Impacts of WeChat on Millennials’ Perceptions and Consumption Behaviors in the Hotel Industry

Social media, known as interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications, has deeply changed and reformed interpersonal communication and business operation with the wide spread of Internet and the development of technology. In the past few years, since mobile apps are becoming more and more popular, the access of social media is not limited to tablet computers only, but is also available for almost all kinds of smart phone devices, such as iPhone, Android, Symbian and so on. The function of social media is not confined to real- time message transmission or information sharing any more. It has expanded to a widely range of features, such as online purchase and payment, e-commerce business, and service for different types of social events. Social media plays an increasingly important role in daily personal life as well as in business activities. People are not merely considered as social media users, but also the component of social media itself. As a result, it is very crucial for people to realize the importance and impacts of social media, especially for those business operators. WeChat (Weixin in Chinses, literally “micro message”) is a cross-platform instant text and voice messaging communication service for multiple mobile devices, developed by Tecent in China, first released in the January of 2011. It is claimed to provide “the new way to connect” and create “a way of life”. It is free to download, install and register, and support all kinds of smart phone platforms with multiple language versions, such as Chinese, English, Japanese, French, and Spanish. WeChat provides its users different ways to communicate and interact with friends innovatively through instant text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, group messaging, lively video sharing, location sharing, money transferring, and contact information sharing. Among all the WeChat users, Millennials is the majority. With the growing-up of Millennials, they are becoming more and more powerful and important to the society and will be the next target segmentation for most of the industries in the very near future. Especially for the hotel industry, the industry that urges to attract Millennials patrons for further substantial development, how to attract Millennials is becoming a critical issue for those hotel operators

On Diffusion-restricted Social Network: A Measurement Study of WeChat Moments

WeChat is a mobile messaging application that has 549 million active users as of Q1 2015, and "WeChat Moments" (WM) serves its social-networking function that allows users to post/share links of web pages. WM differs from the other social networks as it imposes many restrictions on the information diffusion process to mitigate the information overload. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on information diffusion in the WM network by crawling and analyzing the spreading statistics of more than 160,000 pages that involve approximately 40 million users. Specifically, we identify the relationship of the number of posted pages and the number of views, the diffusion path length, the similarity and distribution of users' locations as well as their connections with the GDP of the users' province. For each individual WM page, we measure its temporal characteristics (e.g., the life time, the popularity within a time period); for each individual user, we evaluate how many of, or how likely, one's friends will view his posted pages. Our results will help the business to decide when and how to release the marketing pages over WM for better publicity.Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2016

Social media recruitment : communication characteristics and sought gratifications

This study examines how social media pages can be used to influence potential applicants' attraction. Based on the uses and gratifications theory, this study examines whether organizations can manipulate the communication characteristics informativeness and social presence on their social media page to positively affect organizational attractiveness. Moreover, we examine whether job applicants' sought gratifications on social media influence these effects. A 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design is used. The findings show that organizations can manipulate informativeness and social presence on their social media. The effect of manipulated informativeness on organizational attractiveness depends on the level of manipulated social presence. When social presence was high, informativeness positively affected organizational attractiveness. This positive effect was found regardless of participants' sought utilitarian gratification. Social presence had no significant main effect on organizational attractiveness. There was some evidence that the effect of social presence differed for different levels of social gratification

How to use social media to target Hamilton Chinese females to a Cue store

A review of Cue store’s SWOT analysis shows that this brand has outstanding reputation and quality, but its pricing strategy and the clothing industry competition have limited its market share in Hamilton. Recently, social media has developed rapidly, which is an effective channel to target Chinese female customers. Over the past ten years or so, there have been more Chinese immigrants coming to New Zealand, including Hamilton. The research aim is to understand the social media influences on clothing consumption behaviour of Chinese women in Hamilton, and to investigate the potential for Cue store to use social media to target Chinese female customers in Hamilton. WeChat was identified as the most popular social media, with 95% of Chinese females using it for online orders and payments to purchase clothes. This study indicated that the design and quality of clothes and convenient social media channels are the two main factors that influence Chinese women to make shopping decisions. Therefore, while Cue maintains the advantages of design and quality, using WeChat can effectively attract more Chinese female customers. Another recommendation is to add WeChat payment function in the Cue store and use WeChat for advertising and promotion. The mobile app is a trend of online sales in the fashion industry. This research will lead to an understanding of the factors affecting the turnover rate of MasterHouse through secondary research, then researchers will collect data through quantitative research, and develop a strategic plan for MasterHouse to reduce employee turnover. The researcher will use questionnaires to investigate the HR strategies of MasterHouse and employees’ views on MasterHouse current HR process and policies. This research will involve five factors that affect employee turnover rate: Long-term relationships, benchmark, work-life balance, talent management, rewards and motivation. The researcher then connected and compared survey results with information in the literature and developed a practical plan for MasterHouse to reduce employee turnover rate

2018 Chinese New Year Special Events Planning for Casino Resorts in Las Vegas

Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is the most important holiday in the Chinese culture and is celebrated at the beginning of the Lunar Calendar each year. Not only does the festival have significant impact in China, it is also widely celebrated in Asia as a whole. Due to the fact that about 80 percent of Las Vegas’ biggest whales are from Asia, most of them baccarat players from China and Hong Kong (Rivlin, 2007), the Chinese New Year is also one of the most influential events on the Strip. Although the games and promotions offered by the casinos are the core value that Chinese customers seek when they visit a casino, a warm, comfortable, and intimate service will enhance their gaming experience as well (Han, 2011). Chinese New Year originated with the legend that Chinese ancestors defeated the “Nian” monster and celebrated their victory. Nowadays it is a festival for families to get together and celebrate the New Year. In China, it is mandatory for companies to give their employees at least seven-day paid leave. Some companies even award their staff up to 20 days paid leave. Therefore, it is the best time to go travel abroad. There is a popular belief that a person has their best monetary luck in the first few days of Lunar Calendar, which consequently made it a favorable time to go gambling. The casinos profit from the madness and make huge revenues on Chinese New Year. Almost all casinos who have heavy Asian clientele take advantage this time of the year to attract Asian customers by offering special events to celebrate Chinese New Year. The literature review starts with the origin of Chinese New Year in Las Vegas and how it evolved to be such an impactful time. It will then discuss the efforts made by the casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip to attract more customers on the Chinese New Year. It will also reflect what are the potential opportunities for future Chinese New Year’s and what issues might be out of control, for example, China is restricting the amount of money a person can carry oversea per year to $50,000 – the average of some whale’s bets. Finally, this professional paper will develop a series of special events for Chinese New Year that reflects the traditional culture. The plan will be based on current trends in China, such as what would attract the high rollers and what would resonate to more millennial customers

An Empirical Study on Android for Saving Non-shared Data on Public Storage

With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data that in general fall into three categories: sensitive data, data to be shared with other apps, and non-sensitive data not to be shared with others. For the first and second type of data, Android has provided very good storage models: an app's private sensitive data are saved to its private folder that can only be access by the app itself, and the data to be shared are saved to public storage (either the external SD card or the emulated SD card area on internal FLASH memory). But for the last type, i.e., an app's non-sensitive and non-shared data, there is a big problem in Android's current storage model which essentially encourages an app to save its non-sensitive data to shared public storage that can be accessed by other apps. At first glance, it seems no problem to do so, as those data are non-sensitive after all, but it implicitly assumes that app developers could correctly identify all sensitive data and prevent all possible information leakage from private-but-non-sensitive data. In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is an invalid assumption with a thorough survey on information leaks of those apps that had followed Android's recommended storage model for non-sensitive data. Our studies showed that highly sensitive information from billions of users can be easily hacked by exploiting the mentioned problematic storage model. Although our empirical studies are based on a limited set of apps, the identified problems are never isolated or accidental bugs of those apps being investigated. On the contrary, the problem is rooted from the vulnerable storage model recommended by Android. To mitigate the threat, we also propose a defense framework