Hey!

My name is John, and I am starting my second year in the Marketing Ph.D. program. I was born and raised in Russellville Arkansas, which is only about a 3 ½ hour drive from our school. I received my bachelor’s degree from Arkansas Tech University and my M.B.A. from the University of Central Arkansas. I enjoy meeting new people and learning about other cultures. While working on my master’s degree, I was a graduate assistant for the M.B.A. department. Part of my job was to help with recruiting and social media. At times, the two worked hand in hand. After going to recruiting fairs within the state of Arkansas, me and the other GA would attempt to contact those individuals who seemed very interested in our school through our program’s Facebook account. This gave us a way to stay connected with potential students and answer any questions that they may have.

I am most familiar with Facebook and YouTube. I especially appreciate the way in which these sites allow us to connect with individuals from around the world. As I have already mentioned, I really enjoy meeting individuals from other cultures. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to meet many students from other countries. However, it is often difficult to stay connect with friends. New media types have made it much easier to stay connected, even with friends who are in other countries. New media certainly does make the world seem a little bit smaller.

New media has a huge impact on my area of study (marketing). Therefore, I anticipate learning many things in this class that I can incorporate into my own research. During my first semester, I actually worked on a paper with one of our fellow classmates and another student that dealt with social media and electronic word of mouth (EWOM). This experience introduced me to some of the social media literature. I anticipate learning a great deal more in this class.

This summer, I have been working on a research paper investigating counterfeit items in an online environment. Purchasing an item online can be completely different than purchasing an item in person. Clearly the way in which we interact with each other, and make purchases has radically changed in the past couple of decades. I am somewhat interested in the area of consumer behavior, and I believe that this class will provide me with some ideas that I can utilize in this area.

I look forward to meeting everyone in this class, and I hope that we will all have a great semester! See you guys soon!