Syracuse faculty members awarded grant through Harrah Hospitality Research Center

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.