Investigating negative reviews and detecting negative influencers in Yelp through a multi-dimensional social network based model

In this paper, we propose an investigation of negative reviews and define the profile of negative influencers in Yelp. The methodology adopted to achieve this goal consists of two phases. The first one is theoretical and aims at defining a multi-dimensional social network based model of Yelp, three stereotypes of Yelp users, and a network based model to represent negative reviewers and their relationships. The second phase is experimental and consists in the definition of five hypotheses on negative reviews and reviewers in Yelp and their verification through an extensive data analysis campaign. This was performed on Yelp data represented by means of the models introduced during the first phase. Its most important result is the construction of the profile of negative influencers in Yelp. The main novelties of this paper are: (i) the definition of the two social network based models of Yelp and its users; (ii) the definition of three stereotypes of Yelp users and their characteristics; (iii) the construction of the profile of negative influencers in Yelp.     

Agencing femininity: digital Mrs. Consumer in intra-action

ABSTRACT

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.     

Social media influencers’ narrative strategies to create eWOM: A theoretical contribution

Social media influencers (SMIs) as significant stakeholders are increasingly collaborating with brands to cultivate marketing campaigns. However, literature concerning the narrative strategies used by SMIs to create electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to introduce brands and products remains under-theorised. This research takes a theoretical perspective of marketing communication, advances the eWOM theory to develop SMIs’ eWOM model as the theoretical lens, and adopts semiotic and rhetorical approaches to identify SMIs’ narrative strategies to create eWOM to promote brands and products to consumers. By conducting a netnographic study to observe fashion bloggers’ messages concerning Western luxury brands on Chinese social media, this research identified six distinct narrative strategies that are different in linking the purpose of eWOM, assigning brands with roles in eWOM, representing the meanings associated with brands, and using modes of persuasion to convince consumers to accept these meanings. This research also proposes a model to illustrate the structure of SMIs’ narrative strategies. The results of this research have implications for the advancement of social media marketing theories and provide a foundation for future development of knowledge regarding SMIs’ narrative strategies.