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This study examines the phenomenon of “knowledge influencers,” individuals who convey expert information to non-expert audiences and attract users to subscribe to their self-created knowledge products. It seeks to address two research questions: (1) What are the antecedents that promote perceived attractiveness of knowledge influencers? and (2) How does perceived attractiveness of knowledge influencers affect users’ willingness to subscribe to knowledge products?

Guided by self-branding theory, which suggests that individuals strategically shape user perceptions and interactions to create an appealing image, the study employed a sequential mixed-methods approach. Qualitative interviews were conducted with knowledge influencers and their subscribers, followed by a quantitative survey of users with knowledge subscription experience to validate the findings.

Results suggested that knowledge influencers could enhance their attractiveness to users by promoting perceived professionalism, perceived familiarity, and perceived connectedness. Perceived attractiveness of knowledge influencers could directly affect users’ willingness to subscribe or indirectly through the role of users’ attachment to knowledge influencers.

By understanding the factors driving users’ subscription intentions, platform operators and influencers can refine their strategies to enhance user attachment and optimize monetization opportunities through personalized interactions and tailored content offerings.

This study contributes to the literature by elucidating the relationship between perceived attractiveness and users’ subscription intentions, offering new insights into the dynamics of online knowledge consumption.

This chapter assesses how luxury travel imaginaries were modified in the aftermath of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among travel influencers, the chapter presents their response strategies to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an analysis of evidence from participant observation in tourist sites, network visualisations, in-depth interviews and platform profiles, I trace the transformations luxury travel imaginaries have undergone since the beginning of 2020. Before this global crisis, travel influencers became new puissant players in the highly globalised tourism industry as they regularly received assignments from tourism boards and hotels. Although brand sponsorship was considered a substantial source of revenue for travel influencers, their collaborations in travel destinations and the monetisation of travel content on YouTube were further assets to secure a livelihood. The coronavirus outbreak, however, turned their life-worlds upside down. This ethnographic investigation identified three main responses of travel influencers to the current long-term crisis of tourism: (1) diversification of content creation and orientation towards other influencer genres, (2) support for local tourism organisations and online promotion of staycations and (3), finally, travel to tourist sites for circulating online content on safe travel standards. Digital platforms became a major arena where the future of tourism has been re-negotiated in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. The in-depth investigation suggests that travel influencers were in a position to create new powerful representations of luxury as safe travel since they acquired the skills to establish stable storyworlds for their travel experiences, which attracted the attention of large platform audiences.

While in common English-language parlance speaking of “online celebrities” encourages the conflation of new forms of famousness with existing discourses on mass media stardom and fandom, the Mandarin Chinese term wanghong, a shorthand term for wangluo hongren (literally “person popular on the internet”), frames the enticing shores of online celebrity through the peculiar lexical domain of a grassroots popularity. The figure of the wanghong has in recent years accompanied the development of social media platforms in China, becoming a profitable profession, an inspirational role model, a morally condemnable by-product of internet economies, and in general a widely debated social phenomenon among local users. Drawing on interviews with more and less successful local online celebrities and discussions with their audiences, this chapter offers an up-to-date portrayal of the various forms of wanghong currently vying for attention on Chinese social media platforms, illustrating how popularity is crafted along with narratives of professionalism and economic aspirations intimately connected to the sociotechnical contexts of contemporary China.

This chapter reports on findings from a critical autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) about the strategies and experiences of male microcelebrities from Australia. The author Jonathan Mavroudis, himself identifies as a microcelebrity with a following of over 27,000 on Instagram at the time of writing. This position granted him insider access to this specific cohort and the microcelebrity world in general. The study comprised participant interviews, analyses of the author’s own experiences, and a survey of over 500 of his Instagram followers. The author draws from these data sources to introduce the concept of “fame labor.” Fame labor reconfigures the way visibility labors such as self-branding labor is understood. It offers a macro perspective that relates to nonmicrocelebrities as well as microcelebrities and illuminates potential wider implications of microcelebrity culture.

This chapter considers the evolution of diet culture in the digital age, particularly focussing on the proliferation of anti-diet and holistic wellness sentiments, which paradoxically work to conceal the ongoing persistence of diet culture. A discourse analysis approach was conducted on ‘What I Eat In A Day’ (WIEIAD) YouTube videos to examine the ways in which diet choices are narrated and rationalised to achieve the illusion of the ‘disappearance’ of diet culture. The author explores how this has produced the pressure to have (or more accurately perform) a ‘healthy’ relationship with food. This is ambiguously defined and embodied online, but some recurring themes have been observed through my analysis. The author argues that these WIEIAD videos often risk obscuring the persistence of diet culture by positioning it in the past when, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, it is very much embedded in the current diet discourse. Weight loss and appearance are downplayed as motivations for engaging in health and wellness. However, they are very much still beneath the surface. While the conversation around dieting might be less overtly problematic than it was in the past, there continues to be a significant amount of vigilance and effort required for women to meet conventional beauty standards. In addition to the material practice of dieting, there is now the pressure to perform the emotional labour of ‘talking away’ accusations of disordered eating, upholding the premature ideal of a post-diet culture era.

This paper aims to consider the role of social media platforms as educational technologies given growing evidence of harms to democracy, society and individuals, particularly through logics of efficiency, racism, misogyny and surveillance inextricably designed into the architectural and algorithmic bones of social media. The paper aims to uncover downsides and drawbacks of for-profit social media, as well as consider the discriminatory design embedded within its blueprints.

The authors used a method of a technological audit, framed through the lenses of technoskepticism and discriminatory design, to consider the unintended downsides and consequences of Twitter and Instagram.

The authors provide evidence from a variety of sources to demonstrate that Instagram and Twitter’s intersection of technological design, systemic oppression, platform capitalism and algorithmic manipulation cause material harm to marginalized people and youth.

The authors contend that it is a conflict of professional ethics to treat social media as an educational technology that should be used by youth in educational settings. Thus, they suggest that future scholarship focus more on addressing methods of teaching about social media rather than teaching with social media.

The paper concludes with recommendations for educators who might work alongside young people to learn about social media while taking informed social actions for more just technological futures.

This paper fulfills an identified need to challenge the direction of the field of social media and education research. It is of use to education scholars, practitioners and policy makers.

This study aims, first, to understand consumers’ perception of chefs as human brands (i.e. study one). Second, tests were run to assess the validity of a new conceptual model of the relationships between the factors of chef image, luxury restaurant image, both images’ congruity and consumers’ hedonic and novelty experiences and happiness and well-being (i.e. study two).

The first qualitative study involved using Leximancer software to analyse the data drawn from 43 interviews with luxury restaurant clients. In the second quantitative study, 993 valid survey questionnaires were collected, and the proposed model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that consumers perceive chefs as human brands and the associated narratives include both performance- and popularity-based characteristics. The findings support the conclusion that individuals give great importance to chefs’ image and the congruence between chefs and their restaurant’s image. In addition, luxury restaurant image only affects novelty experiences, and both hedonic and novelty experiences have a positive effect on customers’ happiness and well-being.

This research focused on Portuguese luxury restaurants. The consumers’ happiness and well-being needs to be replaced by other outcomes to confirm if the model produces consistent results.

The results should help luxury restaurant managers understand more fully which pull factors are valued by their clients and which aspects contribute the most to their pleasure and welfare.

This study adds to the extant literature by exploring consumers’ perceptions of chefs as human brands and the role these chefs’ image play in customers’ luxury restaurant experiences and perceived happiness and well-being.

This paper aims to understand the opportunities and challenges to engage emerging adult gamers (aged 18–25) in adopting healthier diet behaviours through online games and related platforms such as esports and streaming. The study uses a socio-ecological approach to understand influences and suggests approaches to changing behaviours.

Purposive and convenience sampling were used to identify (n = 13) online gaming industry professionals and emerging adult (EA) gamers for interview. Qualitative thematic analysis of data using NVivo was undertaken.

Bi-directional influences were found that are potentially impacting EA diet behaviours. Food industry advertising and sponsorships were identified as dominant influences within the behavioural ecology, using microcelebrities and esports events to target EAs. The study identifies a need for social marketers to engage EA gamers in healthful behaviours through interventions across various levels of the behavioural ecology, including those upstream with industry and potential government regulation, to promote better health and balance food marketing. It also identifies future research avenues for engaging gamers in good health.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of the gaming behavioural ecology on EA diet behaviour. It identifies new channels that social marketers can use to engage EAs, who are difficult to reach through more traditional marketing channels.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the contributions presented in this special section on the selfie phenomenon and its significance for marketing practice and scholarship.

The significance of the topic is reviewed and themes related to the selfie phenomenon and marketplace issues are discussed in connection with extant research. The contributions of each paper are briefly highlighted and discussed.

Although the selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, both marketing practice and scholarship have noticed its prominence in consumer lives and potential for generating marketplace insights. Despite its frequently presumed triviality, the selfie is a multifaceted phenomenon of significance to key marketing areas such as branding, consumer behavior or market research. Possible avenues for future research are outlined.

Key issues relating to research into the selfie phenomenon for marketing scholars are illuminated.

Although a large number of prior studies have discussed the impact of using social media to organizations, the existing literature has not yet provided a clear guidance on what specific communication strategy organizations should adopt on social media and what relationship they need to establish with the public. To fill this theoretical gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of message strategy and interactivity from a relationship-building perspective within a social media context.

Through a 2×2 between-subjects experiment (n=84), this study tests the effects of two message strategies, communal-relationship oriented messages and exchange-relationship oriented messages, with either a high or low level of interactivity within a corporate Twitter setting.

The study findings indicate that communication strategies with different relationship orientations differ in quality. Communal-relationship oriented messages tend to generate more favorable relationship outcomes such as trust and control mutuality than exchange-relationship oriented messages. Message interactivity also positively influences attitude toward the company, perceived company credibility, and commitment.

The unique contribution of this study is to extend relationship theories to a discussion of what message strategies organizations should use on social media. It suggests that messages oriented toward different relationships can lead to different outcomes. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of message interactivity in building a relationship between an organization and the public.