Dino Villegas, Ph.D. and associate professor of practice in the Area of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, published "From the Self to the Screen: A Journey Guide for Auto-Netnography in Online Communities," in the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM) on March 2.
JMM , the official journal of the Academy of Marketing, is a double-blind peer-reviewed periodical with a global reputation for publishing path-breaking and original contributions. Villegas selection to be published in this journal demonstrates the cutting-edge business research being conducted at the Rawls College.
The applications for business are significant. By better understanding how digital conversations develop, researchers and marketers can better understand how their brands are impacted in online communities.
For more information, read the abstract of the paper: Supported by the previous literature, Villegas explores the method of auto-netnography, delimiting and differentiating its scope and boundaries. This article contributes to the literature with a Journey Guide for Auto-Netnography that can be used in online communities in social media by practitioners, organizations and scholars. That guide is constituted by six elements: (1) the traveler, (2) the map, (3) the routes, (4) the learning, (5) the telling and (6) the safety of the trip. The article also advances the literature by identifying and discussing the novel concept of brand auto-netnography. For illustrative purposes, Villegas uses an example of his own efforts to perform an auto-netnographic study in the context of a presidential candidate's Facebook community; the author was the candidate's campaign manager.
Read the full article here.