Doctoral thesis: TV live-tweeting - From coach potato to social media influencer
In his doctoral thesis Kai Huotari studied TV viewers who tweet about TV programmes while watching them. This phenomenon called TV live-tweeting has become increasingly popular in recent years and has been shown to have a positive impact on TV ratings.
Huotari studied how live-tweeting affected the TV viewing experience and found that a TV live-tweeter is an empowered TV viewer who can, by experientialising live-tweeting into his or her TV viewing, personalise and control his or her TV‑viewing experience better than before, can express him- or herself more fully, and can reach a large enough audience and acceptance for his or her ideas. Live-tweeting makes TV viewing more active, more challenging, and more passionate.
Experientialising refers to the consumer integrating two activities with each other in a way that leads to new practices of consumption and to a transformed and empowering experience. Using grounded theory as his methodology, Huotari generated a substantive theory of experientialising live-tweeting into the TV viewing experience. Huotari suggests that the concept can, however, be used also in other contexts and presents two abstractions of the theory: experientialising customer-to-customer communication into a consumption experience and experientialising a customer activity into a service experience.
These tentative models can be used to explain, for example, museum visitors' willingness to go to museums in groups or how reading on public transportation changes the experience of commuting.
M.Sc. (Tech.), M.A. (Film) Kai Huotari defends his doctoral thesis in marketing: "Experientializing - how C2C communication becomes part of the service experience. The case of live-tweeting and TV-viewing" on 28 August 2014.
Time: 28 August 2014, at 12
Place: Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki
Opponent: Professor Jari Salo, University of Oulu
Custos: Professor Maria Holmlund-Rytkönen, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki
For more information, please contact:
Kai Huotari
+358 50 3841557
kai.huotari@hanken.fi Opens in new window
A copy of the thesis can be downloaded here