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The study aims to contribute to the knowledge on the role of the fashion bloggers in the product adoption process in both advanced and emerging markets. Specifically, the study investigates the impact of credibility, engagement and homophily on intentions to buy fashion products recommended by the blogger.

The empirical research builds on an online survey with a sample of 402 consumers (189 Italian and 213 Taiwanese). The proposed model was tested through structural equation modeling.

Results showed that homophily and the fashion blogger credibility positively influenced the engagement within the blog. Moreover, perceived similarity with the other blog's followers (homophily) and a higher engagement with the blog both translated in a stronger intention to buy the sponsored products and to spread a positive word-of-mouth about the fashion blogger.

The study has practical implications since it identifies strategic suggestions for both companies that create partnerships with famous fashion bloggers and bloggers who have turned their diary-style websites into a business.

The study contributes to a better understanding of the influence exerted by blog engagement on intentions to follow blogger's recommendations. The study also examines credibility and homophily as antecedents of engagement, which have not been extensively researched in the past with respect to blogs.

In the past few years fashion blogs have become a popular form of user‐generated content, and consequently, the fashion industry has shown great interest in fashion blog marketing. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze consumer‐to‐consumer (C2C) electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM) in fashion blogs, and especially to compare naturally‐occurring, i.e. organic eWOM with marketer‐influenced, i.e. amplified eWOM.

The study takes a netnographic approach to the phenomenon of fashion blogs. The empirical material consists of observational data including blog texts and audience comments of six popular fashion blogs in Finland.

Findings indicate that although not as varied as organic, amplified eWOM content in consumer fashion blogs resembles organic content. The main topics discussed in organic eWOM include personal style, brands, designers and retailers, tips and advice as well as purchases. Amplified topics concerned products received by the blogger, brands, designers and retailers, tips given to the audience, and competitions.

The findings indicate that for blog marketing to be effective and credible, the marketed fashion items, designers, or retailers need to fit the blogger's personal style.

Social media, especially blogs, play an important role in contemporary fashion marketing. This study addresses the emerging, yet scarce area of research into how marketer influence on fashion bloggers can be seen in user‐generated content.

This paper focuses on the analysis of fashion blog activity regarding brands under corporate crisis situations and discusses how these opinion leaders may be agents of corporate crisis management.

The authors analyzed four influential Portuguese fashion blogs regarding eight fashion brands that had experienced a corporate crisis situation. In total, five of the selected brands were mentioned in 2.846 posts of blog content, whose discourse was deeply analyzed.

The absence of express reference to brand crisis suggests that fashion bloggers tend to ignore these crisis events or divert the readers' attention to the brands' more positive aspects. This result opens the discussion whether fashion bloggers downplay corporate crisis in brand equity or whether it expresses strategies of brand crisis communication through digital influencers.

Though social media may be a source of negative word-of-mouth, social media influencers have been considered important partners of corporate crisis communication in particularly challenging times. Many studies have focused on the role of social media influencers in crisis management, but there was a dearth of research on the specific case of blogs. This study contributes to the understanding of fashion bloggers as agents of brand communication, particularly regarding crisis management and their role on brand activation and positive electronic word-of-mouth, even under crisis situations. This contribution paves the way for future research on whether this is a spontaneous phenomenon or the reflection of possible partnerships between companies and fashion bloggers for the management of corporate crisis situations in the context of fashion brands.

This study aims to examine the influence of fashion blogs on consumer brand preferences and investigate the emergence of “communities of style” associated with combinations of fashion brands.

This study undertakes a netnography of Swedish fashion blogs, applying an ethnographic approach to information posted on the Internet.

Right now, there are probably more people in Sweden reading or posting on a fashion blog than there are reading a newspaper. There were greater than 60 Swedish fashion blogs generating greater than 10,000 visits a week back in August 2009; ten of them each generated greater than 100,000 visits a week. It is an increasingly global phenomenon – the location of choice for internationally known elite fashion bloggers. This is a consumer-driven information platform publicizing the brand choices made by stylish people to an international audience – a development with considerable implications for fashion industry marketers.

This study focuses on the Swedish blog network. Future research could use a similar netnographic approach to identify international communities of style and relate them to the global fashion industry.

The study draws attention to the way this development shifts power over brand meaning toward consumers and away from marketers.

The study shows that fashion blogs can demonstrate all the characteristics of a community and can communicate with and influence a wide audience.

The study highlights the use of style as a way to bring consumers together in virtual communities involving the selection and combination of multiple brands.

The purpose of this study is to investigate (1) how female blog users' perceived benefits (i.e. perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, community identification and perceived norm of reciprocity) influence their perceived social capital on fashion blogs, (2) the influence of structural social capital and cognitive social capital on users' relational social capital and (3) the influence of relational social capital on blog loyalty.

Structural equation modeling was performed using 530 useable data collected through an online survey.

The result indicated that perceived usefulness and the norm of reciprocity led to the development of cognitive social capital, while community identification and the norm of reciprocity led to the development of structural social capital. Cognitive and structural social capital both led to the development relational social capital, which in turn influenced blog loyalty.

This study provides insights for a fashion brand marketing strategy that uses fashion blogs to target relevant consumers. It helps firms to understand the factors that lead people to embed their resources in a blog and to learn how the different perceived benefits impact blog users' contributions to the community.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the theoretical/conceptual development and application of weblog‐textmining to fashion forecasting in general and street fashion trending in particular.

The current methods of forecasting cannot keep pace with the changing dynamics of the marketplace – mostly due to the rampant diffusion of data/information. The company that can tap the continual flow of data/information in the present, contrast it with a stored set of information from the past, and adjust based on repeated cycles, will have the best insight into the lingering trend, changing trend, or dynamic trend. The paper uses a simple example to explain blog trend analysis using Nielsen BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse.

The study finds that to make fashion weblog forecasting a reality, there needs to be a rich accumulation of fashion communication in structured blogs. In addition, there needs to be a classification of the various forms of industry web text, web venue. Furthermore, rich research traditions must be in place to chronicle the cultural, behavioral, linguistic, socioeconomic, and communication behaviors over time for the weblog and the fashion weblogger in particular.

The changing dynamics of the fashion business makes it a good example for understanding the weblog‐text mining approach developed in this paper.

The understanding and implementation of trend forecasting using blogs as data mining sources will add another dimension of forecasting techniques to survive the multi‐channel revolution in fashion marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate fashion blogs’ influence on Spanish Millennials’ buying behaviour.

This research is quantitative in nature, utilising a mono method consisting of structured self-administered questionnaires. Data were exported to IBM SPSS Statistics, where different types of analyses were combined – such as frequencies, means, hypothesis testing analyses, principal components analysis or K-means cluster.

Findings show that the most important motivations to follow a fashion blog are entertainment and information seeking. Besides, consumers’ attitudes seem to be influenced by how consumers assess credibility, which is determined by trustworthiness, para-social interaction (PSI), expertise and message credibility. Finally, after showing covert and overt marketing posts, both trustworthiness and PSI were lower than before, identifying PSI as a possible moderator in these cases.

The main limitation of this study is the sample size, which does not make it possible to generalise conclusions.

From this research, it can be said that, due to the importance of establishing a strong relationship with the public, bloggers should try to connect with readers on an emotional level, and brands need to select bloggers very carefully.

This paper reveals Millennials’ attitudes whilst they are visiting a fashion blog and the influence that these attitudes can exercise on their purchase intention.

The proliferation of social media, new generations of digital natives and the profusion of wireless campuses promise to revolutionise teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. No consensus exists on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies into an educational context, so whilst it is intuitive that educators have a vital role in determining and evaluating the uses and implications of social media, there is a lack of research both into general pedagogic questions and into the particulars of introducing blogs to the classroom. The potential for blogging in education is explored through a review of international research, exemplars of good practice are cited and a qualitative case study of the integration of social media across a range of college level courses is presented. Vignettes from the case study illustrate both the successes enjoyed and the difficulties encountered introducing individual and group blogs. The majority of students endorse the use of blogs and report how blogs support their learning by codifying search trails, improving writing styles, help the visualisation of the process of their own and classmates’ work, how group blogs facilitate the coordination of collaborative projects and how for many blogging has become an integral part of their educational experience.

The purpose of this research is to conduct an exploratory study to discover if presenting consumers with a certain content type (i.e. product-focused content with informational appeal, institution-focused content with emotional appeal, experience-focused content with emotional appeal,) and blog type (i.e. a corporate, sponsored or a personal blog) persuade consumers to form perceptions of credibility and similarity toward the fashion brand, which leads them to further engage with the brand through Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM).

This study employs a 3(content type: product-focused, institution-focused, experience-focused) x 3(blog type: corporate, sponsored and personal) between-subjects design. Mock fashion blogs and content were developed in order to provide a realistic blogging experience for the participants. With 511 usable data collected, ANOVA was employed to test the relationships.

Findings reveal that content type, specifically product-focused content and experiential content, is an important consideration for illustrating similarities between the brand and consumers compared to institutional content. Product-focused content is found to be effective in encouraging consumer eWOM for the brand as well. Further, the interaction effect of blog type and content type was significant in establishing brand credibility. However, blog type did not influence any of the dependent variable.

This study brings meaningful suggestions to fashion brands on effective blog campaign, which eventually provide insights on how brands can influence female consumers to shape positive evaluation toward the brand.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents and consequences of social media fashion influencer's (SMFI) diffusion of fashion information. This study proposes and examines following research questions: What motivates SMFI to share fashion information? In what way shared fashion information impact SMFI?

This study uses semi-structured interviews with SMFI to learn about their relationships with followers. It then conducts a survey of 510 SMFI in Portugal. The data are analyzed by structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that intrinsic motivation can develop a SMFIs' fashion leadership, while the SMFIs' perceived usability of fashion blogs does not. The authors also find a self-serving bias among SMFI.

SMFIs' fashion leadership is associated with the intrinsic motivations of sharing and helping other consumers make fashion decisions, which indicates that marketers can improve their results through using opinion SMFI to assist fashion consumers in purchasing decisions. Further studies should explore the processes adopted by fashion consumers to evaluate SMFI.

This study helps to understand the antecedents and consequences of fashion diffusion by SMFIs. In particular, the research helps the marketers to understand how the bonds between SMFIs and followers are nurtured.