Despite a growing amount of research on social media, little research has been conducted to investigate why consumers connect with brands on Facebook. As companies continue to expand their presence to the social networking website, a gap in research on social media has formed. This study focuses on consumer's connection with a brand on Facebook. To do this, this research focuses on the connection of consumers with Oreo on the website to identify the environment created that engages those who connect with the brand online. Oreo was selected as the focus of the research due to its popularity on Facebook as well as the steady engagement that occurs on its page. Utilizing a phenomenological method, this qualitative study features 12 interviews in which current Oreo fans on Facebook discussed their experience and motivations for connecting with the brand. The interview questions were designed to investigate whether the tenets of relationship management theory and Ledingham's (2003) five dimensions of organization-public relationships (trust, openness, investment, involvement, and commitment) aligned with interaction on Facebook. Overall, the responses of the participants identified a connection between organization-public relationships and engagement on social media.

Fran Ross's only novel, Oreo, explores the nature of multiethnic American identities through an empowered female character that embarks on a Theseus-like journey. Ross devotes significant portions of the novel to the introduction of Oreo's family and individual character, in order to carefully outline her interracial and multiethnic upbringing as an African-Jewish American girl. In order to understand Oreo's political and aesthetic sensibilities, this thesis explores the cinematic representations of interracial relationships during the time that Oreo was written, and argues that Fran Ross's main character is in direct conversation with the predominant 70s black movie and political culture of blaxploitation and Black nationalism. Blaxploitation cinema's rise during the early 70s was facilitated by a burgeoning literary genre depicting an urban black experience aligned with Black nationalist ideologies, to which Fran Ross responds with her interracial protagonist. While not all Black nationalist leaders and supporters felt that blaxploitation movies furthered the revolution, the politics of the movement were still present in the movies, especially in regard to interracial relationships. Black nationalist ideologies regarding interracial relationships positioned sexual relationships between black people and white people as counter-revolutionary, because they did not result in the propagation of the black race, and were reminiscent of the rapes that occurred during the slave period and beyond. In contrast with these cinematic depictions, Oreo is a desexualized, witty, and athletic mixed raced female, who challenges the stereotypes of black cinematic culture and the politics of Black nationalism. As Oreo was written at the end of the blaxploitation genre's height (1974), its politics appear to be in direct dialogue with the representation of blackness in the movie genre. Ross even goes as far as rewriting scenes and stereotypes from blaxploitation movies, positioning Oreo as a critique of the Blaxploitation genre, and the genre's Black nationalist political agenda surrounding interracial relationships.