Research Perspectives on Social Media Influencers and their Followers argues that the brands that find the most success on social media are the ones that acknowledge the real key to social media marketing-it's all about the followers. This collection, edited by Brandi Watkins, explores how social media has shifted power dynamics away from brands and toward the consumers themselves-the social media users who choose to like, share, and engage with brands online. This dynamic has paved the way for the rise of the social media influencer (SMI); a unique category of social media user who has a large platform and compelling content that attracts a number of loyal and devoted followers.. It's the followers that make SMI relevant and appealing to brands as a marketing strategy. Contributors discuss emerging trends in research related to the SMI and their followers; as the influencer marketing industry continues to grow and evolve, they argue, so too should our understanding of the influencer-follower relationship that makes this marketing strategy successful. Each chapter of this collection presents a variety of research perspectives, questions, and methodologies that can be used to analyze this trend. Scholars of media studies, communication, technology studies, celebrity studies, marketing, and economics will find this book particularly useful.

Communicating with Our Families: Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation explores the impact of personal communication technologies on family communication. In this historical moment, novel communication technologies and social media applications infiltrate our family units. This edited collection examines how communication technologies are shaping childhood, parenthood, and families by exploring topics such as parental loneliness, family storytelling, family technology rules, mindful technology usage, multigenerational communication, and community. The scholars in this volume work from a human communication perspective and use various research modes of inquiry including quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive methods. Through the integration and presentation of diverse research questions tested and responded to from a variety of scholarly approaches, a nuanced exploration of communication technology utilized within a family setting is provided. Since the family is indeed "the first communication classroom," this volume interrogates how that classroom may be changing and the implications of that change on different roles, responsibilities, and relationships within the family. Perhaps the most significant question implied by our contributors in this volume: Will the introduction of new communication technologies fundamentally alter familial forms and will those new grouping that emerge resemble what has been generally assumed for several millennia?

Research Perspectives on Social Media Influencers and their Followers argues that the brands that find the most success on social media are the ones that acknowledge the real key to social media marketing-it's all about the followers. This collection, edited by Brandi Watkins, explores how social media has shifted power dynamics away from brands and to the consumers themselves, the social media users who choose to like, share, and engage with brands online. This dynamic has paved the way for the rise of the social media influencer (SMI)-while the influencers have the platform, the products, and the content, the followers are what keep them relevant and appealing to brands as a marketing strategy. Contributors discuss emerging trends in research related to the SMI and their followers; as the influencer marketing industry continues to grow and evolve, they argue, so too should our understanding of the influencer-follower relationship that makes this marketing strategy successful. Each chapter of this collection presents a variety of research perspectives, questions, and methodologies that can be used to analyze this trend. Scholars of media studies, communication, technology studies, celebrity studies, marketing, and economics will find this book particularly useful.

By the end of the First World War, women's labor was viewed by contemporary observers as fundamental to the survival of family farms in Germany and consequently to the nation's economic and social stability. At the same time, however, the overburdening of farm women sparked increasingly acrimonious conflicts between young hired women, or MAgde, their employers, and state officials. The progressive feminization of agricultural work in Germany during the prewar decades and attempts after the war to prevent young women's flight from family farms is the focus of this new study. Concentrating principally on developments in the Kingdom, later the Freestate, of Saxony, the author highlights the ways that previously invisible historical actors -young rural women- actively shaped state policies: in disputes over work between MAgde and their employers before village magistrates; in the thorny debates over rural social welfare reform and the campaigns to professionalize farm wives and daughters; and in state officials' uneven enforcement of agricultural employment laws and their struggles to maintain the food supply during and after the First World War. The book furthermore challenges established narratives of German history that equate modernity with the industrial and the urban, instead suggesting that rural inhabitants participated actively in the broader debates and crises that defined modernity in the Imperial and Weimar eras, particularly concerning debates over individual rights versus collective national duties, the future health and prosperity of the Volk, and the meanings of Germanness.