Author's Note

Humor has always been an important part of my life. From a young age, one of my favorite things to do has been making other people laugh. I learned early on that there is nothing so bad that it cannot be fixed with a little bit of humor. This is a mentality that I have carried throughout my entire life, and one that factored heavily into my decision to research the effects of humor in branded Twitter content. However, humor is only half of the topic. While I have always been interested in making others laugh and finding the humor in everyday life, this alone did not constitute a research project. It was also my passion for social media that ultimately brought me to the topic for this research.

Throughout my four years in school studying marketing communication and advertising, we had discussed social media as a marketing tool. In fact, I took an entire class dedicated to just the understanding of social media marketing. This class piqued my interest in Twitter, as I realized that many brands were utilizing it as a way to communicate with their customers and audience, rather than a platform for product promotion. It was a revelation that I carried with me to my senior year, during which I discovered that there had been little research about Twitter at all, let alone research that looked at the utilization of humor as a branding tool on the platform. It was a clear gap, opening a doorway for me to conduct consumer-based quantitative research.