With a Side of Knowledge is a podcast produced by the Office of the Provost at the University of Notre Dame. It brings listeners informal interviews with fascinating scholars and professionals from both Notre Dame and elsewhere that take place over brunch.
The sixth episode of season two, “On Social Media and One in a Trillion Success,” was released Thursday, Jan. 10, and features Vamsi Kanuri, assistant professor of marketing in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. His areas of expertise include marketing analytics, digital marketing, and decision-support models, and his research has appeared in leading marketing and management journals as well as books and the popular press.
One of Kanuri’s most recent studies, undertaken with two colleagues from Texas A&M University, develops a more scientific approach for posting content to social media in order to increase the likelihood that people will engage with it. Published in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of Marketing, the team’s research suggests different types of stories perform better at different times of day—for reasons that have to do with our biology.
Kanuri and host Ted Fox talked about this research and the ways it can help social media managers sort through what can literally be a trillion options for sharing their stories. They also discussed how we, as a society, might promote more civil and responsible discourse on social media, where consumers, advertisers, and the platforms themselves regularly have conflicting interests.
You can visit provost.nd.edu/podcast to learn more about the podcast, which is available through iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher or by searching “With a Side of Knowledge” in your favorite podcast app.
You can also listen to the episode with Kanuri using the player below.