Focus: Social Media

Paper accepted for presentation at the International Communication Association Annual Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, May 2020. Abstract: Through two experiments, this study assessed source and message effects of Instagram-based pro-veganism messages. Experiment 1 (N = 294) examined effects of organization (brand versus non-profit) and message types (egoistic versus altruistic), while experiment 2 (N = 288) […]

Paper to be presented to American Advertising Academy (AAA) conference, San Diego, CA. Abstract: Given the prevalent use of social media in disseminating public service announcements (PSAs) encouraging healthy behavior, investigating the effects of user-generated comments alongside health messages became an important pursuit in the advertising and marketing scholarship. With this in mind, Facebook user-generated […]

Lucinda Austin and Yan Jin (Eds.) (Forthcoming in 2021). Social Media and Crisis Communication (Second Edition), Routledge.

Abstract: This study posits that human values can be used to identify and segment audiences for social media‐based valuable brand activities. Three online surveys were conducted with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users (ages 18–34) on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 491). The relationship between social media users’ values and their reported social media activities was […]

Nah Ray Han (Grady PhD Student) was awarded the 2019-2020 American Academy of Advertising Dissertation Award ($2,500) for her proposal “The Influence of Digital Crowding and Perceived Privacy on Advertising with Anthropomorphic Characters in Social Media”

Abstract: Companies consider social media‐based consumer engagement behaviors such as sharing, content creation, and reviews for brands as more valuable than “liking” or consuming brand content. Studies show that branded content shared or created by consumers on social media may drive more brand awareness and loyalty than “likes” (Adweek, 2013). Global companies are increasingly focusing […]

Abstract: Addressing the problem of increasing and diversifying sponsored eWOM on social media, this study examined the effects of different types of sponsorship arrangements and disclosure messages, with focus on (1) consumers’ perceived trust in the sponsored content creator and (2) attitudes toward the content creator and the sponsoring brand. An online experiment revealed interesting […]

Abstract: Social media-based consumer engagement behaviors, such as sharing, content creation and reviews for brands as more valuable than “liking” or consuming brand content. As consumers trust consumer-driven recommendations more than advertising, brand content shared or created by consumers on social media may drive brand awareness and loyalty. Marketing researchers and practitioners are only recently […]

Abstract: The continuation of rapid changes in Web 2.0 has transformed the practice of business communication and stakeholders’ expectations. One paramount issue facing corporate communicators is stakeholders’ social media fatigue that leads to online disengagement and social media strategy ineffectiveness. To tackle this challenge, a conceptual model is provided to guide the development of alternative […]

ABSTRACT: Social media and other online platforms are increasingly the way consumers access news articles, which increases the likelihood of users visiting articles from sources they may not have visited on their own. Users of these platforms experience a tension between their tendency to focus resources on processing information rather than credibility assessment. In a […]