A model for the generation of public sphere-like activity in sport-themed Twitter hashtags

#WeTheNorth: Examining an Online Brand Community Through a Professional Sport Organization’s Hashtag Marketing Campaign

“…Yet they can simultaneously cause non-focal subcommunities to form, such as those found in this study. Thus, the digital brand community evolves similarly to O'Hallarn et al's (2019) concept of the virtual town hall. Although there are shared associations, there are subgroups seeking to advance their own interests or frame the discussion in a particular manner, and that sentiment has important implications for both theory and praxis.…”

“…Through the analysis of three distinct hashtags relating to the games, one branded and two unbranded, they found that the most viral messages were either celebratory or satirical in nature and largely came from individuals rather than brands or organizations. However, the use of hashtags can also incite activism or dissent towards a context or brand due to the open nature of social media (O'Hallarn, Shapiro, Wittkower, Ridinger, & Hambrick, 2019). For instance, fast-food giant McDonald's promotionally oriented #CheersToSochi was hijacked by users looking to amplify their messages about human rights violations in Russia during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games (Pegoraro, Burch, Frederick, & Vincent, 2014); Yan, Pegoraro, and Watanabe (2018) highlighted how a hashtag could be utilized to mobilize social activism in relation to the University of Missouri football player strike; Girginova (2016) revealed the disparaging narrative associated with American broadcaster, NBC, through the #NBCFail hashtag, also from 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games.…”

Information-Sharing Behaviors Among Sports Fans Using #Hashtags

“…To illustrate the utility of the hashtags concept, if a baseball fan uploads real-time photos from a stadium where the World Series is played and accompanies these images with hashtags (i.e., #RedSox, #MLBchampion), other fans can effortlessly find pertinent up-to-date content by leveraging the aforementioned string of words in their search. In the matter of sporting organizations, hashtags clear the way for controlling and organizing voluminous fan data and contribute to advertising effectiveness owing to the frequent exposure of a sporting organization's name over a reach that extends across international, instantaneous, and interconnected social networks (O'Hallarn, Shapiro, Wittkower, Ridinger, & Hambrick, 2019). Given the importance of harnessing the power of hashtags in the sport industry, ascertaining why sports fans use hashtags can be a pivotal starting point.…”

Guest editorial

“…Another area of research engaged in the observation of social media platforms as places of negative behaviors such as racism or sexual abuse (O'Hallarn et al , 2018a, 2019). Certainly, researchers also investigated how these negative behaviors could be prevented or how organizations deal with such topics (Kilvington and Price, 2019; Sanderson and Wheaters, 2020).…”