Using qualitative content analysis, this research study explored the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) social media use, with specific reference to Facebook, as a communication tool to engage with stakeholders. The study looked at how Facebook is used to promote two-way communication between the government and citizens, based on the principles of the Excellence Theory, which advocates for communication models developed by Grunt and Hunt (1984). The diagonal principles by Kent and Taylor (1998) used as a strategic framework to facilitate relationship building with the public and the organisations, were also explored. The results indicated that the majority of the departments are active on Facebook, however not at a satisfactory level. The majority of the departments failed to use all the six dialogic principles to leverage two-way communication, in particular creation of the dialogue loop which facilitates the building of ongoing relationships and feedback. Some of the departments have not fully taken the opportunity to increase the engagement and dialogue through posting photos on Facebook walls. The numbers of videos posted were extremely low. The majority of the departments utilised the social media platform, Facebook, as a one-way communication, such as publishing of media statements, announcements, media conferences and interviews among others. Most of the departments use Facebook for information dissemination especially on events and campaigns. The poor use of Facebook can be attributed to the challenges such as a lack of resources, especially a budget, lack of skills on effective use of social media, the continuous use of one-way communication by the government and a lack of budget among others. The findings correlate to the previous studies that found a lack of proper engagement, dialogue and interactivity on government’s Facebook pages.

Social animals, such as primates, incur many fitness-related costs as a direct result of living in groups of conspecifics. However, group-living also comes with benefits. Sociality is thought to have evolved in response to the need for individuals to negotiate their social environment in order to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs associated with group-living. Recently, researchers interested in animal sociality have turned to a set of sophisticated statistical tools, collectively termed 'social network analysis' in order to better understand the structure of animal social systems and the role of individuals within their social groups. Using a social network analytic approach, I explore the relationship between the ecological and social environments, and the implications of an uncertain social landscape for individual fitness and fitness-relevant processes in two species of Old-World monkeys: chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) and vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops pygerythrus). My results suggest that individuals respond to fluctuating local conditions in diverse ways depending on behavioural context and their current reproductive state, and that the social environment experienced by an individual, and their active pattern of social engagement has important implications for infant survival. Finally, I investigate how network structure influences two fitness-relevant processes of flow in a population of vervet monkeys: information transfer and disease transmission. I conclude that the complex social life of animal groups emerges from many individuals trying to achieve the same fitness goals. Successful individuals exploit the complexity in their social environment and respond adaptively to an uncertain and inconstant set of local conditions by actively adopting social strategies that serve to enhance their fitness.

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. At the same time, thanks to the widespread and growing popularity of mobile devices equipped with location-sensing technology, users are now increasingly sharing details about their geographic location and about the places they visit. This adds a crucial spatial and geographic dimension to online social services, bridging the gap between the online world and physical presence. These observations motivate the work in this dissertation: our thesis is that the spatial properties of online social networking services offer important insights about users' social behaviour. This thesis is supported by a set of re.sults related to the measurement and the analysis of such spatial properties. First, we present a comparative study of three online social services: we find that geographic distance constrains social connections, although users exhibit heterogeneous spatial properties. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by considering only social or only spatial factors it is not possible to reproduce the observed properties. Therefore, we investigate how these factors are jointly influencing the evolution of online social services. The resulting observations are then incorporated in a new model of network growth which is able to reproduce the properties of real systems. Then, we outline two case studies where we exploit our findings in real application scenarios. The first concerns building a link prediction system to find pairs of users likely to connect on online social services. Even though spatial proximity fosters the creation of social ties, the computational challenge is accurately and efficiently to discern when being close in space results in a new social connection. We address this problem with a system that uses, alongside other information, features based on the places that users visit. The second example presents a method to extract geographic information about users sharing online videos to understand whether such videos are going to become locally or globally popular. This information is then harnessed to build caching policies that consider which items should be prioritised in memory, thus improving performance of content delivery networks. We summarise our findings with a discussion about the implications of our results, debating potential future research trends and practical applications.

With increasing demand for social network based activities, it is very important to understand not only the structural properties of social networks but also how social networks form, to better exploit their promise and potential. We believe the existing methods and tools for social network analysis have a major inadequacy: they do not capture the behavior (such as rationality and intelligence) of individuals nor do they model the strategic interactions that occur among these individuals. Game theory is a natural tool to overcome this inadequacy since it provides rigorous mathematical models of strategic interaction among autonomous, intelligent, and rational agents. This thesis brings out how a game theoretic approach helps analyze social networks better. In particular, we study three contemporary and pertinent problems in social networks using a game theoretic approach: determining influential individuals for viral marketing, community detection, and social network formation. The first problem deals with determining influential nodes in social networks for diffusion of information. We present an efficient heuristic algorithm (SPIN) to this problem based on cooperative game theoretic techniques. The running time of SPIN is independent of the number of influential nodes to be determined. Moreover, unlike the popular benchmark algorithms, the proposed method works well with both submodular and non-submodular objective functions for diffusion of information. In the second problem, we design a novel game theoretic approach to partition a given undirected, unweighted graph into dense subgraphs (or communities). The approach is based on determining a Nash stable partition which is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium of an appropriately defined strategic form game. In the proposed graph partitioning game, the nodes of the graph are the players and the strategy of a node is to decide to which community it ought to belong. The utility of each node is defined to depend entirely on the node’s local neighborhood. A Nash stable partition (NSP) of this game is a partition consisting of communities such that no node has incentive to defect from its community to any other community. Given any graph, we prove that an NSP always exists and we also derive a lower bound on the fraction of intra-community edges in any NSP. Our approach leads to an efficient heuristic algorithm to detect communities in social networks with the additional feature of automatically determining the number of communities. The focus of the third problem is to understand the patterns behind the evolution of social networks that helps in predicting the likely topologies of social networks. The topology of social networks plays a crucial role in determining the outcomes in several social and economic situations such as trading networks, recommendation networks. We approach the problem of topology prediction in networks by defining a game theoretic model, which we call value function -allocation rule model, that considers four determinants of network formation. This model uses techniques from both cooperative game theory and non-cooperative game theory. We characterize the topologies of networks that are in equilibrium and/or socially efficient. Finally, we study the tradeoffs between equilibrium networks and efficient networks.

Transdisciplinary focused work concentrates on communication on the social network Facebook. Firstly, the author puts forward a theoretical introduction to social communication and afterwards to communication on social networks. The thesis introduces the concept of New Media and Web 2.0 as the essential platform for the full development of the potential of Facebook. Further, the author discusses the term Online Social Networks and the definition of Social Capital. With the help of the former and latter the author demonstrates the rightfulness of people social ties; i.a. on the Small-World theory. The subsequent analysis is dedicated to Pages and Groups, which appear o Facebook. On sampled examples the author examines the content of communicated messages, the motivation people have to join such Groups and Pages and the overlap this activity has in the real world.

This diploma thesis analyzes the position of social networks in the Czech Republic and describes their potential usage for business with a scope on marketing. The work focuses on the social network Facebook, which in terms of number of users and their activity is the most represented social network in the Czech Republic and therefore represents the highest advertising potential. The work describes the creation of both paid and unpaid forms of communication within this social network and presents an optimal solution for its involvement in company's activities. The findings were applied in practice to the Facebook profile of www.milujito.cz e-shop.

There is little research data available on the experience of unemployed youth and the effects of social supports in buffering or insulating their adjustment to this stressful life event. Fourteen unemployed youth, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, were interviewed utilizing a critical incident methodology. The aim was to identify the factors facilitating and hindering adjustment for these youth as well as isolate sources of support (ie. friends, parents, relatives, or other key others). The research findings yielded information on the specific needs of this particular group of unemployed young people, and identified sources that provided specific forms of emotional, material and informational support. Recommendations are offered for supportive services and programs needed by these youths. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Although past research has consistently demonstrated that hostile individuals report fewer satisfactory sources of social support, it remains unclear whether their evaluation is based on an objective assessment of their social environment or is coloured by hostile cognitions. To evaluate this question, 120 young adults, falling in the upper or lower tercile groups on a hostility measure, participated in a social cognition experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three priming conditions (Hostility, Support, or Neutral) designed to activate cognitive schemata. They then read through vignettes depicting stressful situations typically encountered by students and evaluated how supportive various offers of help would be perceived in response to these problems. A 2 Hostility (high, low) x 3 Condition (hostility, support, or neutral) MANOVA examined the impact of personality and primed schemata on judgments of social support. Analyses yielded a significant Hostility x Condition interaction. Simple main effect analyses indicated that individuals low in hostility made the most negative judgments of perceived helpfulness in the Hostility condition, supporting the prediction that an active hostile schema biases people to view offers of help in a more pejorative way. However, hostile participants made their most negative judgments in the Support condition, which could indicate that an active social support schema is associated with increased mistrust and guardedness about offers of help in hostile individuals. These data suggest that hostile and non-hostile individuals process support-related information differently, which has important implications for interventions designed to augment social resources in at risk individuals. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

M.Phil. (Information Management) / This study was aimed at the discovery of in corporate advisory networks who act as agents to share information and knowledge. In the current competitive and often uncertain economic business environment, savvy executives need to leverage off the expertise of their company employees in order to service their customers effectively and remain competitive. Since not all employees in the company have expert knowledge, executives need to discover the advisory networks of expert employees embedded in formal organisational structures and encourage them to share and transfer their expert knowledge to novices and/or less experienced employees. In light of the current argument, a diagnostic technique known as social network analysis (SNA) was used to map out and measure the advisory relational X-ray patterns within organisational departments and across to other functional business units. Once the patterns are discovered and the key expert networked employees identified, knowledge sharing interventions are introduced to facilitate experts to share and transfer their information, knowledge, insights and experiences to other less knowledgeable employees within the departments and across to other functional areas in the organisation. The overall objective of this study is therefore to utilise the SNA technique to discover the experts in the corporate advisory networks whom will act as agents to facilitate information and knowledge sharing in the organisation to improve other employees’ work performance thereby enabling the organisation to meet and even exceed its strategic objectives...

The main purpose of this master thesis is to help companies in their work with social networks. The first chapter is a short introduction into social networks and types of their users. The second chapter helps companies to realize how the social networks are connected to marketing activities and what kind of monitoring possibilities they can take advantage of. Then the thesis is focused on what kind of businesses is monitoring applicable for as well as how to correctly determinate goals and monitoring on social networks. These findings are demonstrated on particular company named Foreigners.cz Pilsen.