ABSTRACT Strategic social media influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication. However, despite the growing relevance of this new strategic communication instrument, research has paid only limited attention to elaborating its basic concepts. In this article, we adopt a strategic communication perspective to develop a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication. Particularly, we draw on research findings that identify the external resources social media influencers contribute to organization-influencer cooperation. We use these findings to systematically develop functional definitions of social media influencers and of strategic social media influencer communication. We define social media influencers as third-party actors who have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web. Subsequently, we define strategic social media communication as the purposeful use of communication by organizations or social media influencers in which social media influencers are addressed or perform activities with strategic significance to organizational goals. We then situate these definitions within the broader framework of strategic communication by discussing related concepts and by describing the strategic action field that has emerged around strategic social media influencer communication.

中文翻译：

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战略沟通中的社交媒体影响者：战略社交媒体有影响者沟通的概念框架

摘要战略性社交媒体影响者交流已成为战略性交流中的主要话题。但是，尽管这种新的战略沟通工具越来越重要，但是研究在阐述其基本概念方面只受到了有限的关注。在本文中，我们采用战略沟通的观点来开发战略社交媒体影响者沟通的概念框架。特别是，我们利用研究发现来确定社交媒体影响者有助于组织与影响者合作的外部资源。我们使用这些发现来系统地开发社交媒体有影响力人士和战略性社交媒体有影响力人士交流的功能定义。我们将社交媒体影响者定义为第三方参与者，他们通过内容生产，内容分发，交互和在社交网络上的个人露面建立了大量与特定利益相关者的特定关系并对其产生影响的相关关系。随后，我们将战略性社交媒体传播定义为组织或社交媒体有影响力者有目的地使用的沟通方式，在其中社交媒体有影响力的人得到解决或开展对组织目标具有战略意义的活动。然后，通过讨论相关概念并描述围绕战略社交媒体影响者交流而出现的战略行动领域，我们将这些定义置于更广泛的战略传播框架内。