Han, K. (2018). How do you perceive this author? Understanding and modeling authors’ communication quality in social media. Plos ONE, 13(2), 1-25. Carmen Kang

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Carmen Kang

Article Review: Han, K. (2018). How do you perceive this author? Understanding and modeling authors’ communication quality in social media. Plos ONE, 13(2), 1-25.

Personal branding often revolves around an individual representing themselves through a lens on social media platforms. This can typically involve positive reinforcement, whether this is a person turning into a brand or a person monitoring their own social media to make it appear as proper as possible for future employment. Without being completely aware, individuals turn from regular people and into editors. With such close editing and watch over the self’s social media, others may begin to wonder how do you perceive this individual? Better yet, how do you perceive this author? Is this an individual you can trust, or more so an individual you can see yourself supporting?

Han (2018) discusses the manner in which social media can be analyzed, as a content analysis and how these posts reinforce a specific style of communication. More specifically, the author introduces a four factors that are used to analyze how these authors tailor their content to communicate. The first factor is author credibility, which typically connects to an individual’s character and lifestyle. It represents vaguely where this individual believes they may stand within a social hierarchy, as well as how they might tailor their social media identity to fit a certain aesthetic. This is to instill the idea of credibility, as it is formed and either built or deteriorated overtime.

The second factor is interpersonal attraction, which mainly interferes with individuals opinions and thoughts on others. This act can be divided into two different actions, the first being a desire for interaction and the second being social. In this case study, social is fulfilling that social interaction by acting through social media. This is done by either liking posts, or responding to posts. The third factor would be communication competence. This factor focuses primarily to the level of competence perceived by readers which further reinforces the identity of the publisher. In this study the author focused on the capability that the individual had to create a tweet in retrospect to clarity, effectiveness and organization. The fourth and final factor focuses on the intent to interact. This translates the level of willingness to follow and keep up with an individual’s account and feed.

From all of this, the communication competency of the author can be gathered. This helps to better understand, or push away the ability to understand an individual and in a sense the cycle repeats itself. In more ways than one, this cycle takes place in everyday life rather than just personal branding as a practice. For millennials, social media is a way of life and the more aesthetically pleasing one may appear, the stronger their communication competency may be.

The most strengthening factor of this case study is the methodology, involving the four factors. Each of these factors are fairly simple to understand, and when put together can become recognized as a form of routine around social media. The methods and discussion work to introduce this cycle as an everyday action as well as brand new terms that can be linked to this. One of the terms introduced was the computational approach. This approach focuses on the activity around an individual's social media interactions. A computer is easily able to monitor these approaches and begin to pick up on patterns that the individual might post about or even that of which the individual might respond in regards to. These sorts of patterns can at times be noticed by humans interacting with individuals but better by computers.

By introducing these factors and describing each when it is going through it’s phase, the case study becomes quite efficient. Furthermore, when new terminology is introduced it helps to better understand why these phases may occur and how they help lead into one another.

With that, the biggest weakness in this case study is the lack of change that is implied or described. Since Han focuses so much on patterns and repetitive actions, there is a pull away from improvising or implying different behaviour. It is rare that most with a strong social media presence will post differently from their regular posts, but if they were to, how would this place these factors off balance? This is the main question that remains unanswered.

Overall, this article introduces the idea of social media actions and how these may form a cycle. In addition to that, how followers register these actions or this cycle and if they wound up in the cycle. It begins with an interest and could potentially end with following and the want to keep up with an account, possibly the person running the account.

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