the social Web intelligence, studying which is essential in the promotion and advancement of both collective and business intelligence. The first part of the dissertation is focused on the phenomenon of social privacy. This work is mainly motivated by the privacy dichotomy problem. Users often face difficulties specifying privacy policies that are consistent with their actual privacy concerns and attitudes. As such, before making use of social data, it is imperative to employ multiple safeguards beyond the current privacy settings of users. As a possible solution, we utilize user social footprints to detect their privacy preferences automatically. An unsupervised collaborative filtering approach is proposed to characterize the attributes of publicly available accounts that are intended to be private. Unlike the majority of earlier studies, a variety of social data types is taken into account, including the social context, the published content, as well as the profile attributes of users. Our approach can provide support in making an informed decision whether to exploit one\u27s publicly available data to draw intelligence. With the aim of gaining insight into the strategies behind online persuasion, the second part of the dissertation studies written comments in online deliberations. Specifically, we explore different dimensions of the language, the temporal aspects of the communication, as well as the attributes of the participating users to understand what makes people change their beliefs. In addition, we investigate the factors that are perceived to be the reasons behind persuasion by the users. We link our findings to traditional persuasion research, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion. A set of rhetorical relations is known to be of importance in persuasive discourse. We further study the automatic identification and disambiguation of such rhetorical relations, aiming to take a step closer towards automatic analysis of online persuasion. Finally, a small proof of concept tool is presented, showing the value of our persuasion and rhetoric studies

Culture and Communication : A Study of NGO Woman-to-Woman Communication Styles at the United Nations

This dissertation is an original study that will confirm that culture determines the foundation for shaping one’s communication style. A multitude of communication styles strongly impacts woman-to-woman interaction among UN NGO representatives. As a result, progress on the advancement of women involves an enormous amount of effort and energy in the never-ending challenge to communicate effectively with one another

Crowd control : organizing the crowd at Yelp

This dissertation investigates how businesses are able to align the collective actions of a disconnected crowd with the strategic goals of the organization. I examined this questions within the context of the business review website Yelp through a quantitative analysis of nearly 60,000 business reviews, 17 in-depth qualitative interviews with reviewers, and a two-year ethnography. Interpreting the results of this data within the framework of the collective action space (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012) indicates that Yelp is able to manage the contributions of a relatively small subset of reviewers through the Yelp Elite Squad. Rather than simply motivating more reviews, the Elite Squad encouraged reviewers to interact more personally with other reviewers and accept increased institutional engagement with Yelp. In encouraging members of the crowd to produce online reviews within this context, Yelp was able to use organizational culture as a control strategy for encouraging Elite reviewers to adopt a pre-mediated reviewing approach to their reviews. This increased the frequency of moderate reviews and decreased the frequency of extreme reviews. This behavior ultimately furthers the organizational goals of Yelp, as moderate reviews are considered to be more helpful for reviews of businesses. Finally, implications for crowdsourcing, big data analysis, and theory are discussed