- Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States
- University of South Florida, Mass Communications, Faculty Memberadd
- Mass Communications, Communication, Education, Social Media, Uses And Gratifications, Identity Development, and 11 moreSports media, Social Media Analytics, Communication and Sports, International Advertising, Broadcast Television, Brand Relationship, Viral Marketing, Advertising and Branding, Advertising, Viral internet marketing, and Advertising theoryedit
Social media influencers rely on emotional connection to maintain and grow their followings and have value for brands. To date, however, no research has quantitatively examined the impact of emotion in the facial expressions and caption... more
Social media influencers rely on emotional connection to maintain and grow their followings and have value for brands. To date, however, no research has quantitatively examined the impact of emotion in the facial expressions and caption text that influencers use in their video posts on consumer engagement through likes, comments, and views of posts. Grounded in consumer brand engagement, psychological sense of community, and the behavior ecology view of facial displays, this study uses social media analytics, facial expression analysis, and computational linguistic analysis to assess the emotional substance of 402 video posts by prominent micro-, macro-, and mega-influencer mothers, known as InstaMoms, as exemplars of Instagram influencers. The study identifies that the amount of emotion used and specific discrete emotions have a meaningful influence on engagement, and both follower count and presence of branding saliently contribute to a more robust understanding of the relationshi...
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Abstract Global consumers are increasingly expecting brands to strive to positively impact the communities and societies in which they exist. Marketers are taking heed, looking to balance social good against commercial profits in their... more
Abstract Global consumers are increasingly expecting brands to strive to positively impact the communities and societies in which they exist. Marketers are taking heed, looking to balance social good against commercial profits in their decision making. Historically the purview of management, business ethics, and public relations research, advertising research has, until lately, largely ignored CSR and the critical role advertising communication and practice play in it. With CSR advertising scholarship on the rise, this article seeks to provide focus to the area by placing extant and future research in the context of the advertising strategic planning process (SPP) in order to holistically understand CSR’s impact and gaps in knowledge. This study represents a systematic review of advertising CSR research in Social Science Citation Index advertising journals within the Web of Science database. Forty-three relevant articles were reviewed to identify relevance and situatedness within the SPP. Based on these findings, a research agenda addressing gaps in each of the stages of the SPP is proposed.
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This article presents a systematic analysis of all refereed articles, research reports and invited commentaries (N = 197) published in the Journal of Advertising Education from 1996 to 2015. The analysis revealed that the most common... more
This article presents a systematic analysis of all refereed articles, research reports and invited commentaries (N = 197) published in the Journal of Advertising Education from 1996 to 2015. The analysis revealed that the most common article theme was classroom and course instruction (52.8%; n = 104). Within that theme, articles about using a tool or approach in the classroom (e.g., using a class wiki; 47.1%, n = 49) and achieving a learning outcome (e.g., developing teamwork skills; 30.8%; n = 32) were most popular. The authors performed additional analyses on articles reporting data collection and analysis (N = 122). The researchers found that only 26.2% (n = 32) of these articles identified a theory by name, and only six (4.9%) offered a theoretical implication in the discussion. However, a significant majority of these articles provided practical implications for educators (86.1%; n = 105).
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Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook function as both venues for reconnecting with associates from a user's past and sources of social information about them. Yet, little is known... more
Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook function as both venues for reconnecting with associates from a user's past and sources of social information about them. Yet, little is known about what factors influence the initial decision to reconnect with a past associate. This oversight is significant given that SNSs and other platforms provide an abundance of social information that may be utilized for reaching such decisions. The present study investigated the links among relational reconnection, information seeking (IS) behavior, and individual- and relationship-level factors in user decisions to reconnect on Facebook. A national survey of 244 Facebook users reported on their most recent experience of receiving a friend request from someone with whom they had been out of contact for an extended period. Results indicated that uncertainty about the potential reconnection partner and forecast about the reconnection's potential reward level significantly predicted IS behavior (passive on both target and mutual friends' SNS pages as well as active). However, the emergence of their two-way interaction revealed that the forecasts moderated the IS-uncertainty link on three of the strategies (extractive, both passive approaches). Moreover, social anxiety, sociability, uncertainty about the partner, the forecast about the reconnection's reward level, and extractive and passive (target SNS pages) strategies significantly predicted user decisions to reconnect. Future directions for research on relational reconnection on SNSs are offered.
Research Interests: Information Systems, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Social Media, and 14 moreInformation Seeking Behaviour, Medicine, Interpersonal Relationships, Social behavior, Uncertainty, Humans, Female, Male, Interpersonal Relations, Information Seeking Behavior, Middle Aged, Adult, Social Behavior, and Friends
Research Interests: Marketing and Advertising
Abstract Fashion and beauty brands leverage social media influencers to shape purchasing decisions, improve cost effectiveness, and reach wider audiences. New conventional wisdom has brands moving away from megainfluencers toward... more
Abstract Fashion and beauty brands leverage social media influencers to shape purchasing decisions, improve cost effectiveness, and reach wider audiences. New conventional wisdom has brands moving away from megainfluencers toward microinfluencers due to greater perceived relatability and trustworthiness. This study employs a novel computational approach integrating network analysis and computational text analysis to understand differences in content and its diffusion through mega- and microinfluencer Twitter networks. Findings debunk conventional wisdom that microinfluencers can best fill unique roles by forging intimate, emotion-laden interpersonal connections. While microinfluencers are more central to two-way dialogue within their networks, megainfluencers garner more affect directed toward them, indicating greater trust. Practical implications for the continued value of megainfluencers and the identification and development of promising microinfluencers are discussed.
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Mobile health (mHealth) interventions provide opportunities and challenges for self-management of healthcare. As scholars explore the future of mHealth interventions, it is important to consider the end user to focus on the increasingly... more
Mobile health (mHealth) interventions provide opportunities and challenges for self-management of healthcare. As scholars explore the future of mHealth interventions, it is important to consider the end user to focus on the increasingly important nature of the personalized healthcare experience. To do this, mixed-method approaches are offered to effectively personalize these experiences. Narrative approaches in mHealth interventions can provide improved behavioral outcomes, patient compliance, and improved self-efficacy. To better gather and evaluate mHealth interventions, data science approaches through mining can benefit mHealth interventions in their design, user experience, and evaluation. These approaches are outlined in tandem with examples and suggestions for their use in practice. This chapter is concluded with suggestions for future directions that make use of these strategies to build optimal mHealth interventions that serve the broader public.
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There are many real-world contexts in which it would be invaluable to identify intermediaries who serve as bridges for specified dyads. For instance, with respect to suicide prevention among military veterans, mental health organizations... more
There are many real-world contexts in which it would be invaluable to identify intermediaries who serve as bridges for specified dyads. For instance, with respect to suicide prevention among military veterans, mental health organizations play an important role in providing information, social support, and other resources to veterans, particularly on social media, where anonymous and pseudonymous interactions may help to counteract the stigma associated with suicide and mental health. However, many at-risk individuals are overlooked in the large-scale conversations on social media and are thus less likely to benefit from those interactions. Intermediaries who can integrate those peripheral actors into the conversation, or at least deliver essential information to them, could help to resolve this issue. The critical question, then, is how to identify those potentially useful intermediaries who are well positioned to act as bridges to reach peripheral actors. To address this challenge, we propose a new network measure, targeted betweenness centrality , to identify vertices that represent potentially useful intermediaries between specified dyads, then use that measure to identify social media users who can act as opinion leaders on behalf of the US Department of Veterans Affairs to reach vertices on the periphery of the Twitter conversation about veteran suicide. The results of this study provide useful insights related to opinion leadership, the military veteran community, and suicide prevention, and more broadly, they demonstrate the practical utility of targeted betweenness centrality for real-world research across a variety of contexts.
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Social television (TV) engagement has become more commonplace as viewers seek alternative ways of engaging with TV shows and other viewers. This is especially true with televised professional wrestling; 119,506 tweets were analyzed using... more
Social television (TV) engagement has become more commonplace as viewers seek alternative ways of engaging with TV shows and other viewers. This is especially true with televised professional wrestling; 119,506 tweets were analyzed using social network analysis during the four World Wrestling Entertainment telecasts. Results show that brand-affiliated users primarily interact among one another and not the fans themselves, despite fans reaching out to the brand, resulting in significant social stratification and low interactivity within the community. The findings suggest that when fans think they are able to join and contribute to the brand’s ongoing conversation, those fans might still be highly motivated to communicate with the brand, even if the brand does not reciprocate.
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Communities of practice (COPs) have become increasingly important across a wide range of casual and business contexts, including innovative technical product development, refining skill sets for co...
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Abstract Practitioners and scholars increasingly employ social media listening platforms (SMLPs) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to extract actionable insights from large amounts of social media data informing research questions... more
Abstract Practitioners and scholars increasingly employ social media listening platforms (SMLPs) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to extract actionable insights from large amounts of social media data informing research questions and brand strategy. Due to their proprietary nature, AI tools within SMLPs are “black boxes” that force users to accept results on blind faith, a source of concern in industry and academia. This study seeks to provide greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of SMLPs by assessing the AI-based results of leading SMLP Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch Consumer Research) against those of a standard human content analysis and an analysis conducted using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Analyzing a random 10,000-post sample of the conversation around the Nike “Dream Crazy” ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, findings reveal Crimson Hexagon’s AI tools to be woefully unreliable in terms of brand identification as well as detection of post and brand sentiment polarity, specific emotions, and brand outcomes, demonstrating the hazards of blindly relying upon conclusions drawn from black-box social media listening platforms. Findings highlight the need for researchers to examine algorithm documentation and training data sets, as well as assess AI-generated data prior to use in research models and decisions.
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The present study examines Twitter conversations around cardiovascular health in order to assess the topical foci of these conversations as well as the role of various state departments of health. After scraping tweets containing relevant... more
The present study examines Twitter conversations around cardiovascular health in order to assess the topical foci of these conversations as well as the role of various state departments of health. After scraping tweets containing relevant keywords, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify the most important topics discussed around the issue, while PageRank was used to determine the relative prominence of different users. The results indicate that a small number of state departments of health play an especially significant role in these conversations. Furthermore, irregular events like ebola outbreaks also exert a strong influence over the volume of tweets made in general by state departments of health.
This paper offers an approach to enhancing trustworthiness of qualitative findings through data analysis triangulation using Leximancer, a text mining software that uses co-occurrence to conduct semantic and relational analyses of text... more
This paper offers an approach to enhancing trustworthiness of qualitative findings through data analysis triangulation using Leximancer, a text mining software that uses co-occurrence to conduct semantic and relational analyses of text corpuses to identify concepts, themes, and how they relate to one another. This study explores the usefulness of Leximancer for triangulation by examining 309 pages of previously analyzed interview data that resulted in a conceptual model. Findings show Leximancer to be an ideal tool for refining a priori conceptual models. The Leximancer analysis provided missing nuance from the a priori model, depicting the value of and connection between emergent themes. Dependability was also added to the findings by facilitating a better understanding of how participant quotes represent particular themes.
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Research Interests: Marketing and Advertising
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Research Interests: Marketing and Advertising
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Research Interests: Marketing and Advertising
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Research Interests: Marketing and Advertising
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This study addresses gaps in our understanding of viral advertising by examining the following questions: (1) how do brand relationships, interpersonal relationships, and user comment valence influence decisions to accept referrals of and... more
This study addresses gaps in our understanding of viral advertising by examining the following questions: (1) how do brand relationships, interpersonal relationships, and user comment valence influence decisions to accept referrals of and re-share online video ads, and (2) how do the roles of each intertwine to influence those decisions. A national sample (N = 405) of 18- to 34-year-old Facebook users participated in a 2 (stronger/weaker brand relationship strength) × 2 (stronger/weaker interpersonal relationship strength) × 2 (positive/negative user comments) experiment. The results show that interpersonal relationships, brand relationships, and valence of user comments play different, but intertwining roles in social networking site users' acceptance of viral video ads and decisions to re-share. Interpersonal relationships most strongly influenced ad referral acceptance while brand relationships and comment valence drove re-sharing. A three-way interaction, however, revealed that positive user comments greatly strengthen the brand's impact on referral acceptance; negative comments strongly negate brand influence.
FREE COPY (first 50 downloads): http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CMkbAtJEDF2HfdM3biF5/full
FREE COPY (first 50 downloads): http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CMkbAtJEDF2HfdM3biF5/full
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This article presents a systematic analysis of all refereed articles, research reports and invited commentaries (N = 197) published in the Journal of Advertising Education from 1996 to 2015. The analysis revealed that the most common... more
This article presents a systematic analysis of all refereed articles, research reports and invited commentaries (N = 197) published in the Journal of Advertising Education from 1996 to 2015. The analysis revealed that the most common article theme was classroom and course instruction (52.8%; n= 104). Within that theme, articles about using a tool or approach in the classroom (e.g., using a class wiki; 47.1%, n = 49) and achieving a learning outcome (e.g., developing teamwork skills; 30.8%; n = 32) were most popular. The authors performed additional analyses on articles reporting data collection and analysis (N = 122). The researchers found that only 26.2% (n = 32) of these articles identified a theory by name, and only six (4.9%) offered a theo- retical implication in the discussion. However, a significant majority of these articles provided practical implications for educators (86.1%; n = 105).
Research Interests:
Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook function as both venues for reconnecting with associates from a user’s past and sources of social information about them. Yet, little is known about what factors influence the initial decision... more
Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook function as both venues for reconnecting with associates from a user’s past and sources of social information about them. Yet, little is known about what factors influence the initial decision to reconnect with a past associate. This oversight is significant given that SNSs and other platforms provide an abundance of social information that may be utilized for reaching such decisions. The present study investigated the links among relational reconnection, information seeking (IS) behavior, and individual- and
relationship-level factors in user decisions to reconnect on Facebook. A national survey of 244 Facebook users reported on their most recent experience of receiving a friend request from someone with whom they had been out of contact for an extended period. Results indicated that uncertainty about the potential reconnection partner and forecast about the reconnection’s potential reward level significantly predicted IS behavior (passive on both target and mutual friends’ SNS pages as well as active). However, the emergence of their two-way interaction revealed
that the forecasts moderated the IS-uncertainty link on three of the strategies (extractive, both passive approaches). Moreover, social anxiety, sociability, uncertainty about the partner, the forecast about the reconnection’s reward level, and extractive and passive (target SNS pages) strategies significantly predicted user decisions to reconnect.
Future directions for research on relational reconnection on SNSs are offered.
relationship-level factors in user decisions to reconnect on Facebook. A national survey of 244 Facebook users reported on their most recent experience of receiving a friend request from someone with whom they had been out of contact for an extended period. Results indicated that uncertainty about the potential reconnection partner and forecast about the reconnection’s potential reward level significantly predicted IS behavior (passive on both target and mutual friends’ SNS pages as well as active). However, the emergence of their two-way interaction revealed
that the forecasts moderated the IS-uncertainty link on three of the strategies (extractive, both passive approaches). Moreover, social anxiety, sociability, uncertainty about the partner, the forecast about the reconnection’s reward level, and extractive and passive (target SNS pages) strategies significantly predicted user decisions to reconnect.
Future directions for research on relational reconnection on SNSs are offered.
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Advertisers worldwide are designing advertising with an eye toward viral activity particularly within social networking sites such as Facebook. Yet, little is known about the social processes at play when ads are shared. Taking a... more
Advertisers worldwide are designing advertising with an eye toward viral activity particularly within social networking sites such as Facebook. Yet, little is known about the social processes at play when ads are shared. Taking a consumer-centric approach, this study investigates the social processes central to ads going viral within the Social Web. Conducting a national online experiment, the intertwining roles of brand relationships, interpersonal relationships, and sharing motivations in the social exchange of advertising are explored by testing two proposed referral decision-making processes: referral and referral acceptance. Results suggest that brand relationships and interpersonal relationships impact referral of ads within SNSs, and brand relationships interact with sharing motivations to impact decisions; specifically, brand relationships are conduits for ensuring reciprocal altruism in exchange, but their influence is tempered within stronger interpersonal relationships. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.