Friend-Zone With Benefits: The Parasocial Advertising of Kim Kardashian

This research focuses on the social media-driven convention of advertising, and seeks to analyze the type of communication that occurs between celebrity endorsers and audiences within social media. Kim Kardashian is used as the most current and successful celebrity endorser. A content analysis, including posts and responses from April and May 2011, is used to analyze the type of advertising messages and celebrity/audience interaction. The goal of the study is to establish whether Parasocial Interaction could improve the effectiveness of advertising. Due to findings that yielded a high amount of endorsements embedded into personal stories, as well as female approval for those posts, it can be stated that Parasocial Interaction takes place between Kim Kardashian and audiences. It can also be considered as an advertising vehicle in terms of positive audience feedback. The results imply that advertisers should utilize Parasocial Interaction in order to conduct successful advertising

Friend-Zone With Benefits: The Parasocial Advertising of Kim Kardashian

This research focuses on the social media-driven convention of advertising, and seeks to analyze the type of communication that occurs between celebrity endorsers and audiences within social media. Kim Kardashian is used as the most current and successful celebrity endorser. A content analysis, including posts and responses from April and May 2011, is used to analyze the type of advertising messages and celebrity/audience interaction. The goal of the study is to establish whether Parasocial Interaction could improve the effectiveness of advertising. Due to findings that yielded a high amount of endorsements embedded into personal stories, as well as female approval for those posts, it can be stated that Parasocial Interaction takes place between Kim Kardashian and audiences. It can also be considered as an advertising vehicle in terms of positive audience feedback. The results imply that advertisers should utilize Parasocial Interaction in order to conduct successful advertising

Improving Health Messages Targeting College Students Suffering from Depression: An Interdisciplinary Approach

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2016. Major: Mass Communication. Advisor: Marco Yzer. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 165 pages.Tragically, as depression symptoms and risk for suicide increase on college campuses, actual help-seeking decreases – a problem that could be targeted with effective health communication interventions promoting help-seeking for depression. Unfortunately, theoretical and practical guidance on how to best create such messages is largely lacking, mainly due to the separation of psychology and persuasion communication science. In order to provide comprehensive understanding of whether and how depression influences health information processing, the present research sought to address this gap in knowledge. In order to test the effects of framing techniques and depression on persuasive outcomes of depression help-seeking messages, two between-subjects experimental studies were conducted: Study 1 was an online study testing the effects of three depression help-seeking messages that varied in levels of responsibility framing (low responsibility, no responsibility, and information only). Study 2 was a lab experiment utilizing eye-tracking, self-report, and linguistic software to test the effects of gain-and loss framing and depression on attention to, interpretation of, and memory for depression help-seeking messages. Results demonstrated that depression did not influence interpretation of depression help-seeking messages that differed in levels of responsibility framing. Depression did, however, influence effects of gain-and loss framed messages according to congruence of message valence and levels of depression – those who were depressed reported higher intentions to seek help after viewing the loss-framed message versus the gain-framed message. Linguistic analyses of memory responses indicate a crucially important explanatory mechanism - those high in depression perceive help-seeking behavior as more risky, lending support to the assumption that help-seeking behavior is a detection behavior for those who suffer from depression (Rothman et al., 2006). The present research contributes to the advancement of effective depression help-seeking messages. Depressed participants respond better to negative framing of self-relevant depression help-seeking messages. Such framing induces higher levels of perceived risk, which ultimately prompts intentions to seek help

Organizational innovation for energy conservation: a case study of Poudre School District

Includes bibliographical references (pages 32-33).Since 2000, Poudre School District has built seven green schools and steadily improved the energy performance of all existing school buildings. The Operations Services department has received over 30 awards from local, state, and national agencies for energy conservation and sustainable design. This report provides the results of a case study that examined how Poudre School District adopted innovative practices and became a national leader in high performance buildings. We found that the adoption of sustainable design guidelines and a sustainability ethic was part of a larger organizational transformation that made sustainability the core mission of Operations Services. We describe this change process using an eight-step model that builds on previous research in organizational change; and we discuss the importance of framing the changes to generate broad-based support for sustainability. In addition, we found that Operations Services operates as a "learning organization" in a densely connected network with other public and private organizations