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The purpose of this study is to explore how Indonesian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) select and “manage” employee influencers in order to engage more effectively with younger generations.

The study applies a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative data were obtained by analyzing Instagram content with samples for analysis being taken from company-related posts from June 2018 to June 2020. Qualitative data collection was by two focus group discussions (FGD). The FGDs comprised in total, 22 employee influencers representing the 11 sectors of SOEs in Indonesia.

The article examines how employee influencers engage with others; how they are chosen by their organizations; how they are managed and the support they need from their employers. It was discovered that a careful triangulation is required between employees as influencers, their followers and SOE communication hubs. A key factor is maintaining the authentic relationship between employee influencers and their followers. A conceptual model of employee influencer management for Indonesia is proposed.

The research provides useful insights for communication management, marketing, and human resources in developing and supporting the role of employee influencers.

The research provides useful insights for communication management, marketing and human resources in developing and supporting the role of employee influencers. The suggested model is of practical utility for SOEs for managing employee influencers in Indonesia and provides valuable indicators for other countries.

The study of SOEs’ employee influencers has not been explored previously in the literature. This, combined with the Indonesian perspective, brings new insights to the field. Social media use is especially high in Indonesia, so it acts as a good exemplar for the field. It also builds on the growing literature about the importance of employees as influencer, especially in the social media space. The model also make a theoretical contribution.

Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the Internet are dependent on strategic intimacy to appeal to their followers. Our study aims to examine how multiple exposures to Internet celebrity endorsements influence consumers’ click and purchase decisions in the context of influencer marketing.

Based on a unique and representative dataset, the authors first model consumers’ choices for clicks and purchases with two panel fixed-effect logit models linking clicks and purchases with the frequency of exposure to Internet celebrity endorsement. To further control the endogeneity produced by the intercorrelation between the click and purchase models, the authors also adopt the two-stage Heckman probit structure to jointly estimate the two models using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Robustness checks confirm the effectiveness of the models.

The results suggest that Internet celebrity endorsement plays a significant role in bringing referral traffic to e-commerce sites but is less helpful in affecting conversion to sales. The impact of repetitive Internet celebrity endorsements on consumers’ click decisions is U-shaped, but the role of Internet celebrities as online retailers will “shape-flip” this relationship to a negative linear relation.

Our study is the first to investigate the repetitive exposure effect of Internet celebrity endorsement. The results show a contradictory pattern with a wear-out effect of repetition in the advertising literature. This is the first study to show how the endorsing self, which is a common business model in influencer marketing, moderates the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

The emergence of social media has brought the influencer marketing landscape to an unprecedented level, where many ordinary people are turning into social media influencers. The study aims to construct and validate a model to yield strategic insights on the relevance of content curation, influencer–fans interaction and parasocial relationships development in fostering favorable endorsement outcomes (i.e. purchase intention).

The present study analyzes data from a survey of 411 consumers using partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to understand the net and combined effects of content attributes, interaction strategies and parasocial relationships on purchase intention.

PLS-SEM results reveal that content attributes (i.e. prestige and expertise) and interaction strategies (i.e. interactivity and self-disclosure) positively influence parasocial relationships, and in turn, lead to high purchase intention. Findings from fsQCA indicate six solutions with different combinations of content attributes, interaction strategies and parasocial relationships that sufficiently explain high purchase intention.

The present study demonstrates the roles of content attributes and interaction strategies in engendering parasocial relationship and the endorsement outcome (i.e. purchase intention) from both linear and non-linear (complexity) perspectives.

The importance of influencer marketing is constantly growing. However, little empirical research has examined influencers’ success requirements. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring whether the requirements of influencers’ attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness are relevant for online influencer campaigns. An entry-level luxury fashion brand is the focus of the experiment.

A total of 288 participants completed an online survey evaluating the profiles of influencers who varied in terms of the three abovementioned requirements. The impacts of these requirements on brand image, brand satisfaction and brand trust as well as purchase intention and price premium were tested via structural equation modeling.

The results show that the most important requirement is trustworthiness, followed by attractiveness; surprisingly, the relevance of expertise is virtually nil.

To date, practitioners are still struggling with the success requirements of influencer marketing. They have focused on traditional advertising models and numeric requirements such as the amount of followers. However, regarding merely these requirements can result in wrong decisions. Considering the two requirements, attractiveness and trustworthiness, in a stronger way can provide a remedy to this struggle. In future research, the relevance of the requirements in different involvement conditions and for non-attractiveness-related products might be investigated.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the success requirements that are directly related to influencers (e.g. attractiveness) rather than numeric requirements of their profiles (e.g. page rank) and the impacts of those requirements on brand image, brand satisfaction and brand trust as well as purchase intention and price premium. It adapts the Source-Credibility Model for influencers and shows that its requirements interact in a unique way that is counterintuitive and different from other endorser types such as celebrities or salespersons.

The paper aims to explore the influence of cybersecurity on the semantic orientation of the sports consumers. Focusing on both sport and esports, this study finds the social media factors contributing in the sentiment formation and commenting behavior on Twitter and proposes a scheme for attitude modulation through identification of highly engaged nano-influencers.

Experimental design was used as the research methodology. Data mining from Twitter using RStudio software was conducted using the keyword “cybersecurity” during the time of pandemic. Final corpus of 31,891 tweets were considered for the study. Initial sentiment analysis has been conducted to explore the consumer's emotional inclination towards cybersecurity. Further through generalized equation modeling the impact of social media attributes over the consumer's posting behavior has been analyzed.

The research findings reveal that users are inherently positive towards cybersecurity adoption in sports and the factors such as number of tweets, number of positive words contained in these tweets and the authenticity of the information source boost the pre-established tweeting behavior. However, the influx of information from non-organizational sources such as trending topics and discussions have negative impact over the users.

This study is first to explore the role of nano-influencers as communication moderators over digital social platforms. This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiments formation over social media and offers a scheme of selection of nano-influencers to modulate the pre-established sentiments of the users. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and selection of nano-influencers for practicing marketing managers.

The recent livestreaming commerce has magnified the role of influencer marketing, where the influencers are partnering with brands for product promotion. This study examines the impact of influencer attributes, interaction strategies and parasocial relationships on impulsive buying in livestreaming commerce.

A survey with 368 livestreaming commerce users was analyzed using the symmetric-thinking approach – partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and asymmetric thinking approach – fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The results of PLS-SEM indicate that influencer trustworthiness, influencer interactivity and self-disclosure determine parasocial relationships, which in turn influence impulsive buying. The fsQCA finding returned three configurations with various combinations of the causal conditions (i.e. influencer attributes, interaction strategies, parasocial relationships, perceived fit uncertainty and perceived quality uncertainty) explaining the formation of impulsive buying.

These findings provide unique linear and nonlinear insights to explain the combinatory effects of influencer attributes, interaction strategies, parasocial relationships, perceived fit uncertainty and perceived quality uncertainty on impulsive buying in livestreaming commerce.

This research examines the factors that affect business owner influencers' success in growing their businesses and making them a brand in line with the principles of the cognitive response theory (CRT).

This research examined the perceived uniqueness and originality of the posts on Nusr-et’s Instagram account as external information; information credibility was examined as a cognitive response, and desire was taken as a cognitive response and intention. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used in the analysis of the data.

According to the research findings, perceived uniqueness and originality were found to have positively affected information credibility and cognitive response, while cognitive response factors were also found to have positively affected desire. In addition, cognitive response factors were found to have mediated the effect of external information factors on desire. All these results reveal the significant accuracy of the model developed based on the CRT. In addition, age and gender variables were found to have had moderating roles. Based on the research findings, original suggestions for restaurant enterprises have been presented to help them gain a competitive advantage.

This study has found that the posts shared by business owner influencers have affected their followers in their desire to eat in the promoted restaurants and therefore, entrepreneurs and owners of the food and beverage industry should give importance to the preparation of social media content that could directly affect customers for visit to their restaurants and regularly post such contents in their social media accounts.

This research has been one of the first research papers using a model to reveal the reasons for behavioral intention in the field of hospitality based on the CRT.

This study delves into how corporations make decisions about influencer marketing. Specifically, it examines the differences between human influencers, who carry the risk of scandals, and virtual influencers, a new and unpredictable realm, regarding their integration with social media platforms.

Using game theory and empirical data, the study explores crucial factors in influencer marketing, including influencer quality, reputation repair costs and the probability of R&D failures.

This study suggests that companies favor human influencers when the risk of scandal is low. However, competing companies switch to virtual influencers at different intervals as this risk increases. The costs, likelihood of scandals and competition intensity all play a role in a company's decision-making regarding technology management. Additionally, a higher chance of R&D failure can motivate a company to invest more in R&D to gain a competitive advantage over rivals that may suffer failures.

This study provides insights into how corporations manage social media influencer marketing in the digital age. It contributes to marketing theory and technology management decisions by offering a fresh perspective on the relationship between corporate reputation and influencer marketing strategy.

This study offers valuable perspectives into a relatively uncharted area of marketing strategy. It employs game theory and empirical analysis to introduce a fresh method of comprehending the dynamics of influencer marketing, its impact on corporate reputation management and its interaction with social media.

The purpose of this study is to understand the individualism/collectivism and masculine/feminine cultural aspects presented in the endorsement content made and shared by digital influencers on Instagram.

The authors conducted a cross-cultural qualitative study, collecting endorsement posts published by six fitness mega-influencers from Brazil and the USA. A total of 147 posts were assessed through the semiotic analysis of still images.

The authors identified that, in collectivist and feminine cultures, endorsements focus on the emotional competence of the digital influencer and the content aims at interaction, whereas in individualistic and masculine cultures, the posts highlight the informational competence of the influencer and the content focuses on the endorser's self-promotion.

This study examined only two of the Hofstede's six cultural dimensions, limiting its scope. However, this study established a model that shows that the appeal of content posted by the influencer depends on individualism–collectivism dimension and the post symbolism is a result of the masculinity–femininity dimension. This study also identified the spectrum of appeal in messages and the role of advertising in building the influencer's narrative.

The authors identified cultural traits as an important criterion of congruence when choosing a brand endorser and as an element that impacts the marketing communication strategy in a social media environment. Therefore, this study suggests that organizations consider the influencer's culture as a criterion for choosing endorsers, which will guide the digital content strategy suited to the campaign's target audience.

This study emphasizes the illusory effectiveness of the internet in the search for convergence, establishing that the digital environment still requires socialization that brings feelings of cultural engagement, especially through new social actors arising from virtual media. Still on the social side, this study suggests the reflection of the economic characteristics of a country together with its cultural dimensions.

This study fills a research gap from previous studies that provide empirical evidence on the impacts of cultural differences on social media behaviors. This research adds the impact of the influencer in this virtual environment to restructure the communication and information model, mold it according to the culture, acting as indicators of social transformation resulting from technological advances. This research still innovates by proposing a new methodological approach for semiotic analysis in digital media.