Synergetic Effects of Advertising and Interpersonal Communications in Social Networking Media: Theory and Field Experiments

Synergetic effects of deploying multiple media platforms in marketing communications have long been a research subject for advertising and marketing scholars. Previous studies largely focus on traditional media such as television, radio, newspaper and magazine. The rise of the Internet, especially social networking media in recent years, has opened a new era of research on synergetic effects of simultaneous media consumption. Unique to the new era is the role of interpersonal communications in disseminating, interpreting, and amplifying advertising messages.This project explores the synergetic effects of interpersonal communication and advertising in a social networking environment by conducting a series of field experiments. The focal product will be a new movie, the pre-release promotion objective will be to generate traffic to the movie’s web site, and the target audience will be white collar professionals in major cities of China. The field experiments will create different scenarios, in which measures will be taken for the separate as well as combined impacts of interpersonal communications and advertising. The experimental media setting will be MSN, the most popular online interpersonal communication platform in China. Interpersonal communications in this project will take two forms—identity statements in MSN dialog box and personal e-mail notes about the new movie web site. On the other hand, advertising takes the form of banner ads that will appear when users login to their MSN accounts. A sample of 2,200 users who meet certain criteria will be recruited for this project, and these users and all users on their contact lists will constitute the pool of participants of these field experiments.Data from these experiments will enable the researchers of this project (a team of advertising, communication and marketing scholars from the U.S. and China) to address the following key research questions:what is the effect of key social network characteristics (e.g., interaction frequency) on consumers’ responses to interpersonal communications?What is the impact of advertising in the social media setting?How does advertising interplay with interpersonal communications in the social media setting? Andwhat are the conditions for which marketers can synergistically leverage advertising and interpersonal communications in social networking media.Answers to these questions should product cutting-edge knowledge about the synergetic effects of these two different forms of communications; thus providing marketers with effective ways to use the increasingly important social networking media.