Hashtags have become a ubiquitous and seminal feature of social media; however, a comprehensive understanding of what motivates and predicts their use is yet to be addressed. To fill this gap, this research investigates motives of hashtag use and their effect on behavioral outcomes based on the Uses and Gratifications (U&G) approach. Through a twophase mixed method data collection, we distill six motives of hashtag use in the context of Instagram: Self-presentation, Chronicling, Inventiveness, Information Seeking, Venting, and Etiquette. We find drivers for platform use to affect these motives, which, in turn, influence the frequency of clicking and adding hashtags, and the number of hashtags a user may employ in a post. Furthermore, we find potential influencers to be heavy users of hashtags, primarily driven by motives of self-presentation, and to score higher on narcissism, extraversion and self-monitoring than followers. We further assert the need for U&G studies to explicitly acknowledge the nature of social media that allows users to both consume and produce content. The findings hold important implications for social media managers and designers.

The goal of this research is to explore the transformational power of a new consumption and production practice, the practice of blogging, to understand its impact on consumers’ identity transformations beyond their self-concept as consumers and on the blogosphere as an organizational field. Through an exploratory study of over 12,000 blog posts from five fashion bloggers, complemented by in-depth interviews, we trace the transformation of consumer bloggers. We identify and describe three identity phases, the individual consumer, collective blogger and blogger identity phase, and two important turning points. Our findings show that through a continuous process of identity negotiation, adaptation, and re-interpretation with multiple stakeholders, these bloggers transform into human brands. In turn, these individual transformation processes reciprocally influence the emergence of blogging as a professional practice and of the blogosphere as a new organizational field. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of consumer transformation processes in a new field, where consumers can leave their role as consumers through continuously engaging in identity negotiation, adaptation and re-interpretation, creating alternative points of reference and validation in a new field that in turn continues to influence their brand identity. Furthermore, our findings contribute to an understanding of human brands from a brand-as-process perspective, and have implications for brands wishing to collaborate with these influential actors.

Free-to-play online games create significant revenues through sales of virtual items. The argument that the sale of items that provide a competitive advantage (functional items) fuels a pay-to-win culture has attracted developers to business models that are solely based on the sale of non-functional items (items that provide no objective competitive advantage). However, the motivations for purchasing non-functional items remain under-examined. The present study therefore provides an exploration of hedonic, social, and utilitarian motivations underpinning purchase of virtual items within the top-grossing free-to-play game League of Legends. From interviews with 32 players, a number of motivations are identified and presented. In addition, a novel finding is that motivation for purchase may not stem from the value in the item but lie in the act of purchasing itself as a means of transferring money to the developer.

AcknowledgmentsWe wholeheartedly thank Catherine Hedler for her expert wizardry in assisting with the development of our controlled stimuli in Photoshop. Furthermore, we would like to thank Elena Osadchaya, whose complaint about guest photographs detracting from the appeal of hotels helped spark the underlying idea of this research.Tourists searching for information about destinations on online review sites are concurrently exposed to two different photograph aesthetics, professional (produced by destination managers) and amateur (generated by travelers). While the former is glossy and sharp, the latter is often grainy and overexposed. Although aesthetics are important factors in tourist decision-making, the effects of the exposure to both types of photo aesthetics remain largely unexamined. This research investigates how both types of aesthetics, either singularly or in combination, affect a destination's visual appeal and tourists' booking intentions through four controlled experiments (N = 1282). Our results show that despite the 'messy' beauty in amateur aesthetics, photos with professional aesthetics make a depicted destination appear more visually appealing, ultimately driving booking intentions. However, the negative effects of amateur aesthetics are mitigated when (i) viewed by risk-averse tourists, (ii) presented alongside positive reviews, and (iii) accompanied by a greater number of professional photos.

A 2019, 'Smile(y)-and your students will smile with you? The effects of emoticons on impressions, evaluations, and behaviour in staff-to-student communication', Studies in Higher Education.