Turner Faculty
Trailblazers
Social Media Messaging and Firm Reputation Recent research by the Turner College’s Joshua Brooks, an assistant professor of Finance, points out that it has now become a normal part of the consumption journey for consumers to share their positive and negative service encounters with firms on microblogs such as Twitter. Brooks’ research, co-authored with Jennifer Barhorst of the College of Charleston, and Alan Wilson and Graeme McLean, both of the University of Strathclyde, explores the comparative effects of positive and negative valence “service encounter microblog word of mouth” (SEMWOM) on receivers’ perceptions of firms’ reputations, and the factors that are particularly salient to receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to SEMWOM.
The study, titled “Service Encounter Microblog Word of Mouth and its Impact on Reputation,” and published in a 2020 issue of the Journal of Services Marketing, includes an experiment that exposed 372 Twitter users to positive and negative valence SEMWOM related to the U.S. airline companies. The research finds that both positive and negative valence SEMWOM affect, to varying degrees depending media type, receivers’ perceptions of airlines’ reputations on exposure.
“Through social media, even relatively isolated individuals can inflict a meaningful amount of damage or benefit to a company's reputation,” Brooks explained. “Our study examined the characteristics of social media mentions that caused the biggest impact on a company's reputation.”
Coral Reef Revenue, or Coral Reef Rash? Recent research by Turner College associate professor of Economics Tesa Leonce addresses particular risk of overexpoitation and extinction faced by coral reefs due to negative externalities from productive sectors such as tourism and fisheries. Her study, titled “Coral Reef Conservation incentives and Revenue Sharing,” and published in Tourism Economics, proposes a community-based approach to conservation based on a bioeconomic model that addresses the difficult trade-offs stemming from increased reliance on tourism revenues.
Leonce’s bioeconomic model explores whether or not effort-dependent revenue-sharing incentivizes local residents to engage in conservation activities. The short answer is that Tesa Leonce revenue-sharing proposals can promote local engagement in coral reef conservation. The key variables leading to this potential include, as Leonce’s research explains, the relative size of reward, the degree of reliance on coral reefs as a source of revenue, and whether the coral reefs are perceived by local residents as a commodity or a nuisance.
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