Throughout the course of history, presidential campaigning has evolved commensurate with the advancements in technology. FDR mastered the radio, JFK the television and President Barack Obama, the Internet. In both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns, President Barack Obama used social media via the Internet to understand the voter better than any candidate before his time. Through revolutionary data collection techniques, both offline and online, the Obama campaign obtained vital electorate information. This data was used by the campaign to: target online social media users who were most likely to become politically engaged; and attempt to influence their voting habits, two of the most crucial measures of a successful presidential campaign. This paper analyzes whether the social media campaign strategy deployed by President Barack Obama in both the 2008 and 2012 elections was successful in its attempt to influence the electorate. This is accomplished by evaluating voter turnout and engagement based on targeted demographic groups. Next, I assess how social media has impacted fundraising in the 2st1 century, particularly following the aftermath of the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) in 1974. Finally, I analyze how social media effectively assisted President Obama’s campaign in mobilizing the electorate both online and offline to his benefit.

The non-profit sector is growing, where NPOs compete for scarce resources. Meanwhile, innovation in communication technology requires resources and creativity. Can social media work as an efficient tool for communicating organizational goals and values and how does it enhance trust in NPOs relationship with donors? How do NPOs use ICT and social media in communication to donors and how do they implement functional and emotional communication online?  The research area is approached through a deductive, qualitative, and constructivist perspective. Interviews with two leading NPOs were held, as well as a number of interviews with potential donors. The theoretical framework builds upon Morgan and Hunts and MacMillan et al’s models of trust and commitment. Functional and emotional communication was developed through various theories on online communication. The main findings of this thesis are that Swedish NPOs mainly focus on emotional communication in order to obtain emotional commitment before further developing trust, which is created from functional communication. The investigated NPOs use functional communication to a very little extent.

New event detection, also known as first story detection (FSD), has become very popular in recent years. The task consists of finding previously unseen events from a stream of documents. Despite the apparent simplicity, FSD is very challenging and has applications anywhere where timely access to fresh information is crucial: from journalism to stock market trading, homeland security, or emergency response. With the rise of user generated content and citizen journalism we have entered an era of big and noisy data, yet traditional approaches for solving FSD are not designed to deal with this new type of data. The amount of information that is being generated today exceeds by many orders of magnitude previously available datasets, making traditional approaches obsolete for modern event detection. In this thesis, we propose a modern approach to event detection that scales to unbounded streams of text, without sacrificing accuracy. This is a crucial property that enables us to detect events from large streams like Twitter, which none of the previous approaches were able to do. One of the major problems in detecting new events is vocabulary mismatch, also known as lexical variation. This problem is characterized by different authors using different words to describe the same event, and it is inherent to human language. We show how to mitigate this problem in FSD by using paraphrases. Our approach that uses paraphrases achieves state-of-the-art results on the FSD task, while still maintaining efficiency and being able to process unbounded streams. Another important property of user generated content is the high level of noise, and Twitter is no exception. This is another problem that traditional approaches were not designed to deal with, and here we investigate different methods of reducing the amount of noise. We show that by using information from Wikipedia, it is possible to significantly reduce the amount of spurious events detected in Twitter, while maintaining a very small latency in detection. A question is often raised as to whether Twitter is at all useful, especially if one has access to a high-quality stream such as the newswire, or if it should be considered as sort of a poor man’s newswire. In our comparison of these two streams we find that Twitter contains events not present in the newswire, and that it also breaks some events sooner, showing that it is useful for event detection, even in the presence of newswire.

In this paper, I examine the role of CEO age in predicting the success of startup firms, as measured by social media exposure. I use a novel measure of early-stage growth defined by increased levels of social media and online traction. I hypothesize that the age of the company’s CEO will be negatively correlated with their social media scores while controlling for the company’s total funding amounts and employee counts. My data consists of 250 United States-based startup companies that were founded between 2011 and 2015. Furthermore, they are all relatively successful in that they are still operating and have received between $100 thousand and $10 million of funding. I find that the social media score of a company is negatively impacted by the age of their CEO.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between black millennial political activism and social media use. In Phase One of the study, the attitudes of 126 black 18-29 year olds were measured via survey. Results from the survey show that there is a significant relationship between social media use and political activism. In Phase Two, ten high-scoring participants from Phase One were interviewed and analyzed using thematic coding. Examination of the influence of social media on black millennials can inform strategy used for the advancement of black communities and black activism through widespread, effective communication and an advocacy platform accessible by all.

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Supplier networks today are seeing a complete redirection in their purpose from a decade ago. Supplier networks focused originally on transaction-oriented exchanges for sending purchase orders electronically. However, based on the current increased need to understand business risks, supplier networks are demonstrating a clear shift in emphasis from establishing “transaction-based focus” relationships towards the evolution of network platforms. The Aberdeen Group (2011) demonstrates that 76 per cent of supplier networks increasingly are being used to identify new suppliers and market opportunities. Moreover, with social-networking features similar to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (which are very recent phenomena), supplier networks have become more important in their role of spending management based on the ability to help organisations identify new suppliers while sharing information with other buyer organizations. Therefore, analysing data from supplier networks today has become a necessary strategy for optimizing transaction-focused procurement, in addition to improving supplier relationships. With this in mind, the Social Media Domain Analysis (SoMeDoA) framework has been developed to facilitate the decision-making process for selecting flexible suppliers within the e-procurement-based marketplace and apply it to a real set of data gathered from two social-networking sites (Twitter and LinkedIn). The research contributes a rigorous method that analyses effectively domain concepts and relations between notions from social networks and builds the domain ontology. The effectiveness of the framework, in analysing domain and relations, is evaluated by its application to varying datasets gathered from social networks, including the pharmaceutical domain. This model extrapolates findings from stages in the research and marries elements from various papers and frameworks therein, in order to produce a guideline model for organisations seeking a suitable supplier with whom to work. The results of the evaluation are encouraging, and provide concrete outcomes in an area that is little researched.

Background: In today’s world mobile marketing and social media marketing are playing a significant role. The reason for this is a global digitalization that effects a lot of interactions between clients and organizations. In that situation small and medium-seized enterprises (SMEs) are challenged to exist and generate revenue. Huge corporations also observe the change in the business landscape, however it is much easier for them to adapt as they have way more resources and expertise concerning marketing in ‘digital era’. As the market becomes more competitive SMEs have to act wisely, but they do not always have necessary knowledge. Purpose: Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to determine whether using SMM and mobile marketing brings value to the SMEs and have proven andmeasurable positive outcomes on sales of the company. Method: As the research explores the topic of SMM and mobile marketing in relationwith SMEs the decision was made that main source of data will be executives and marketing practitioners of the companies who use social media in their business activity. The research method will be exploratory, with induction as the primary research approach. Hence, semi-structured interviews were chosen as empirical data source. Finally, 12 interviews were held with companies from various business sectors from Russia and Sweden. Qualitative research gives an opportunity to investigate such a developing area find out certain business insights and vision from the companies that would be difficult to find out otherwise. Results & Contribution: First of all, the thesis has a theoretical contribution. The theoretical framework can give a deeper understanding of the subject for marketing practitioners and executives. As the theory moves forward on such a popular topic some of the instruments may have been left aside, whereas the conceptual framework can grab the attention and reveal the tools of SMM and mobile marketing that were not used by the companies. Furthermore, research has a comprehensive empirical analysis of the subject. The 12 semi-structured interviews covered all the areas that were previously examined in theoretical part. SMEs can use the practical part as a foundation to build their own marketing strategy. Such a strategy may be a complex platform for achieving results. Whereas, the participants share insights and vision on the subject.

UA Open Access Publishing Fund / Background: Internet and mobile health (mHealth) apps hold promise for expanding the reach of evidence-based health interventions. Research in this area is rapidly expanding. However, these studies may experience problems with recruitment and retention. Web-based and mHealth studies are in need of a wide-reaching and low-cost method of recruitment that will also effectively retain participants for the duration of the study. Online recruitment may be a low-cost and wide-reaching tool in comparison to traditional recruitment methods, although empirical evidence is limited. Objective: This study aims to review the literature on online recruitment for, and retention in, mHealth studies. Methods: We conducted a review of the literature of studies examining online recruitment methods as a viable means of obtaining mHealth research participants. The data sources used were PubMed, CINAHL, EbscoHost, PyscINFO, and MEDLINE. Studies reporting at least one method of online recruitment were included. A narrative approach enabled the authors to discuss the variability in recruitment results, as well as in recruitment duration and study design. Results: From 550 initial publications, 12 studies were included in this review. The studies reported multiple uses and outcomes for online recruitment methods. Web-based recruitment was the only type of recruitment used in 67% (8/12) of the studies. Online recruitment was used for studies with a variety of health domains: smoking cessation (58%; 7/12) and mental health (17%; 2/12) being the most common. Recruitment duration lasted under a year in 67% (8/12) of the studies, with an average of 5 months spent on recruiting. In those studies that spent over a year (33%; 4/12), an average of 17 months was spent on recruiting. A little less than half (42%; 5/12) of the studies found Facebook ads or newsfeed posts to be an effective method of recruitment, a quarter (25%; 3/12) of the studies found Google ads to be the most effective way to reach participants, and one study showed better outcomes with traditional (eg in-person) methods of recruitment. Only one study recorded retention rates in their results, and half (50%; 6/12) of the studies recorded survey completion rates. Conclusions: Although online methods of recruitment may be promising in experimental research, more empirical evidence is needed to make specific recommendations. Several barriers to using online recruitment were identified, including participant retention. These unique challenges of virtual interventions can affect the generalizability and validity of findings from Web-based and mHealth studies. There is a need for additional research to evaluate the effectiveness of online recruitment methods and participant retention in experimental mHealth studies.

Social media – over the last decade with the development of technology, this new worldwide phenomenon occurred on the horizon and changed the traditional marketing ways forever. Many companies therefore seek these new platforms in order to come closer to potential customers. One of the most important social media platforms for this is Instagram, where companies can approach their target groups by visual storytelling. Start-up companies have often limited marketing budgets, which makes Instagram a perfect marketing channel because it is cost effective. This thesis is a case study of how pictures on Instagram can be used to spread the brand and how different activities affect traffic to the website/webshop. This case study is based on a marketing model that has been created and tested on an interior company’s, Tegelbruketdesign, Instagram account. The marketing model is analysed and compared to collected data from semi-structured interviews with two popular private Instagram accounts and a semi-structured interview with a Digital PR & Social Media strategist. The findings suggest that some picture types and styles are better then others regarding the spreading of the brand. The findings also suggest that Instagram activities have a positive affect on the traffic to the company’s website/webshop.