Research report presented to the Unisa School of Business Leadership / The results of the study show that as posited in the research statement, media spend is positive in relation to both the direct and indirect business cycles variables. This pattern of increased media spend is only maintained during the up-phases of the business cycle, but tends to level off during the down-phases.

Research report presented to the Unisa School of Business Leadership / The results of the study show that as posited in the research statement, media spend is positive in relation to both the direct and indirect business cycles variables. This pattern of increased media spend is only maintained during the up-phases of the business cycle, but tends to level off during the down-phases.

Music services, media players and managers provide support for content classification and access based on filtering metadata values, statistics of access and user ratings. This approach fails to capture characteristics of mood and personal history that are often the deciding factors when creating personal playlists and collections in music. This dissertation work presents MusicWiz, a music management environment that combines traditional metadata with spatial hypertext-based expression and automatically extracted characteristics of music to generate personalized associations among songs. MusicWiz’s similarity inference engine combines the personal expression in the workspace with assessments of similarity based on the artists, other metadata, lyrics and the audio signal to make suggestions and to generate playlists. An evaluation of MusicWiz with and without the workspace and suggestion capabilities showed significant differences for organizing and playlist creation tasks. The workspace features were more valuable for organizing tasks, while the suggestion features had more value for playlist creation activities.

Background: Social medias have contributed to big changes in the way firms and customers interact with each other. Due to the great amount of people using social medias, firms have understood the importance of incorporating social medias in their marketing strategy. However, due to increasing competition, customer engagement on social medias has become important. To generate customer engagement, firms must create engaging social media content that is worth the customer’s time and effort. The micro-sized firms are under researched and therefore the authors have chosen micro-sized firms as a study subject and hence the sender of the content. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe the key components of creating customer engagement on social medias for micro-sized firms. Methodology: This research took a qualitative approach in a deductive nature with a descriptive purpose and a cross-sectional research design. The need of primary data was collected by conducting seven semi-structured interviews with social media managers- and consultants. Participants were purposely sampled and the empirical findings were coded, concepts were identified and further categorised while trustworthiness was set to be a criterion for the quality of the research. Conclusion: The research provided seven key components of engaging social media content for micro-sized firms and further recommendations on how to implement them in the micro-sized firms social media management. The components are described together with an illustration. Keywords: Micro-sized firms, social media managers, social media, customer engagement, content appeals, social media targeting, social media timing and frequency, qualitative research, semi-structured interviews.

Soziale Medien spielen gesellschaftlich eine immer bedeutendere Rolle. Sie lassen viele Lebensbereiche digitaler werden und sind meist nicht mehr wegzudenken (BVCM, 2014; Lumma et al., 2015). Sie erleichtern die Informationsteilung und -bearbeitung aller Art und dienen dem Austausch und der Pflege von Beziehungen (Schmidt, 2018). Social Media ist längst zum Standard geworden. Für Unternehmen ergeben sich neue Herausforderungen, denn soziale Netzwerke entwickeln sich rasant weiter. Vermehrt suchen Firmen nach erfahrenen Mitarbeitenden, die die Chancen und Risiken der digitalen Veränderungen managen können. Die Unternehmen lassen ihre Kanäle von eigens eingestellten Expert*innen betreuen, um sie im Hinblick auf ihre Zielerreichung bewusst einzusetzen (BVCM, 2014; BITKOM, 2015; Lumma et al., 2015). Social Media Manager*innen (SMM) nehmen dabei eine übergeordnete, strategische Position ein. SMM sind ein entscheidender Teil der Unternehmenskommunikation und tragen zu einer strategischen Kommunikation am Arbeitsplatz bei (Cyphert, 2009). Diese beinhaltet im Allgemeinen die Überwachung und Evaluierung der Kommunikation, ein thematisches Management, die Policy- und Strategieberatung sowie die Unterstützung zur Problemlösung (Moss et al., 2005). Konkret obliegen SMM nach dem Bundesverband Community Management e.V. (BVCM, 2014) die folgenden Aufgabenbereiche: Strategie, Change Management, Monitoring und Reporting, Koordination sämtlicher Social Media Aktivitäten, Qualitätssicherung von Inhalten sowie Führung des Community Teams. Zudem nehmen sie eine Schnittstellenfunktion zwischen den unterschiedlichen Bereichen des Unternehmens wahr (BVCM, 2014). Die Aufgabenbereiche sind interdisziplinär ausgestaltet und berücksichtigen neben Marketing und PR bspw. auch die Produktentwicklung (Lumma et al., 2015) ... [Aus: Einleitung]