Social media services like Facebook mark the continued domestication of surveillance technology. Facebook has been remarkably successful at establishing a presence within a variety of social settings, including the interpersonal sphere, the academic sector, and the marketplace. As a platform shared by these spheres, Facebook distributes personal information beyond intended contexts. This research will develop a sociological understanding of individual, institutional, and aggregate surveillance through social networking sites. A series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews with students, university administrators and business employees provides a detailed understanding of surveillance practices on Facebook. Three kinds of surveillance are considered. First, lateral – or peer-to-peer – surveillance refers to interpersonal scrutiny between individuals. Second, institutional surveillance is the scrutiny of key populations by universities and other institutions. Third, aggregated surveillance is used primarily by businesses to study relevant markets. I propose that mutual augmentation exists between individual, institutional, and aggregate forms of surveillance on social media. These three models are situated within the same informational platform. By sharing not only the same information, but also the same interface used to access that information, formerly discrete surveillance practices feed off one another. New personal details, criteria, and searching techniques become common knowledge. Marketers and institutions now benefit from ‘user-generated value’ when individuals exchange relevant information amongst themselves. Likewise, university-age users have adopted new criteria like ‘employability’ and ‘liability’ to assess their peers as well as themselves. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-12-31 05:12:00.199

Viral marketing is a marketing tool that is becoming more common in the marketing industry. As people spend more time on the internet via their smartphones, tablets and computers marketers try to find new ways to reach out and connect with consumers. Succeeding with a viral spread is not easy; it's several factors that are important. Viral marketing encourages consumers to recommend and talk about product-related information with each other. So, what should a viral campaign or message contain in order to create this interest among us consumers? There are few empirical studies done in this subject which makes this kind of uncharted territory. By reading previous studies done in the subject we managed to find a few factors that reappeared frequently. In our theory chapter, we describe what previous studies say about these viral marketing factors; Message, Messenger, Social Media and Environment. Based on the theory we then created questions which we used when we interviewed 10 respondents who work with viral marketing on a daily basis. All answers were then stacked up in a table in which we extracted interesting patterns. These patterns are discussed and analyzed in our analysis chapter where our data is compared with previously done theory and our own reflections. Our contribution by this thesis is to bring empirical data within viral marketing, which has been missing up to now. We have done this through interviews and a model that we have developed. Keywords: Viral marketing, Social media, Social media marketing, Viral message

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 19, 2010). "Edward R. Murrow College of Communication." Includes bibliographical references (p. 148-162).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-201). Also available in print.

Cette thèse se donne donc pour objectif d’estimer la valeur des médias sociaux pour les entreprises. Elle développe une série d’analyses théoriques portant sur les effets que peuvent avoir ces médias sur leurs performances. Elle suggère également aux gestionnaires et aux praticiens différentes façons d’exploiter leur présence sur les médias sociaux pour tirer un profit maximal des avantages que cette présence suscite. Des méthodes quantitatives comme la modélisation par équations structurelles, l’analyse des séries temporelles et les panels dynamiques sont mises en pratiques pour aborder le sujet de façon empirique et exhaustive. Afin d’atteindre ces objectifs, cette thèse soulève un certain nombre de questions de recherche : Les médias sociaux sont-ils créateurs de valeur pour les entreprises ? Quels effets ont les médias sociaux sur les marques, les consommateurs, les investisseurs ? Quels indicateurs sont essentiels pour mesurer la performance des médias sociaux ? Nous nous proposons de répondre à ces questions dans cette thèse qui s’organise en quatre articles distincts.L’article 1 développe plusieurs analyses théoriques dont l’objectif est de comprendre comment les indicateurs de médias sociaux affectent la valeur des marques.L’article 2 aborde la pertinence des médias sociaux sous un angle différent. Nous y analysons les trajectoires de l’impact des médias sociaux sur les consommateurs puis sur les investisseurs, ainsi que les explications de cet impact.L’article 3 se focalise plus particulièrement sur la relation entre les médias sociaux et le comportement du consommateur. Les effets des médias sociaux owned et earned sur les étapes séquentielles qui composent le parcours d’achat du consommateur y sont analysés, avec pour objectif de donner un meilleur aperçu de l’influence des médias sociaux sur la décision d’acheter et sur la satisfaction du consommateur.Enfin, l’article 4 se place dans le prolongement de l’article 1 pour étudier l’effet des médias sociaux et traditionnels sur la satisfaction des consommateurs et la valeur de marque. / This dissertation focuses on assessing the value of social media. There are several theoretical and practical gaps in the stream of social media marketing literature, particularly in terms of the impact of social media on performance. This dissertation proposes a set of theoretical conceptualizations of how social media can impact performance, makes suggestions for managers and practitioners on how to leverage the social media presences in pursuit of the benefits of social media marketing, and makes recommendations for researchers on how to further contribute to this research domain. Quantitative methods such as structural equation modeling, time-series analysis and dynamic panel methods are applied to address the issue empirically and comprehensively.

Social media use is becoming a popular activity among students at Nursing Education Institutions in South Africa, with Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Blackberry Messaging, Mxit and Google Plus being some of the social networking sites adopted for various reasons by nursing students. However, lack of accountability and unethical use of social media by nursing students in South Africa has been reported. Owing to the lack of accountability and unethical misconduct associated with the use of social media, guidelines for responsible usage are needed. A qualitative, descriptive, explorative and contextual research study was conducted to explore and describe the perceptions of nursing students regarding the responsible use of social media. Nursing students registered for the undergraduate nursing degree at a Nursing Education Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa were interviewed using a semi-structured individual interview method in order to elicit rich descriptions of their perceptions regarding the use of social media. The goal of the study was to develop guidelines for the responsible use of social media by nursing students. In phase one, the researcher explores and describes the perceptions of nursing students regarding the use of social media. In phase two, guidelines for the responsible use of social media by nursing students were developed, using the findings of the study. Tesch’s method of thematic synthesis was utilised to analyse the data. To ensure rigour and trustworthiness in the study, the researcher used Guba and Lincoln’s criteria, namely: credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability. To protect the rights and dignity of the participants and to safeguard the integrity of this study, the researcher complied with the following ethical principles: beneficence and non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, privacy, and confidentiality. Twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews provided saturated data, which was then transcribed and coded to yield the major and sub-themes that were identified in this study. The information shared by the participants provided the basis for the development of guidelines for the responsible use of social media by nursing students, which are intended to provide guidance for legally and ethically acceptable social networking. Three themes that emerged from the data were: Nursing student’s lives are centred around social media, Nursing students experience blurred personal and professional boundaries and lack of accountability, and Students expressed a need for the guidelines for the responsible use of social media. Six principle guidelines focusing on accountable and ethically acceptable use of social media were developed. The study concludes with the recommendations regarding nursing practice, nursing education and nursing research. The limitations of the study were that data was collected from students in the undergraduate nursing degree programme and therefore the experiences of the nursing students in the postgraduate degree and diploma programmes regarding the use of social media are not known. The researcher depended solely on the story as told by the participants and did not get the opportunity to observe their social networking conduct, so the researcher made inferences based on the information that was supplied by students. The paucity of research in this topic made it a challenge for the researcher to find context-specific research articles for South Africa. Recommendations from this study could be used to influence further research aimed at establishing the effectiveness of the guidelines. The findings of this research study could also be used to influence policy making at national and provincial levels of government regarding the use of social media at healthcare facilities.

Social media has radically altered today's media landscape, and presents public relations practitioners with new possibilities and opportunities to promote their companies. Social media enables public relations to observe in order to find out what people need; what content they are looking for; and how your company can help them. However, will engaging in online conversations give an organisation‘s consumers a voice? Past PR models illustrate how methods of communication was established and used in the past. However, the Grunig and Hunt two-way symmetrical model creates the possibility of two-way communication (dialogue) between consumer and organisation in which the power relations are equal. By applying Web 2.0 (social media) to these models, one can explore new ways of two-way communication. Finally by applying these elements to each other, a case study can be created to prove if social media can be used to create a dialogue between consumer and organization.

Social media's role in formenting protest action in Egypt has often been lauded by proponents of these web 2.0 technologies, to the extent that the collective protest actions that swept the Middle East and North Africa from December 2010 to the present have been referred to as "Twitter Revolutions" in recognition of the pivotal played by Twitter in mobilising citizents.

Social media is an unexplored and new area, for both businesses and academia. Many institutions are not confident on how to improve their business through the use of social media, neither for internal or external purposes. Social media is nevertheless immense among private persons (Wikström & Wigmo 2010:1) and to ignore this would be a critical mistake by marketing communicators, regardless of the economic sector in which they operate. Therefore, this study intended to expand on the current limited knowledge and information available relating to the use of social media by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to improve their brand image. The primary objective of this research was to evaluate and empirically test the impact of selected Brand identity variables (Brand reputation, Brand relevance, Brand personality, Brand performance and Brand relationship) on the Brand image of a HEI, through the use of social media. The focus was on the impact of social media (Facebook) on the brand image of a Higher Education Institution (HEI), namely the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), which was used as the sample for this study.

This study measures Facebook use intensity in residents of Saudi Arabia, and distinguishes between Saudi citizens and non-Saudi residents. This is achieved through an analysis of the antecedents and the consequences of Facebook use intensity. The sample used consists of 135 Saudi and 66 non-Saudi participants, all of whom were Facebook users aged 18 or older. The “snowball” technique was used in this study. Data was collected through a face-to-face questionnaire, and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics. Results show that there were significant relationships between the antecedents and the consequences of Facebook use intensity. Non-Saudi residents are shown to use Facebook to keep in touch with their families and friends more than Saudi do, while Saudi citizens use Facebook to search for products more than non-Saudi. The two groups are also quite different in terms of their online shopping behavior, including the sources of information and recommendations they prefer when researching a product. This study shows that there is a relationship between participants’ Facebook usage, and their demographics, personality, motivations, and values. The major limitation of this study is that it was conducted in only one city: Riyadh. Therefore, additional research should be carried out in other cities with larger samples. This thesis makes a special contribution to the literature, as it is the first to consider both the antecedents and the consequences of Facebook use intensity in a single study. It is also the first study to analyze the relationship between the Six Dimensional Achievement Motivation Scale (Jackson, Ahmed, and Heapy, 1976), the Rokeach Value System (1973), and Facebook use intensity in the world in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular.