Our study available online in Public Relations Review! (Through Science Direct) CLICK on picture above!
I just found out that my article along with my fellow research colleagues titled “Who are the social media influencers? A study of public perceptions of personality” has been published online for the Public Relations Review. If you have access to the Science Direct database online, you will be able to get access to the article. This study focused on social media influencers (SMIs), who represent a new type of independent third party endorser who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and the use of other social media. In our study, we discuss how we believe that these individuals are influential due to their SMI capital, and in order to maximize organizational SMI capital, this requires methods that provide precise information about relevant influencers and how they are perceived by audiences. Because of the persuasive power of social media influencers, technologies have been developed to identify and track the influencers relevant to a brand or organization.
The method that we used was the California Q-sort by Jack Block, which allowed us to be able to quantify and compare participants’ subjective impressions of people or entities by ranking a set of 100 attributes standardized and validated over more than 50 years of use by the scientific community. Attributes were sorted into nine categories (1= least characteristic or salient to 9= most characteristic or salient) using the following quasi-normal distribution of items per category: 5,8,12,16,18,16,12,8,and 5.
In order to look at the perceptions of audiences for these SMI influencers, we decided to look at four social media influencers for this research study: Brian Solis, Deirdre Breakenridge, Charlene Li, and Jeremiah Owyang.
From this study, there were interesting results that came out of this – the SMIs were all perceived as smart, ambitious, productive, poised, power-oriented, candid, and dependable according to the ranking of the different attributes. The attributes that were NOT associated with the SMIs included the following: likely to give up, self-defeating, lacking meaning in life, doubting adequacy, submissive, fearful, anxious, and thin-skinned.
What are the implications to the PR field due to this research? Public relations professionals have to recognize that with new media such as social media and other emerging technologies, we are not controlling the message and people are getting their information from other sources who are perceived to be credible and trustworthy. By understanding the different perceptions of the SMIs, we can discuss how influence and transfer of knowledge happens virtually, and what are the personality characteristics people are attributing to these individuals that motivates them to follow, read, or engage in conversation with online.
In summary, this is definitely an area of research and practice within public relations and social media that needs to be explored further – there are so many opportunities and future research studies that can emerge from this. We need to have this discussion with both researchers and practitioners in public relations – this can be applied and helpful in both academia as well as in the real world. I am looking forward to exploring this line of research further in my academic career. 🙂
Hope you all are having a wonderful day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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