• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.31-44
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• 2021

The emergence of the digital economy and easy accessibility to Web 2.0 tools has seen an expansion of the influencer ecosystem within the travel and tourism industry. Founded on the principles of reference groups and peer reference there is a growing trend amongst industry practitioners who are now opting to move away from many of the traditional approaches used to market their products and services and are instead taking advantage of the concept of e-word-of-mouth (eWOM). Whilst there is a growing body of academic literature addressing the notion of influencer marketing, there is little understanding of influencer marketers themselves. Consequentially, this study addresses this gap in the literature through the quantitative examination of those who promote products, services, or companies by distributing eWOM through their online digital channels and presence; otherwise known as travel influencers. A quantitative research approach involving an online survey yielded 255 responses from travel influencers. The research findings indicate that those who work in this field prefer not to be awarded the label "travel influencer," focusing instead on their specific method of influencing, such as blogging and vlogging or sharing Instagram updates. The research also demonstrates how the new influencers have a strong role in generating travel urge and desire. The research contributes to the wider body of academic literature and travel industry practitioners by establishing the general profile of influencers and their increasingly specialized role in tourism and hospitality marketing.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.130-139
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• 2023

With the increasing popularity of computer-generated virtual influencers, the trend is rising especially on social media. Famous virtual influencer characters Lil Miquela and Imma were all created by CGI graphics workflows. The process is typically a linear affair. Iteration is challenging and costly. Development efforts are frequently siloed off from one another. Moreover, it does not provide a real-time interactive experience. In the previous study, a real-time graphic workflow was proposed for the Digital Actor Hologram project while the output graphic quality is less than the results obtained from the CGI graphic workflow. Therefore, a real-time engine graphic workflow for Virtual Influencers is proposed in this paper to facilitate the creation of real-time interactive functions and realistic graphic quality. The real-time graphic workflow is obtained from four processes: Facial Modeling, Facial Texture, Material Shader, and Look-Development. The analysis of performance with real-time graphical workflow for Digital Actor Hologram demonstrates the usefulness of this research result. Our research will be efficient in producing virtual influencers.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.246-264
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• 2020

As netizens increasingly utilize social media to obtain and engage with information, this study aims to determine the extent to which the follower-influencer interaction is manifested and strengthened. To analyze information related to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a total of 62,119 online posts from 11 Internet forums were examined to find a relationship between followers and influencers in Taiwan. These forums are PTT, SOGO, Ck101, Plurk, Mobile01, TalkFetnet, Gamez, PlaySport, Dcard, Eyny, and PCDVD. The variables that were the best predictors of influencer classification were strong influences, engagements, and hot values across 11 Internet forums. Learning the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is vital because public actions could have been fueled by stigmatizing terms that may harm public health and well-being. The results questioned the conventional diffusion of traditional news sources because the influencers brought widespread attention to the health threat issues in the early outbreak stages. This study enhances the understanding of forum types, follower engagement, and influencers' impact maximization in social networks. The conclusion provides insight into the relationships and information diffusion mechanisms to ensure accurate health information dissemination.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.26-47
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• 2023

In the age of digital media transformation, the rapid rise of social media has changed the paradigm of traditional marketing techniques by leveraging the influence of influencers. However, the influence of influencers cannot be freed from ethical issues that arise as individuals, so virtual influencers are emerging as a countermeasure. This study is a study on how to increase the influencer effect of virtual models with a focus on the MZ generation in medical service. This study investigated whether respondents in their 40s or younger were aware of 'Rosy', a virtual influencer, and then conducted a survey on those who recognized 'Rosy'. As a result of this study, first, both cognitive and emotional motivation had a positive influence on fanship and attractiveness for virtual influencer. In addition, it was found that there was a difference in follow motive according to gender. Second, in order to lead to the intention of visiting hospitals, which is the medical service industry, only the cognitive motives with useful and reliable information and useful information for the virtual influencer were found to be significant in intention to visit.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.217-235
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• 2021

As 49% of the world's population uses social media platforms, communication and content sharing within social media are becoming more active than ever. In this environmental base, the one-person media market grew rapidly and formed public opinion, creating a new trend called sell-sumer. This study defined new types of influencers by product category by analyzing the subject concentration of the commercial/non-commercial keywords of influencers and the impact of the ratio of commercial postings on sales. It is hoped that influencers working within social media will be helpful to new sales strategies that are transformed into sell-sumers. The method of this study classifies influencers' commercial/non-commercial posts using Python, performs text mining using KoNLPy, and calculates similarity between FastText-based words. As a result, it has been confirmed that the higher the keyword theme concentration of the influencer's commercial posting, the higher the sales. In addition, it was confirmed through the cluster analysis that the influencer types for each product category were classified into four types and that there was a significant difference between groups according to sales. In other words, the implications of this study may suggest empirical solutions of social media sales strategies for influencers working on social media and marketers who want to use them as marketing tools.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.104-112
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• 2023

This study attempted to investigate the characteristics of beauty influencers' social media contents and examine their influence on color cosmetics purchase intention. For this, female millennials who have shown an interest or subscribed beauty contents on social media platforms as followers were selected by convenience sampling. In terms of a research method, a self-administered questionnaire was performed from September 19 to 30, 2022. Among a total of 220 questionnaires distributed, 200 copies excluding poorly answered ones were used for final analysis. The collected data were analyzed by frequency analysis, descriptive statistics, factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis, using SPSS 24.0, and the results found the followings: First, concerning characteristics of beauty influencers' beauty contents, five factors were derived: reliability, professionalism, social attractiveness, attractive appearance, sympathy In purchase intention, on the contrary, two factors were obtained: base makeup, point makeup. Second, regarding the effects of characteristics of beauty contents on color cosmetics purchase intention, 'professionalism (β = -.170 p = .015)' and 'physical attractiveness (β = -.148, p = .037)' revealed a negative influence with statistical significance. Through the result, by demonstrating the effect on the intention to purchase color cosmetics based on the beauty contents feature of the beauty influencer, it is considered that the purchasing power of the color cosmetics industry will continue to increase and help to suggest more effective color cosmetics promotion ways and indicators which companies can utilize.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.1321-1329
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• 2019

With the development of social information networks, the marketing methods are also changing in various ways. Unlike successful marketing methods based on existing celebrities and financial support, Influencer-based marketing is a big trend and very famous. In this paper, we first extract influencer features from more than 54 YouTube channels using the multi-dimensional qualitative analysis based on the meta information and comment data analysis of YouTube, model representative themes to maximize a personalized video satisfaction. Plus, the purpose of this study is to provide supplementary means for the successful promotion and marketing by creating and distributing videos of new items by referring to the existing Influencer features. For that we assume all comments of various videos for each channel as each document, TF-IDF (Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency) and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) algorithms are applied to maximize performance of the proposed scheme. Based on the performance evaluation, we proved the proposed scheme is better than other schemes.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.777-792
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• 2018

As social media has become a part of daily life, new types of online opinion leaders are emerging, and in turn, changes in traditional fashion leaders and leadership are expected. Considering such changes, this study attempted to reexamine fashion leader types and influence characteristics from the perspective of college students as fashion followers. Students were asked to write an essay identifying their fashion leader and how and why they were influenced by him or her. Sixty essays entitled "My Fashion Leader" were collected and content-analyzed. A total of 78 fashion leaders were identified and categorized into four types including celebrities, social media influencers, friends/family/acquaintances, and people seen on the street in order of frequency. Influence characteristics of the identified fashion leaders included superiority, role model, similarity, and familiarity. Similarity was observed across all types of fashion leaders, while superiority and familiarity were identified for celebrities and friends/family/acquaintances, respectively. The results imply that celebrities, mostly those from the TV, movie, and music industries, are still important as fashion leaders in society regardless of their communication style, while friends/family/acquaintances as opinion leaders within a consumer group are important to provide information, advice, and help. However, social media influencers between the two groups are expanding the influence.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.169-181
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• 2022

Currently, due to the activation of SNS live broadcasting, online services based on influencer live broadcasting are becoming a major consumption trend around the world. This study aims to verify the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction, product characteristics, and acceptance intention for influencer broadcasting based on nfluencer broadcasting experiences in an Internet environment. This study conducted a survey of users who experienced live broadcasting on social media in Taiwan from June 29 to August 30, 2020, and a total of 253 copies were used for empirical analysis. The collected data were analyzed through SPSS 25.0. The results of the empirical analysis are summarized as follows. First, it was found that the service quality factors (reliability, tangibility, responsiveness, certainty, and empathy) of Taiwan's influencer live broadcast had a significant effect on live broadcast satisfaction. Second, it was found that the product characteristics of Taiwan's influencer live broadcasting had a significant effect on product satisfaction. Third, it was found that live broadcasting satisfaction and product satisfaction had a significant effect on the acceptance intention of new brands in Taiwan's influencer live broadcasting. This study will provide useful data for establishing efficient marketing strategies to improve live and product satisfaction and increase acceptance of new brands by identifying service quality factors and product characteristics of Taiwan's influencer Live Broadcasting.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.111-130
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• 2020

Purpose SNS (Social Network Service) is one of new promising marketing tools which allow marketer to do two-way communication and social interaction. Three characteristics of SNS marketing including informativeness, interactivity, and playfulness are distinguished from traditional marketing. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between three characteristics of SNS marketing, brand image, and purchase intention. Design/methodology/approach The present study proposed a research model integrating SNS marketing characteristics, brand image, and purchase intention represented by structural equation modelling and four hypotheses. A total of 20 questionnaire items for five variables were developed and measured by using five point Likert scale. 199 valid data were collected and used to test four hypotheses using SmartPLS. Findings Three hypotheses that the characteristics of SNS marketing such as informativeness, interactivity, and playfulness have a positive influence on brand image were supported at the significance level of 0.05 and 0.001 respectively. The hypothesis regarding the relationship between brand image and purchase intention was also supported at the significance level of 0.001. Brand image plays a significant mediating role in the relationship between SNS marketing and purchase intention. In particular, the result of research that playfulness of SNS marketing affects brand image significantly suggests a new future research theme regarding spiritual marketing. Implications for academics and practitioners were suggested.