Background: To align with the new trend of using social media in the marketing mix, product placement has been adapted to social media platforms as one strategy to create attention. Especially on Instagram, product placements have gained popularity among companies. While scholars have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the strategy, suggesting that credibility is one component necessary for success, a gap in the research is illuminated when focusing on what makes a product placement on Instagram credible. Previous studies regarding credibility and its relation to traditional media have concluded that there are some factors essential in consumers’ credibility evaluation process. Since social media differs from traditional media, there was a need to investigate the applicability of credibility to the social media platform Instagram. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to examine key factors of product placement on Instagram that influence credibility. Method: To meet the purpose of this thesis a study with a mixed method research design was conducted. The qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews with the intention to discover how consumers evaluate credibility. The scales and items developed from the findings of the qualitative study were tested using a questionnaire to identify which factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment. Conclusions: The overall findings indicate that consumers evaluate credibility based upon source, message and receiver characteristics. The empirical evidence suggests that the Expertise of influencer, Professionalism of picture, Trustworthiness of influencer, Connection to influencer and Causes of irritation are the factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment of product placement on Instagram. The findings further implies that it is not only the factor itself that influence, credibility can additionally be transferred from one factor to another.

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The importance of social media is growing day by day because consumers increasingly use online platforms to facilitate social interaction. One new form of social media is microblog. The real time and ubiquitous communication that can deliver to a network of people is a great benefit for marketers to build online brand communities. The paper investigates the communication between the company and consumers based on BenQ’s case in Taiwan. The focuses lie in addressing the types of topic, techniques for marketing purposes and eWOM. These findings should assist marketers and academics in their understanding of brand communities on social media. / text

This study examines how and why individuals use the social networking site Twitter and explores how they perceive the credibility of tweets by politicians. Using a survey to sample adults, it shows that people primarily use the medium to get timely content, for entertainment, and for social interaction, and that interactive tweets by elected officials are viewed as most credible, even if people are not likely to use the medium to directly communicate with politicians themselves. It concludes that Twitter’s potential to change how people communicate with each other and with politicians is strong, but that it has not yet been fully realized. / text

Beliefs that are not the result of science-based interpretation of evidence (e.g., belief in ghosts or belief that prayer is effective) are extremely common. Science enthusiasts have expressed interest in automatic detection of non-science-based claims. This thesis intends to provide some first steps toward a solution, specifically aimed at detecting Twitter users who are likely or unlikely to take a science-based perspective on all topics. As part of this thesis, a set a Twitter users was labeled as being either "pro-science" (i.e. as having the view that beliefs are rational if and only if they are in accord with science-based reasoning) or "non-pro-science" (i.e. as having the view that beliefs may be reasonable even if they are not in accord with science-based reasoning). Word frequency ratios relative to a neutral dataset, and a simple topic alignment technique, suggest considerable linguistic divergence between the pro-science and non-pro-science users. High accuracy logistic regression classification using linguistic features of users' recent tweets support that idea. Supervised classification experiments suggest that the pro-science and non-pro-science perspectives are not only detectable from linguistic features, but that they can be abstracted away from particular topics (i.e. that the pro-science and non-pro-science perspectives are not inherently topic-specific). Results from distantly supervised classification suggest that using easily acquired, weakly labeled data may be preferable to the much slower process of individually labeling data for some applications, despite the pronounced inferiority to the fully supervised approach in terms of accuracy. The best classifier obtained in this thesis has an accuracy of 93.9%. / text

Sociala medier är ett samlingsbegrepp för kommunikationskanaler där individer har möjlighet att integrera med varandra. Sociala medier utgår från en tvåvägskommunikation, vilket innebär att mottagaren har möjlighet att integrera med företag. Denna sorts marknadsföring har utvecklats och utgör en stor del av hotellens marknadsföring, via denna sorts kommunikation kan hotellet utveckla en starkare relation med gästen. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur interaktionen via sociala medier kan stärka relationen mellan gäst och hotell.        Uppsatsen är en litteraturstudie baserad på fem vetenskapliga artiklar, de valdes ut för att besvara uppsatsens syfte. Resultatet tar upp vikten av att vara medveten om möjligheter och risker med sociala medier för hotell. Sociala medier ger möjligheten till att förmedla sin vision till en bredare publik, och via detta stärka sitt varumärke. Till största del handlar det om att visa engagemang, bygga upp en fungerande strategi och att ge respons till gästers feedback. Om detta hanteras korrekt, ger det ökad möjlighet för hotellen att stärka relationen till gästerna. / B-uppsatser

Forskning om professionaliserade valkampanjer har nästan uteslutande bedrivits genom studier av val i en nationell kontext, vilket har skapat ett teoretiskt ramverk som förbiser andra typer av val, så som lokala- och supranationella val. Den här studien söker att nyansera den gängse bilden av professionellt kampanjarbete genom att undersöka i vilken utsträckning politiska partier i en mellanstor svensk kommun använder sig av professionaliserade kampanjtekniker, samt i vilken utsträckning det nuvarande teoretiska ramverket är applicerbart på lokalt kampanjarbete. Resultatet visar som väntat på en lägre generell grad av professionalisering jämfört med nationella kampanjer, vidare visar resultatet på att det finns specifika lokala förklaringar till partiernas olika grad av professionalisering som inte har belysts av tidigare forskning.

Businesses, be it large corporations or small, and medium businesses are today hard pressed to find ways to effectively reach out to consumers. The simple reason for this is the advancements in technology. The Internet is forcing marketers to adopt new methods of engagement. Thus, businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon. However, presence on social media networks does not necessarily equate to interactivity and engagement with consumers. This research examines three automobile companies for interactivity and engagement using thematic analysis and a multi-platform interactivity analysis. The conclusions drawn from this research are: (1) companies are good at interacting or engaging but are seldom good at both, and (2) companies do not necessarily utilize their online resources on multiple platforms efficiently. / Department of Telecommunications

Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur bild- och informationsdelning påverkar användare på social media. Studien innefattar en beskrivning av bild- och informationsdelning på Facebook och Instagram. Vi vill undersöka fördelar och nackdelar med användandet av internetbaserade forum. Studien ska generera i kunskap om hur individer påverkas av social media och om de använder sig av fenomenet för att söka och dela med sig av information i relation till resandet.

In June 2015, Caitlyn Jenner created waves of excitement with her coming out announcement on the cover of Vanity Fair: “Call me Caitlyn.” From the perspective of critical trans politics, however, the heightened visibility of trans people in mainstream media does not call for unequivocal celebration. Though trans women of color, such as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, are more visible in mainstream media than ever before, mainstream media still largely depicts trans people through white constructs of what it means to be trans, namely medicalized binary transitions. Many trans people who deviate from mainstream media’s depiction of trans people are creating their own media on YouTube to voice their lived experiences. I argue that while YouTube is a particularly accessible platform for trans people to challenge transnormativity, the reach of trans YouTubers’ messages are highly limited by the medium’s design and genre conventions.