Amplification and Virtual Back-Patting

This chapter explores the rationalities of politicians' social media uses in Web-campaigning in a party-based democracy. This is done from an in-depth case study of a Swedish politician, Nina Larsson, who with the help of a PR agency utilized several social media platforms in her campaign to become re-elected to the parliament in 2010. By analyzing how and for what purposes Larsson used social media in her Web-campaign, this chapter concludes that even though discourses of instrumental rationality and of communicative rationality were common to make her practices relevant, Nina primarily used social media to amplify certain offline news media texts as well as to commend and support other liberal party members. Hence, from this case, the authors conclude that Web-campaigning on social media is used for expressive purposes, to negotiate and maintain an attractive political image within the party hierarchy.

Digital Resources and Approaches Adopted by User-Centred Museums

Society is experiencing unprecedented changes, largely attributable to the evolution of communication technologies, which are steadily reframing our way of life, and the methods we use to establish and maintain social relations. Museums are therefore facing numerous challenges, in general as a result of these developments: apps, open content, and the Internet-of-things. A complex relationship can be created between visitors and the museum, and this also opens new unexplored opportunities for user involvement in the museum's activities, even during the course of the visit itself. It is worth taking care to identify all the variables involved in the museum-visitor-relationship, which also encompasses the social dimension. Both the museum and the individual are active participants in a gradually expanding relationship, namely the growth of the so-called Web 2.0 and social media. Therefore, we can assume the need for museums to develop a conscious strategy for their social media presence, a real social media strategy, which forms part of the museum's wider digital strategy. The increasingly pervasive spread of e-mobile technology is a foretaste of the moment when museumgoers will radically change both the way of establishing relations with these organisations and the actual ways of using museum services. This chapter focuses on digital resources and approaches adopted by user-centred museums, where there is an increasing impact from the internet and social media.

The Strategic Use of Social Media in the Fashion Industry

The importance of social media is evident as millions of people use it to connect with others, share content, and discuss different topics (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Kim & Ko, 2010). Although it is clear that social media is powerful and ubiquitous, many fashion brands have been reluctant or unable to develop strategies and allocate resources to effectively engage with the new media. The goal of this chapter is to critically review the literature that explicitly addresses the adoption, application, and impact of social media by fashion brands. In particular, the purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical assessment of the adoption of social media amongst three well-established fashion brands in order to identify the importance of social media as a strategic marketing tool and to propose a number of alternative social media strategies for fashion brands. Such a critical assessment is necessary since, as demonstrated by the research findings, implementing these strategies will allow brands not only to survive, but also to create new competitive advantages and thrive in the new global fashion business environment.

Analyzing Blending Social and Mass Media Audiences Through the Lens of Computer-Mediated Discourse

In recent years, mass media content has undergone a blending process with social media. Large amounts of text-based social media content have not only shaped mass media products, but also provided new opportunities to access audience behaviors through these large-scale datasets. Yet, evaluating a plethora of audience contents strikes one as methodologically challenging endeavor. This study illustrates advantages and applications of a mixed-method approach that includes quantitative computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) and automated analysis of content frequency. To evaluate these methodologies, audience comments consisting of Facebook comments and SMS mobile texting to Italian radio-TV station RTL 102.5 were analyzed. Blended media contents through computer-mediated discourse analysis expand horizons for theoretical and methodological audience analysis research in parallel to established audience analysis metrics.

Towards a Unified Semantic Model for Online Social Networks to Ensure Interoperability and Aggregation for Analysis

The Online Social Networks (OSN) have a positive evolution due to the diversity of social media and the increase in the number of users. The revenue of the social media organizations is generated from the analysis of users' profiles and behaviors, knowing that surfers maintain several accounts on different OSNs. To satisfy its users, the social media organizations have initiated projects for ensuring interoperability to allow for users creating other accounts on other OSN using an initial account, and sharing content from one media to others. Believing that the future generations of Internet will be based on the semantic web technologies, multiple academic and industrial projects have emerged with the objective of modeling semantically the OSNs to ensure interoperability or data aggregation and analysis. In this chapter, we present related works and argue the necessity of a unified semantic model (USM) for OSNs; we introduce a kernel of a USM using standard social ontologies to support the principal social media and it can be extended to support other future social media.

Social Media Tools for Quality Business Information

Information, as a tool to reduce uncertainty and to develop knowledge in organizations, is an important aid in the decision-making process and must be of quality to improve its value. We are living in an information society where organizational and personal life are mediated by information and knowledge, with the help of technologies that gather, disseminate, and deliver that raw material to support our decisions. There are several characteristics that describe the quality of information that will allow the analysis of the value of the information used. In the globalized world we are living in, quality information warrants best results when competing with other organizations. Its value is related to the results that it will allow to be obtained and the dependability on its context. Marketing trends and competitive information is needed for clear decision making about what products to develop, for what customers, at what cost, through which distribution channels, reducing the uncertainty that a new product/service development always brings with it. Social Media tools allow the knowledge of competitor's moves and the analysis of trends from the communications exchanged in the networks of individual consumers, making it easy for companies to develop solutions according to their clients and prospects desires. Learning how to extract quality information, unbiased, valuable for business, from these social tools is the aim of this work, sharing with the interested parties some ways of using it for their profit and competitive sustainability.

Predictive Analytics of Social Networks

In this chapter, the authors survey the general problem of analyzing a social network in order to make predictions about its behavior, content, or the systems and phenomena that generated it. They begin by defining five basic tasks that can be performed using social networks: (1) link prediction; (2) pathway and community formation; (3) recommendation and decision support; (4) risk analysis; and (5) planning, especially causal interventional planning. Next, they discuss frameworks for using predictive analytics, availability of annotation, text associated with (or produced within) a social network, information propagation history (e.g., upvotes and shares), trust, and reputation data. They also review challenges such as imbalanced and partial data, concept drift especially as it manifests within social media, and the need for active learning, online learning, and transfer learning. They then discuss general methodologies for predictive analytics involving network topology and dynamics, heterogeneous information network analysis, stochastic simulation, and topic modeling using the abovementioned text corpora. They continue by describing applications such as predicting “who will follow whom?” in a social network, making entity-to-entity recommendations (person-to-person, business-to-business [B2B], consumer-to-business [C2B], or business-to-consumer [B2C]), and analyzing big data (especially transactional data) for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. Finally, the authors examine a few specific recommender systems and systems for interaction discovery, as part of brief case studies.

Social Media, Customer Relationship Management, and Consumers' Organic Food Purchase Behavior

Extant research has been focusing on the effectiveness of social media in driving consumer engagement and interaction. However, little research has examined how social media influences firms' Customer Relationship Management. This chapter fills this gap by proposing a conceptual framework to capture the impact of social media on traditional Customer Relationship Management in the context of consumers' organic food purchasing. Specifically, this study investigates how social media influences the purchase behavior of loyalty program members and non-loyalty program members. This study also examines the effectiveness of different types of social media content on consumer purchase behavior of organic food.

Purchase Intention of Males and Females Through Social Media

Social media use pervades daily life, leading to a dramatic transformation in communication styles. Three factors affecting purchase intentions through SM modified from technology acceptance model include experience (experience on purchasing through social media, perceived usefulness on purchasing through social media, perceived ease of use on purchasing through social media), company (corporate credibility, product/service information), and social (social influence on purchasing through social media, electronic word of mouth on purchasing through social media). Three hundred and thirty-two respondents (male: 171, female: 161) from Taiwan were surveyed using a structure questionnaire. Analysis results indicate that significantly influence shopping intention with respect to social media. Additionally, males and females differ in purchasing intention. Social influence affects purchase intention for females, but not for males. Product/service information affects social influence for females, but not for males.

Advertising in the World of Social Media-Based Brand Communities

Social media has revolutionized marketing practices and created many opportunities for smart marketers to take advantage of its unique characteristics. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the concept of Social Media-Based Brand Communities to advertisers and show how they can use these communities to work for them in creating and distributing favorable communication messages to masses of consumers. The authors underscore that consumers in a brand community can be employed as unpaid volunteer ambassadors of the brand who diligently try to create favorable impressions about the brand in the external world. Social media has also empowered them to do so through participating in brand communities based in social media. These communities, however, are different from conventional brand communities on at least five dimensions: social context, structure, scale, storytelling, and myriad affiliated communities. Therefore, marketers should treat such communities differently. This chapter provides the essentials all marketers should know before facilitating brand communities in social media.