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Dylan Chung

Allison Bocchino

WRIT 2

November 3rd, 2020

Social Media: A Platform for the Dissemination of Scholarly Ideas

Nowadays, social media companies are like the legal stalker hiding in the public’s

pocket; they can track all of their users’ behaviors, likes and dislikes, and even locations. This

yields social media companies valuable data they can use to find out things such as sexual

orientation or even pregnancy. Thankfully, these companies do not use this information for pure

evil, but rather for a somewhat mediated evil that has come to be known as social media

marketing. But going from raw information, such as liking or ignoring photos, to properly

pinpointing a customer to a product involves many unseen steps. This is where the articles

“Elements of Strategic Social Media Marketing: A Holistic Framework” by Reto Felix, Philipp

A. Rauschnabel, and Chris Hinsch and “Presenting Novel Application-based Centrality Measures

for Finding Important Users Based on Their Activities and Social Behavior” by Ehsan Khadangi

and Alireza Bagheri come in to help social media companies and advertisers maximize the

effectiveness of social media marketing. The first article by Felix, Rauschnabel, and Hinsch

addresses the matters involving social media marketing from a management and business

standpoint, while the second article by Khadangi and Baheri works from a computer science

point of view by evaluating user importance in social media networks, which in turn provides a

better understanding of effective social media marketing. Although the two articles share

similarities in their general formatting, they differ in their analysis of data, their qualitative and

quantitative mannerisms, the audience’s expected level of expertise, and the visual diagrams and
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diction used throughout. These differences appropriately serve the two articles’ goals, as Felix’s

article provides a starting point for understanding the management side of social media

marketing, while Khadangi’s article uses social media marketing both to understand important

nodes on social media and as a proving ground for their custom-made statistical device.

Firstly, “Elements of Strategic Social Media Marketing: A Holistic Framework” presents

evidence in a way that allows readers of any kind of background, with just a bit of catching up,

to interact with their work. The article starts off with a brief framework that draws on previous

studies to introduce social media marketing and the lacking research that necessitates the

existence of a holistic framework (Felix et al. 119). To fill in this gap, the team makes use of

“117 pages of double-spaced verbatim transcripts” and responses from “265 social media

marketing experts” (Felix et al. 120). By providing the amount of data they have at their hands,

the authors subtly push the possibility, or rather inevitability, of the achievement of their

purpose. Thanks to this, the reader is reassured that there is new and valuable information

awaiting them at the end of the article. Following the textual introduction of the response data, a

table summarizes a portion of the respondents in an uncomplicated and inviting manner (Felix et

al. 120). This pushes another point of simplicity and understanding. While the topic is somewhat

complicated, the authors are able to simplify things down so that readers in a wider audience are

able to not only read the paper, but also interact with it and attain new impactful foundational

knowledge.

The analysis is where the business paper takes on a form of its own, as the authors opt to

take a qualitative approach. Though not a fatal flaw, using a qualitative stance provides less

robust findings, as certain patterns sometimes go unnoticed. The authors analyze all of the

responses and then form a two axes diagram (Felix et al. 121). The diagram is, just like the data
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tables, simple, informative, and inviting, providing much information at just a glance. This

would allow educated and uneducated readers alike to be able to reap benefits from it. And yet, it

seems as if the diagram can be further built upon, as the literal drawn boundaries are not as

readily defined as something like a graph. The diagram’s expandability contributes to the article

as an opener to those studying social media marketing, as it looks like those from a high-level

math background could help to expand the diagram that encompasses the majority of the team’s

findings. Utilizing inviting and minimalistic diagrams and analysis helps broaden the audience as

well as help readers feel more inclined to participate, something the business discipline could use

as the discipline does not emphasize specialized knowledge, such as economics or psychology,

that would help further the research.

The diction likewise complements the simple and flexible visual diagram, as the simple

and defined diction invites a large audience without providing too big of a learning curve. The

most advanced terms border on the difficulty of words like metrics, while the words that are

defined in the paper are thoroughly fleshed out, as in the case of the word defender. A defender

is defined as a social media manager who uses “social media marketing primarily as a one-way

communication tool to entertain consumers or to inform stakeholders, rather than integrating

employees or community groups,” (Felix et al. 120). Though the authors skip no steps in making

sure that all of the new foundational knowledge is understandable, the team also makes sure to

provide novel interpretations and discoveries that help to provide a boost to those looking to

further the business discipline’s understanding of social media marketing, once again

incentivizing research and inviting a broad audience.

In fact, the qualitative approach is not a problem but rather a befitting device in

accomplishing the authors’ final wishes for the article. Providing qualitative results in a
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discipline such as business provides a low barrier to entry while also providing valuable

information. Here, having a low barrier to entry means a high level of readability and thus

response, all of which aligns with the authors’ final words. In a future prospects section, the

author states that “the qualitative approach reveals four dimensions of strategic social media

marketing” but “future research could use quantitative approaches to identify the impact of

different positions on each of these dimensions” (Felix et al. 124). Future research could even

“determine whether aspects of cultural or economic context add dimensions to the proposed

framework” and “investigate how other characteristics, such as culture, the type of firm (e.g.,

B2B vs. B2C), the industry… , company size, or available resources, influence” how a firm

might conduct their marketing (Felix et al. 124). The intent, devices, and mannerism all align

with the article’s purpose of serving as a foundation. The author states that the “research

addresses the absence of a holistic framework for strategic social media marketing” rather than

provide a complete holistic framework (Felix et al. 123). This whole final section serves as a

literal invitation to the readers to take up the next few steps in better understanding social media

marketing. Being of the business discipline, this article, though informative in its own right, is

unable to provide insights that those in other disciplines are capable of making about behavior or

money usage. To make up for this inability, the paper serves as the torchbearer, providing

valuable information in an accessible way, so people of other fields can comfortably, simply, and

conveniently make their way into social media marketing research.

Khadangi’s article initially flows along in a similar manner to “Elements of Strategic

Social Media Marketing: A Holistic Framework”. To find the answers to their questions, the

authors make use of “the information of 8079 Facebook users,” (Khadangi and Baheri 65). Just

like in Felix’s article, the data at hand is so extensive that achieving their purpose feels nothing
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short of a certainty. The authors then break the responses down into basic values, such as level of

trust or closeness, and then run them through centrality-measure algorithms to get indisputable

quantitative values (Khadangi and Baheri 66-7). Unfortunately to the inexperienced reader, while

the values are presented uniformly, the numbers are hard to understand (Khadangi and Baheri

67). Even when put into diagrams that accentuate certain patterns, interpreting the values

requires more than just knee-deep knowledge in computer science (Khadangi and Baheri 69).

Though the authors make their best efforts to make the data easier to understand, there is a

problem that arises due to both this article and its discipline’s math requirements. This means

that those who are less knowledgeable in computer science will have to fully rely on the words

of the authors, unlike those who are advanced in the field who will likely have no problems

interpreting the diagrams. Additionally, unlike Felix’s diagram, the diagrams used here are

uncompromising due to the research intending to be a comprehensive quantitative analysis,

serving the role of shutting down inexperienced readers. While the majority of the audience can

still read the article, complicated data inhibits people of a wider audience from interacting with

it, leading to a split in the readership based on computer science expertise.

Moving on to Khadangi's analysis, things get more complicated, as the authors begin to

take account of more factors that lead to the new purpose of the development of a new algorithm

called A-BMLPR (Khadangi and Baheri 72). The article shifts dramatically from presenting the

readers their findings to assuming the audience has a deep understanding of computer science

and presenting raw information. Here, the paper begins to explicitly serve two separate

audiences, as developing a new algorithm is something a novice reader cannot understand, while

to the experienced reader this may be something of great interest. However, the less experienced

audience also benefits, as the new algorithm provides another method to ascertain the results of
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the researchers’ findings. The more computer science savvy audience is of course not left out to

dry, as they are given a brand new method to verify future results in any research. This allows

the development of advanced ideas in the computer science field as well as the dissemination of

general social media marketing information to the wider audience.

Throughout all this, the jargon and diagrams all become more complicated in a nuanced

way that allows the researchers to better demarcate the diffeing content aimed at the two

audiences. There is over one page worth of high-level math, as well as many advanced terms,

less than half of which are defined in the appendix (Khadangi and Baheri 70, 71, 73, 78).

However, the advanced terminology and diagrams are not evenly spread throughout the whole

paper but gathered in certain parts. This suggests that those parts of the paper are for a niche

group of readers that are focused on the development of computer science. This diction

combined with the paper’s gradually evolving two-audience-form enforces the idea that the

paper works as a sorting funnel; those who are interested in the initial goal of finding the most

influential nodes are tucked away at moments. At these times, the readers who are capable of

understanding the advanced terminology are able to remain and receive novel information.

However, this is not to say that the article is not focused on accomplishing the initial broader

goal. In fact, the advanced side of the paper also serves the more broader audience. It is just that

at certain parts the audience accessibility decreases and increases, allowing for a wide audience

while at the same time providing advanced readers new knowledge. By the end, Khadangi’s

article serves the best of both worlds, supplying research that furthers both inexperienced and

advanced readers’ understanding of social media marketing in the context of computer science.

The differing purposes of the two articles in the context of business and computer

science, one as a platform for further research and the other as an article that serves the goals of
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two different audiences, results in the textual, organizational, and visual differences. Felix’s

article complements the use of extensive empirical data with qualitative measures that opens up

the accessibility of the paper. This results in the creation of the first holistic framework of social

media marketing, in which there were openings for others to continue the research. Khadangi’s

article likewise gathers extensive empirical data but pairs this up with a quantitative analysis that

leads to the revelation of important nodes in social media, the best type of network, and also the

creation of their centrality-measure algorithm. The team’s unique approach allows the article to

cater to both an exclusive high level computer science audience as well as a broader social media

marketing audience. Both articles made use of the topic in dramatically different ways, but both

ended up offering novel valuable information that provided new paths in the field of social media

marketing research.
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References

Felix, Reto, Philipp A Rauschnabel, and Chris Hinsch. "Elements of Strategic Social Media

Marketing: A Holistic Framework." Journal of Business Research 70, no. C (2017): 118-

26.

Khadangi, Ehsan, and Alireza Bagheri. "Presenting Novel Application-based Centrality

Measures for Finding Important Users Based on Their Activities and Social Behavior."

Computers in Human Behavior 73, no. C (2017): 64-79.