1. Introduction
• Explain the issue that you are examining and why it is significant.
• Describe the general area to be studied
• Explain why this area is important to the general area under study (e.g., sport management)
• Specifically, your introduction section:
o Should introduce your topic
o Should provide historical example of problem; background on evolution of problem
o Should show the significance and the magnitude of the problem
o Should state the thesis statement of your research
o Should specify and list your research questions (two to four)
o Should explain how these research questions are related to the larger issues raised in the introduction
o Should state the reason why you are proposing the study and its importance
o Should state the practical/managerial and theoretical/scholarly significance of your study
• A thesis statement is a sentence or two that states the focus of your study and informs readers what will be the focus of your study. Then, your thesis statement is developed and supported using scholarly literature, and explained/verified with evidence/research data that you will collect. For more see https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/
• The introduction could be two to four pages long, depending on your topic (you should not limit yourself by page number so far as you are addressing all the above points)
2. Review of the Literature
• Breakdown your topic/title into different sub-topics and inform your readers about those topics
• Describe what is already known about your topic. Include a summary of the basic background information on the topic gathered from literature review that is based on scholarly journal articles
• Discuss several critical studies that have already been done in this area
• The literature review section can be between 4 and 10 pages long (again, you should not limit yourself by page numbers)
3. Research design/Method
• A description of how you would go about collecting data and test the questions that you are examining.
• Method: How would you collect the data and why?
• Describe the general methodology you choose for your study, in order to test your hypothesis(es) or verify your proposition.
• Explain why this method is the best for your purposes.
• Participants: Who would you test and why?
• Describe the sample you would test and explain why you have chosen this sample. Include age, and language background and socio-economic information, if relevant to the design.
• Are there any participants you would exclude? Why, why not?
• Design: What would the stimuli look like and why?
• Describe what kinds of manipulations/variations you would make or test for in order to test your hypothesis(es) or verify your proposition.
• Controls: What kinds of factors would you need to control for in your study?
• Describe the types of effects likely to occur which would make your results appear to confirm, or to disconfirm your hypothesis(es) or your proposition.
• What are other research design procedures that you will be following
• How will you analyze the results?
4. Significance and Conclusion
• Discuss, in general, how your proposed research would lead to a significant improvement over the original studies, and how it would benefit the field. (In other words, why should someone care? If you were applying for money to do this, why would someone fund you? If you wanted to publish your results, why would they be unique?)
5. References
• Use APA
• Include all references in APA style
Please write the research proposal.The topic is “Usage of Twitter for Brand Building: The Case of NBA Teams” You can change my introduction and the research questions but do not change my topic. You have to follow the requirements in the “format” file. Double spaces and 10 pages
Usage of Twitter for Brand Building: The Case of NBA Teams
Introduction
Brand communication provides an important role in the sports industry. It lies at the heart of it and takes on many different forms with varying stakeholders. In sports organizations, there are many mediums to reach their stakeholders including television, radio, publications, and online efforts. About over 65% of online adults using social networking sites, social media has unprecedented grown in usage across variety industries, and has become an especially popular medium in the sports industry (Madden &Zickuhr, 2011). Sports teams are now utilizing an increasing number of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, live chats, Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. Social media are really useful in reaching many stakeholders with speed, carrying ample amounts of information, and with the capability of interaction (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). These elements directly apply to uses in sports communication to connect with the public, build a brand, conduct customer relationship management, and manage reputations.
Many sports organizations and leagues are still searching the capabilities of social media landscape, especially through Twitter. The online social network Twitter has grown exponentially since 2008. The many studies examined Twitter use among professional athletes who use Twitter to communicate with fans and other players. The National Basketball Association (NBA) and its teams have tended to use Twitter to develop professional relationships with their publics via sharing information and promoting products.
The purpose of this study is to identify how Twitter are being utilized by NBA teams. It focused on how these clubs used Twitter to build professional, personal, and community relationships through a content of tweets on their official Twitter sites. The study analysis the second sources form the NBA teams’ official Twitter sites, and interviews with NBA social media specialists to evaluate current social media efforts in the NBA. In analyzing current social media strengths and struggles of NBA teams, the study addresses two research questions:
What contentthat NBA teams use through Twitter to build brand awareness in the game day?
Review of the Literature
Branding & Brand Equity
Brand Building
Brand In Sport Teams
Twitter
Usage Of Twitter For Brand Building
Madden, M. &Zickuhr, K. (2011). “65% of online adults use social networking sites.” Pew Research Center. Retrieved April 29, 2012. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Social-Networking-Sites.aspx
Kietzmann, J.H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I.P., & Silvestre, B.S. (2011). “Social media?
Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media.”
Business Horizons, Vol. 54, pp. 241-251
