My PhD topic

In case you did not know what I am working on, here is a tag cloud made from the introduction of an article I just finished writing. The principle of the tag cloud is that the words that are most used in a certain piece of text are the biggest in the cloud. Which means that my general area of research iiiis …branding, well done! In the context of this specific articles, I looked more specifically at brand communities, “SNS” which stands for Social Networking Sites (Facebook is the most obvious example of SNS) and brand commitment.

What I tried to understand is whether it makes sense for brands to have “fan pages” (or pages of the kind) to communicate with members of a social networking site, and what are the branding benefits of this.

Think about the brands, products, celebrities or causes that you “like” or the groups that you are a member of on Facebook. Is there a lot of them? Do you actually participate or take a look at what is said on these pages/groups? Do you like them because you really care, just for fun or because you want others in your network to know it?

Even if Facebook is probably going to die out at some point, I am fascinated with the idea of social networking sites and how they shape our lives and the way we communicate. Just like Facebook surpassed the once famous MySpace, another website will probably replace it one day (Google +?). As my main interest at school was marketing, I decided to take a look at these sites from a marketing perspective. So here I am!

I would love to tell you all about what I am doing, I could do it for hours…but I just wanted to give you a taste of it with this post 🙂 Keep blogging, posting, liking, commenting, tweeting, ….Keep SHARING!