Interpreting the elements of personas in social media behaviour

The four elements of Marshall’s (2017) VARP model for a persona – Value, Agency,
Reputation and Prestige – correspond to different aspects of an online individual.
This paper declares that in the social media space the VARP elements are aspects
of personas defined by the relationships between individuals and their social media
community. This mapping also corresponds to other relationships between the
VARP elements, allowing social media personas to be measured and compared both
qualitatively and quantitively. These additional relationships include dualities of the
persona, such that there are mutual dependencies between each element of the
VARP model and elements can be grouped to interpret these dependencies. These
include the relationship between the actions of the individual and those of the
community, and the connection between a persona’s popularity or fame and their
contribution to a community.