1st Edition
Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication
This book seeks to draw a comprehensive picture of influencer collaborations from a strategic communication perspective. The contributors tackle strategic influencer communication from multidisciplinary perspectives, from varying actor foci, and from different methodological frameworks and methods.
Influencers cross traditional boundaries in many ways and oscillate between intimacy and publicity, authenticity and commercialization, ingratiation and critical distance. From a strategic communication perspective, this variability makes influencers hard to capture: organizations can cooperate with influencers to achieve both marketing and PR objectives. Influencers can act as cooperation partners, integrating commercial content into organic narratives, or as independent critics. Influencers also combine different roles that have traditionally been occupied by separate actors such as intermediary, content distributor, creative content producer, community manager, testimonial, strategic counsellor, and event host. The combination of these roles in just one actor opens new opportunities for strategic communication and can produce appreciated synergy effects. It is therefore hardly surprising that influencer collaborations have become a firmly established instrument in the toolbox of strategic communicators.
The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Advertising and the International Journal of Strategic Communication.
Introduction - The Authentic Friend: How Strategic Communication Discovered Social Media Influencers
Nils S. Borchers
1. Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication
Nadja Enke and Nils S. Borchers
2. The Commercialization of Social Media Stars: A Literature Review and Conceptual Framework on the Strategic Use of Social Media Influencers
Liselot Hudders, Steffi De Jans and Marijke de Veirman
3. Social Media Influencers as a Crisis Risk in Strategic Communication: Impact of Indiscretions on Professional Endorsements
Kylie Sng, Tsi Ying Au and Augustine Pang
4. Live Streamers on Twitch.tv as Social Media Influencers: Chances and Challenges for Strategic Communication
Jamie Woodcock and Mark R Johnson
5. A Call for Authenticity: Audience Responses to Social Media Influencer Endorsements in Strategic Communication
Essi Pöyry, Matilde Pelkonen, Emma Naumanen and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen
6. Primed Authenticity: How Priming Impacts Authenticity Perception of Social Media Influencers
Vilma Luoma-aho, Tuisku Pirttimäki, Devdeep Maity, Juha Munnukka and Hanna Reinikainen
Biography
Nils S. Borchers is Research Associate at the Institute of Media Studies, Universität Tübingen, Germany. He is the speaker of the Advertising Communication Division in the German Communication Association DGPuK and former YECREA young scholars’ representative in the Working Group Advertising Research in the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).
