Each year, the market place is becoming increasingly globalized and the role of the Internet has been crucial to this phenomenon. Marketers therefore are required to be current on the latest trends. The Internet can be used as a communication tool from the marketers and it is an ever changing medium. At first, most companies were only present through their website, whereas nowadays companies have a greater online presence through Social Media. This study aimed at finding out how Social Media presence can influence Brand Awareness and Trust in Business to Business (B2B) companies. It was based on a research model with two hypotheses. A survey was conducted among Swedish B2B companies within the Ljungby municipality. The survey resulted in 68 complete and usable responses, averaging a response rate of 65%. Using a linear regression, the results of hypotheses testing suggest that the usage of Social Media influences Trust; however it does not influence Brand Awareness. This indicates that companies that are concerned about the level of Trustworthiness within their company should have a Social Media presence, especially on Facebook since it was the most common among companies.

Problematisation: Credible information on social media affects potential tourists when chosing where they will travel. Thus, the competition for the attention of potential tourists makes the credibility aspect important to explore further. Perceived credibility in social media online could be more questioned than offline sources since user generated Websites usually do not go through a review. Additionally, the understanding of online credibility is still limited, when it comes to UGC. There has not been much research emphasising the perceived credibility on user generated content. Furthermore, there seems to be a disagreement about perceived credibility existing in social media, which makes it an interesting topic. Purpose: The aim of this paper is to investigate which dimensions are positively influencing perceived credibility online and if the information on TripAdvisor was seen as credible. The purpose is also to explore if there is a relationship between perceived credibility and the dimensions user generated content, authority, communication, updates and design. The purpose of this dissertation is also to add knowledge about how potential tourists perceive credibility when they view a Website designed for tourists. Methodology: This study used a paper-based questionnaire, answered by students at Kristianstad University. Limitations: This dissertation has two main limitations. Firstly, it only examines one social media, TripAdvisor. Secondly, participants in the sample were only chosen from Kristianstad University and under certain circumstances, which made the sample limited. Conclusion: The result showed that there was a positive relationship between user-generated content, authority, communication, updates and design and perceived credibility. However, the dimension advertisement was rejected. Thus, five of six hypotheses were not rejected and had a statistical significance (P= < 0.01). Only hypothesis four, advertisements, did not have statistical significance and was rejected. The total perceived credibility for TripAdvisor’s Website, in this dissertation, was that it was seen as fairly credible.

This study seeks to explore whether social media plays an important role in determining a firm’s profits. Using data from 392 Large American firms from the period 2005-2013, obtained primarily from the database, COMPUSTAT, I find that a firm’s adoption of Social Media plays a minor role in determining profits, while higher Lagged Profits, Lagged Productivity, Firm Sizes, and Advertising Expenses lead to higher profits.

Syfte Syftet med studien var att ta reda på var ifrån gymnasieelever i Stockholm hämtar sin kunskap om vad hälsa innebär. Frågeställningarna var; vad betyder hälsa för eleverna, var får eleverna i gymnasieskolan sin uppfattning om hälsa ifrån och på vilket sätt upplever eleverna att medias bild påverkar deras syn på hälsa?   Metod I studiens användes enkätfrågor vilka delvis tar utgångspunkt ifrån KASAM.   Resultat Hälsa för eleverna innebär att må bra (79 %), vara nöjd med sitt liv (59 %), äta sund och nyttig mat (52 %) och vara vältränad (46 %). 81 % av eleverna undervisas i ämnet idrott och hälsa. Skolan tillsammans med tränare, vänner och familj är elevernas primära kunskapskälla i vad hälsa innebär. Resultatet visade att eleverna anser att medias hälsobudskap fokuserar på att vi ska vara smala och vältränade och 33 % av eleverna anger att de tränar för sitt utseendes skull. Samtidigt visade svaren att eleverna anser att de blir påverkade av medias syn på hälsa.   Slutsats Slutsatsen av studien visade att ungefär en tredjedel av eleverna påverkas av de mediala kroppsnormerna medan majoriteten av svaren pekar mot att elevernas tankar om hälsa kan vara på väg ifrån den bilden av hälsa media visar idag. / The purpose of the study is to find out where students from high school in Stockholm derive its knowledge of what health means. The study used survey questions were partly based on KASAM. The question is what does health mean to the students, where does the pupils in high schools get their perception of health and in which manner do the students perceive that the media's image affects their approach to health? Health for students means to feel good (79%), to be satisfied with their lives (59%), eating healthy and nutritious food (52%) and be physically fit (46%). 81% of the pupils are taught in physical education. School along with coaches, friends and family are the student’s primary sources of knowledge of what health means. Meanwhile, the responses show that students are influenced by the media's approach to health. The results shows that students think that the media's focus on the health message is that we should be lean and fit. 33% of the students indicate that they are training for the sake of looks. The conclusion of the study shows that about one third of the students clearly are influenced by the medial standards body while the majority of the responses indicate that students' ideas about health may be on the way from the image of health media shows today. This may be due to the students' primary source of knowledge of what health means consists of people who are in their surroundings and recalls the importance of feeling good and being happy with their lives in order to achieve good health.

This thesis examines organizational use of social media. It focuses on developing an understanding of the ways by which social media are used within formal organizational settings. From the vantage point of this thesis such an understanding can be achieved by looking at tensions and incompatibilities that might potentially exist between social media and organization because of their distinct characteristics. It is argued that the distinct characteristics of social media (e.g. openness, transparency, flexibility, etc.) and organization (e.g., hierarchy, formal relationships, standard procedures, etc.) may engender tensions and incompatibilities that affect the ways of using social media and their potential in organizations. The main premise here is that the possibilities, behaviors, and practices afforded by social media are recognizably different in nature from common and established organizational practices, behaviors, norms, and routines. Through a structurational understanding of organizational use of social media, influenced by Giddens’ theory of structuration and Orlikowski’s practice lens for studying technology use, this thesis offers the perspective of immiscibility to capture tensions and incompatibilities driven by the distinctive characteristics of social media and organization. It basically offers a way of seeing social media use in organizations as a dynamic, in- practice interplay between social media and organization characteristics. One key argument in this thesis is that the immiscible interplay of social media and organization, produces, at least in transition, ‘a bureaucracy of social media’. Social media, it is argued, are used in ways that are essentially bureaucratic, reflecting and also reinforcing established characteristics of formal organizations through the production and reproduction of structures which are driven by the immiscible interplay. The development of such an understanding was achieved through multiple research studies focusing on the use of the wiki technology for knowledge collaboration and sharing in two large, multinational organizations: CCC and IBM. A number of qualitative methods were used in these studies to collect empirical evidence from the two organizations including interviews, field visits, observations, and document analysis. The overarching contribution of this thesis centers on offering a unique way of understanding organizational use of social media by putting forward tensions and incompatibilities between social media and organization and also by providing an understanding of how such tensions and incompatibilities affect the potential for change by social media.

One of the key features driving the growth and success of the Social Web is large-scale participation through user-contributed content – often through short text in social media. Unlike traditional long-form documents – e.g., Web pages, blog posts – these short text resources are typically quite brief (on the order of 100s of characters), often of a personal nature (reflecting opinions and reactions of users), and being generated at an explosive rate. Coupled with this explosion of short text in social media is the need for new methods to organize, monitor, and distill relevant information from these large-scale social systems, even in the face of the inherent “messiness” of short text, considering the wide variability in quality, style, and substance of short text generated by a legion of Social Web participants. Hence, this dissertation seeks to develop new algorithms and methods to ensure the continued growth of the Social Web by enhancing how users engage with short text in social media. Concretely, this dissertation takes a three-fold approach: First, this dissertation develops a learning-based algorithm to automatically rank short text comments associated with a Social Web object (e.g., Web document, image, video) based on the expressed preferences of the community itself, so that low-quality short text may be filtered and user attention may be focused on highly-ranked short text. Second, this dissertation organizes short text through labeling, via a graph- based framework for automatically assigning relevant labels to short text. In this way meaningful semantic descriptors may be assigned to short text for improved classification, browsing, and visualization. Third, this dissertation presents a cluster-based summarization approach for extracting high-quality viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, while maintaining diverse viewpoints. By summarizing short text, user attention may quickly assess the aggregate viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, without the need to scan each of possibly thousands of short text items.

We propose a novel network-based approach for location estimation in social media that integrates evidence of the social tie strength between users for improved location estimation. Concretely, we propose a location estimator – FriendlyLocation– that leverages the relationship between the strength of the tie between a pair of users, and the distance between the pair. Based on an examination of over 100 million geo-encoded tweets and 73 million Twitter user profiles, we identify several factors such as the number of followers and how the users interact that can strongly reveal the distance between a pair of users. We use these factors to train a decision tree to distinguish between pairs of users who are likely to live nearby and pairs of users who are likely to live in different areas. We use the results of this decision tree as the input to a maximum likelihood estimator to predict a user’s location. We find that this proposed method significantly improves the results of location estimation relative to a state-of-the-art technique. Our system reduces the average error distance for 80% of Twitter users from 40 miles to 21 miles using only information from the user’s friends and friends-of-friends, which has great significance for augmenting traditional social media and enriching location-based services with more refined and accurate location estimates.

Despite the recent growth of social media, rhetorical theory which addresses authorship in this realm has been slow to develop. Static terms such as "reader," "writer," and "author" are often used to refer to the roles occupied by users in social media, although these terms are insufficient to describe the dynamic rhetorical exchange which occurs there. The goal of this dissertation is to use rhetorical theory to develop an updated terminology to describe the model(s) adopted by creators of social media content. First, past models of authorship are surveyed to locate rhetorical precedents for the model(s) that currently exists in social media. After comparing potential historical precedents to the overall process of content creation in social media, the term "participant" is adopted to describe the roles which users assume when creating digital content. Although "participant" initially appears to be an appropriate term, this notion is complicated when one considers the asymmetrical roles adopted on a smaller scale in genres such as social networking and blogs. To determine if the "participant" model is still applicable in such cases, an examination of authorship as it occurs in the genre of women's personal blogs is conducted. An analysis of the terms that bloggers use to refer to themselves as writers reveals that bloggers situate themselves in roles through which they claim to speak for a group such as storyteller and truth-teller. Subsequent examination of the interactions between bloggers and other participants reveals that bloggers negotiate authority with readers in a variety of ways. By using such strategies, bloggers attempt to situate themselves as community members in a manner which aligns with the "participant" model. The participant role adopted in women's personal blogs helps this previously marginalized group to establish a public presence and may also serve as a precedent for models which could be adopted by learners in the composition classroom as they strive to break free from the author/student writer binary and to establish themselves as socially-engaged participants.

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-74). Also available on microfilm.

Purpose – Today, there is an increase in the use of Internet and a decline in political participation. A discussion on wheatear or not the concept of political participation should be broadened to also include political activates online has begun. The purpose of this study is to investigate the view of political participation among youth.Methodology – This study is quantitative in nature, since it builds on two previous quantitative studies. One is a national study about Swedes and the Internet, and the other on a regional level concerning youth in Skåne. Data from the two studies are used to confirm or disregard four hypotheses which are deducted from the presented theoretical framework concerning political participation.Key Findings – This study finds support that youth are more political participant on the Internet than the older generation, but also show that a traditional political participation is valued higher. Youth have more faith in their opportunity to affect political decisions on different decision-levels. A difference in preferred sources for information has also been detected, and youth value Internet higher as a source for information whereas the older generation prefer traditional media. / <p>2015-06-03</p>