Skip to main content

Linchi Kwok in the News - by SU News Services*

Syracuse University assistant professors Linchi Kwok of the College of Human Ecology and Bei Yu of the School of Information Studies (iSchool) received a 2010 Harrah Hospitality Research Center grant award for their project, “Typology of Social Media Marketing Messages: A Social Networking Website Perspective.”

The $32,333 grant awarded to Kwok and Yu will fund a two-part study concerning how hospitality companies use social media in marketing. They plan to build on media and marketing theories with the aid of text analytics techniques. Research findings may help hospitality and marketing professionals identify means of communicating with target consumers through social media tools and possibly develop strategies to shape consumers’ discussions in social media according to a company’s mission and marketing goals. To facilitate large-scale data analysis, Kwok and Yu will develop new computational methods to automatically code informational and transformational marketing messages and the sentiment of consumer responses in social media.

The first part of the study will focus on the types of marketing messages that hospitality companies use to communicate with consumers. The second part will monitor consumers’ word-of-mouth reactions to the marketing messages they received through social media platforms such as Facebook.

The Harrah Hospitality Research Center at the Harrah Hotel College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was established in 2008 and is dedicated to the advancement of research and practices in the hospitality industry.

Kwok received a Ph.D. in hospitality administration and a master’s degree in restaurant, hotel and institutional management from Texas Tech University. His areas of interest include organizational behavior, recruitment and selection, social media, and event management.

Before joining SU, Yu was a postdoctoral researcher at the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She received a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the areas of information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. Her research interests also include developing text mining methods, especially emotion and opinion analysis approaches, to support data-driven scholarship in humanities and social science research. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science.

* An identical news article can be accessed via the following hyperlink: http://insidesu.syr.edu/2010/06/11/syracuse-faculty-members-awarded-grant-through-harrah-hospitality-research-center/
* Another news from SU's iSchool: http://www.ischool.syr.edu/newsroom/news.aspx?recid=920

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Luxury vs. Millennials and Their Technology: The Ritz-Carlton (By Julia Shorr)

Embodying the finest luxury experience, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC has been established since 1983. In 1998, Marriott International purchased the brand offering it more opportunity for growth while being independently owned and operated. They are known for their enhanced service level as the motto states, “Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen”. The luxury brand now carries 97 hotels and resorts internationally and is attempting to keep the aspects of luxury while keeping up with the trends of the technologically improving generations. The Varying Demographics of the Target Market The Ritz-Carlton’s typical target market includes: business executives, corporate, leisure travelers, typically middle-aged persons and elders, and families from the upper and upper-middle class section of society .   This infers a large range of types of travelers in which all are similar in that they are not opposed to spending extra for the luxurious ambiance. However, with

Is It OK for Hotel Staff to Wear Piercings and Tattoos?

Time has changed. I see more and more college students wearing piercings and tattoos nowadays, but is it OK for hotel staff to wear piercings and tattoos? The answer is “no, no, no.” According a report at USAToday.com, customers across the board do not want to see any hotel workers with pierced eyebrow, pierced tongue, tattooed arm, or nose ring. Some may argue that tattooed and pierced workers may seem more acceptable in edgy boutique hotels as compared to the big franchised hotels, but the survey results did not find any differences among a variety of lodging products. Many respondents believe people who wear visible tattoos and piercings are taking a high risk of their professional lives. If you stay in a hotel, do you mind being served by tattooed and/or pierced staff? What if you are the one who makes the hiring decision? References: USAToday.com: http://tinyurl.com/linchikwok08042010 Picture was downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/linchikwok08042010P

How Covid-19 will change the HR department? (by Vivian Tan)

With the current pandemic happening, many businesses are having a hard time. It is hard for them to maintain to pay all their employees, and many things have changed on how companies are running during Covid-19. Because of this virus, employees work from home and might lack the motivation to finish their tasks. Many businesses shut their doors infinitely and file for bankruptcy because it is hard to pay their employees, and there are not many businesses coming in. In the hospitality industry, the HR department must create policies and answer questions from the outbreak. It is also essential that they communicate with workers for any updates and make sure that it does not affect their daily operations.     When it comes to covid-19 concerns, the HR department should communicate with the employees for any updates on the virus, such as informing employees about policies, personal hygiene, posting signs around the workplace about symptoms of the virus, and wear masks. Also, asking employee