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.

This practicum develops the concept of Mapping Digital Landscape Narratives. It is an exploration of the use of social media as a passive form of community engagement in landscape architecture. Digital landscape narratives are stories about places that are created collectively by various agents, including people, groups, organizations and communities through the Internet and the use of social media. A case study of the Festival du Voyageur in Winnipeg, Manitoba is used to explore the potential of social media as a tool in planning and design. This practicum explores the importance of social media to participatory culture. An understanding of landscape narratives is developed, and contemporary forms of representation are explored. The document explores three forms of data including original social media data, such as photographs and videos, metadata such as hashtags and locations, and social network data, which is created when people interact on social media. Research into mapping, social network analysis and online privacy outline best practices for researchers and designers of public space. A study of the Festival du Voyageur’s programming, along with an interview with the festival’s planning staff, establishes a conventional data set that outlines the festival on a city scale, a neighborhood scale, and the scale of the festival grounds. Social media data from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are mapped and analyzed to create a complimentary data set. Ultimately an overall complex narrative is developed describing the festival from various points of view at various locations. / October 2016

During the early part of the 21st century, a number of campus demonstrations and other protest acts on college and university campuses became highly visible nationally and internationally, largely thanks to social and traditional/popular media. This visibility was partially due to the ubiquitous and easily accessible nature of emergent digital technologies–cameras, cell phones and social networking sites, among other tools. Though campus protests and social movements began to proliferate nationally, and in the context of increased economic inequity, few studies sought to explore how campus actors (students and employees in particular) used social and popular media to shape and control public perception, specifically during highly visible campus conflicts. Further, much of the literature on campus activism has historically overlooked protests and social justice movements occurring on comprehensive state university and community college, or 2-year, campuses. Additionally, the literature does not offer a comprehensive examination of strategies surrounding pre-negotiated protest acts between campus activists, administrators and law enforcement officers. Also, the literature has not adequately examined responses to tactical strategies employed by law enforcement agencies during campus protest, and at a time of heightened militarization of officers. Both issues are related to the image-making capabilities of activists and administrators. To explore such issues, I set out to investigate how student and employee activists and also administrators construct meaning around the public good mission of higher education. I then explored how both groups public good conceptualizations to shape both action and public perception. In doing so, I employed a combined theoretical framework, modifying academic capitalism and co-cultural theories and adapting them into a single framework. My framework enabled the examination of power dynamics around interactions, discourse and space, ultimately leading to an understanding that the public good mission is a battleground. Within this frame, campus activists and administrators are struggling to both define and manifest the democratic imperative, or historic public good mandate, in different ways. The framework also allow for the study of why specific information is publicized or narrated, while other information is omitted or ignored. Using qualitative methods, I specifically studied how individuals seek to control involvement in democratic processes on campus based on definitions associated with the public good. I also studied ways individuals advance democratic ideals. Further, I explored what tools (including social media and traditional and/or popular media, also referenced collectively as "the press") individuals employ to shape public perception about equity issues and conflicts on campus. In this regard, social and popular media serve as conduits for informing public audiences. For my investigation, I purposefully selected one land-grant institution, a comprehensive state university, and one 2-year community college–all in California. I intentionally selected California, as the state has historically and continues to be seen an important forerunner for nationwide higher education policy and practice. I also chose campuses whose conflicts were receiving statewide and national media attention to allow for the investigation of public perception surrounding campus conflict. Doing so also allowed for the exploration of how those on campus employed social media strategies and also utilized popular media to attempt to shape and control the public image of their institutions. My findings suggest that while campus activists and administrators maintain a similar belief that public institutions should be broadly accessible, they differently conceptualize how the public good mission of higher education should manifest. The difference in framing of the public good complicates interactions between both groups, and at times leads to violent clashes during protest. My findings also suggest that while activists and campus officials both maintain a social media presence and interact with media representatives, administrators are not as successful in capturing public support. This appears especially true during and after clashes have occurred during campus protest acts that also involve campus law enforcement officers. Additionally, my findings indicate that the under-utilization of social media, lax media relations strategies and blame shifting, specifically during protest acts, may ultimately hurt administrators and law enforcement officers with regard to image-shaping efforts. Of note, the resulting coverage of violent clashes in the popular media tended to favor activists over administrators and law enforcement officers no matter the type and amount of pre-planning and pre-negotiations between activists and campus officials. Ultimately, my findings challenge perceptions that institutional image-making powers reside squarely with administrators and media relations offices. Given the widespread use of digital technologies and social media, and also strategies activists have employed to engage with members of traditional media outlets, my findings also illustrate how student and employee activists are changing how power is introduced and distributed within their campus communities.

This study explored attributes of a Facebook brand page (FBP). Seven variables were derived from the framework and applied to FBPs. The goals of this research were to discover which attributes contribute to a successful FBP, determine which attributes increase purchase intentions, and help marketers determine where to focus their efforts. A total of 421 surveys were gathered from men and women ages 18 and older. The methods of this research included factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. Results yielded two loading factors for the trustworthiness variable and supported hypotheses of trustworthiness increasing purchase intentions. It was also discovered that participation positively influences purchase intentions. It is advised that information content be monitored to avoid information overload.

My mission is to bring attention to the unusual, undefined, and fluid connections we have to objects through various avenues of experience. Things, objects, and devices have shaped our culture, environment, and personal philosophies. We live, grow, learn, and mourn with objects. We worship, sympathize, and relate to objects. But what I am most interested in is a human tendency to retreat to objects, allowing them to mediate experiences of friendship and intimacy between people. During my graduate studies, I have been evaluating my personal and professional connections with others in order to understand how technology such as smart phones and computers have become so intertwined in these relationships.

Through an accidental discovery of an interest in the film making process, I decided to explore the opportunities that would come through self-education in the field. Along the way, I found that the process of working behind the camera can, in fact, help the actor’s career in front of the camera and provide a chance to train in a nontraditional way. After directing two projects (one simple and one more complicated), I decided to propose a class in which students would be required to self- produce their own video projects online. The class was vastly popular, and the students’ responses to the class work lined up with my learning objectives perfectly. The actor must take control of his/her career by constantly working on the craft, and that can easily be done through going out and shooting one’s own work. Even if it doesn’t result in being ‘discovered,’ the pursuit allows the actor’s creativity and perspective to be ever widening.

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone and camera on social media. iPhoneography, the photography taken or edited with the iPhone, has set the trend of nostalgic photography on social media during the 2010s; thus, the iPhone, a high-tech camera, produces low-tech-looking images. This dissertation attempts to find out why iPhone photographers (iPhoneographers) take, edit, and share images that mimic photographs taken with analog photographic equipment. I argue that nostalgia allows iPhoneographers to use the iPhone as a creative tool and to belong to a community. Based on the arguments of Vilém Flusser—who suggested that photographers are more interested in the camera and the process of taking pictures than in the photographs produced—this work focuses first on the iPhone camera and the camera apps. (This work also considers the writings of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and W. J. T. Mitchell, as they pertain to photography and iPhoneography.) It traces the beginning of the nostalgic photograph style to 2008, when the Apple App Store offered apps that behaved like toy cameras and rendered images similar to those produced by toy and Polaroid cameras. The Hipstamatic app set the trend in 2009, and Instagram made it mainstream. Nostalgia is more a source of inspiration and creativity than a source of melancholy and longing for the past. The iPhoneography community on Facebook tends to form small groups that share and curate specific topics, such as clouds, portraits, flowers, and images produced with Hipstamatic. A small survey of the iPhoneography community shows that the community considers iPhoneography an art.

This quantitative study intends to identify how collective meaning-making elaborates on social media in terms of a rather new swedish concept, klimatsmart. User generated content, gathered under the hashtag #klimatsmart, is analyzed through quantitative content analysis and the study focuses on which climate friendly representations is created and further maintained on the social media platform Instagram. The approach combines an understanding of climate communication as well as how affective communities is formed in social media. The results show that commercial actors and individuals contribute with most content and that visual content of food and items of everyday use are the most common. A consumptionand recycling aspect often is mentioned along with this visual content. This indicates that the ideological negotiation in terms of the hashtag #klimatsmart is focused mainly to small lifestyle changes such as behavior linked to environmentally friendly consumption.

Master of Science / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Doris Carroll / Social media is the use of online applications and websites to create and exchange user-generated content. These websites are becoming ever more popular with college aged students to connect with their peers, businesses, and areas of interest. These websites could be taken advantage of to provide new opportunities to engage students in campus life. This paper examines the concept of student engagement and the role of social media in engaging student with campus life. A brief overview of Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular social networks, is provided. This paper also reviews the limited body of research available on the impact of social media on student engagement. It is argued here that social media can be a positive influence on student engagement within the college campus and could lead to improvements in the way that higher education professional assist with student development. Due to the limited amount of academic research available, popular news sources as well as websites and blogs were examined to determine the most influential uses of social media, and this report makes recommendations for incorporating social media use into higher education. Social media allows higher education professionals to “meet students where they are” and provide for opportunities for engagement and student development. If the recommendations made in this report are implemented by student affairs professionals, they could be assessed for their impact on student engagement and development in the future.

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Joye C. Gordon / As technology advances in social media, crisis management professionals and researchers are charged with revamping or discovering new communication tools to address the dissemination crisis information. Social media provides a platform for open conversations, community, and connectedness among individuals and permits anyone to become the source of information during a time of crisis. Crisis news can be shared and reshared among millions of people without the need of a professional source, such as a journalist. A crisis may disrupt social order to an organization’s reputation and legitimacy, but a crisis also provides an opportunity for growth or renewal. Previous literature has analyzed crisis communication affects on organizational reputation through cases studies; however, there is lack of analysis in using an experimental design. Through an experiment with 207 undergraduate students, this study empirically evaluates the dissemination of crisis communication through Twitter and its effect on organizational communication. Using McLuhan’s (1967) concept of the medium is the message, this study highlights past findings, explicates types of crises, and focuses on the medium as a variable (not content of response) of interest to provide groundwork for an experimental inquiry into how the medium itself (as opposed to message content) impacts the efficacy of organizational crisis responses. A 2x3 experimental design with two research conditions- types of crisis: (1) intentional and (2) unintentional and source types: (1) organization (2) journalist, and (3) friend was used in this study. An online questionnaire was administered through an online survey service to approximately 2,000 undergraduates. Participants were randomized in one of six conditions based on the type of crisis (unintentional and intentional) and the source (organization/journalist/friend) of the message and directed to read an unintentional or intentional press release. Findings indicated that the perception of responsibility is a valid factor to consider during a possible crisis. Overall, as the previous studies have concluded, the organization is perceived as responsible for the crisis.