The spread of COVID-19 across the globe has produced global and possibly persistent economic disruption. This study follows the design science research process and conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis to identify and investigate Canadian agri-food company responses to COVID-19. The results show the possibility of capturing companies’ responses from web-based data, the breadth of responses, and the relationships between the communication of corporate responses and their reception among social media users. Divergences of regression results across different languages are also discussed in this paper. The findings will help academic researchers, business leaders and policymakers understand corporate responses and subsequent reactions better.

The issue of Euroscepticism has been racking the European Union for many years, and the United Kingdom’s exit from the block came as a shock for many. Carried by a campaign on social media, the Leave campaign’s success has highlighted a number of issues that risk not only the EU, but democratic society itself. Focusing on public opinion formation on the EU and political polarisation, this paper explores the question of how a political entrepreneur can polarise a society in a desired fashion. Based on a content analysis performed on 1,100 tweets posted by the Leave campaign, the study attempts to map out topical and polarising tendencies of the campaign, together with a propensity to employ misinformation. The results show a focus on certain topics pertaining to public opinion formation on the EU and a tendency to tweet on them in a polarising manner across the board. Finally, false claims were found throughout the dataset, propelling an argument that there is a relationship between misinformation and polarisation which risks further polarising a given polity.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / This research addresses the dynamics that developed on the official Twitter account of Peru’s former president, Martín Vizcarra, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the analysis, four trends crucial to political activity via Twitter are explored. These are the predominance of the emotional and affective component, the growing influence of fake news, deepening polarization that prevents dialogue, and the use of the platform as an information window. Results show that the pandemic effected a change in the account’s dynamics and audience participation: posting frequency on the @MartinVizcarraC account decreased, but Twitter users’ engagement more than doubled compared with the pre-pandemic period. In addition, the account strongly tended toward predominance of the emotional and affective component and informative value was the second most relevant topic for Vizcarra’s account. The communication of @MartinVizcarraC was unidirectional, focusing on the dissemination of content and avoiding conversation.

This two-part mixed-methods study analyzed the Twitter activity of two regional magazines – D Magazine and Texas Monthly – and how social media editors implement strategies to maintain journalistic integrity (news values, topics, and ethical standards) while increasing engagement.

Twitter are a new source of information for data mining techniques. Messages posted through Twitter provide a major information source to gauge public sentiment on topics ranging from politics to fashion trends. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Twitter tweets to discern the opinions of users regarding Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). We examine the effectiveness of several classifiers, Multinomial Naïve Bayes, Bernoulli Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression and Linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) in identifying a positive, negative or neutral category on a tweet corpus. Additionally, we use three datasets in this experiment to examine which dataset has the best score. Comparing the classifiers, we discovered that GMO_NDSU has the highest score in each classifier of my experiment among three datasets, and Linear SVC had the highest consistent accuracy by using bigrams as feature extraction and Term Frequency, Chi Square as feature selection.

Social media represent brand new environment, which can be very useful for marketing communication, product propagation and also for getting a feedback from customers. The aim of thesis is to analyze multiple ways of social media usage at companies using social media to propagate themselves on the Internet. Information resulted from this research will go through further analysis and create marketing comminucation plan of the company specialized for expedition flashlights.

The purpose of this research was to investigate educator participation in edchats. The research questions addressed were the following: 1. What does an edchat network look like in terms of followership and edchat interactions? 2. What are the different modes of participation in an edchat? 3. What is the ethos of an edchat? 4. How are edchats organized by educators and edchats organized by companies similar to and different from each other? To address these questions, tweet data from 10 edchats was collected and analyzed using a mixed methods approach. Across edchats, social network structures were consistent with the Tight Crowd network structure often found in Twitter learning communities, and members frequently interacted with each other, with several having ties extending beyond a single edchat. Twitter users participated in edchats as moderators and participants through several different modes by tweeting, retweeting, and sharing links and media. Although most participants only tweeted once, a smaller group of participants was especially active. Edchat questions received multiple responses, providing the community with diverse answers to review and if desired, discuss further. Across edchats, communities displayed an ethos of professionality, support, and fun without signs of the hostility known to plague Twitter. Although edchats shared a similar discussion structure and spirit of support and positivity, edchats organized by teachers tended to focus on classroom practice in greater detail than company-organized edchats. Distinguishing a teacher-organized edchat from a company-organized edchat was often complicated due to the presence of companies in teacher-organized spaces as well as an individual’s ability to profit from their social media influence through self-promotion or as a product ambassador. Edchats could provide an additional means of supporting educators by facilitating connection with a community of peers who can provide just-in-time support; however, their quality varies and much depends on the participant, highlighting the need for additional research to develop best practices for structuring and participating in edchats, especially to combat the risk of stealth advertising in these spaces.

I efterdyningarna av den första chocken från COVID-19 på europeiska flygbolag undersöker denna studie Twitteraktiviteten relaterad till fyra av dessa bolag och tillämpar sentimentanalys för att utforska interaktioner mellan kunder och bolag. Sambandet mellan kundsentimentet och bolagens svarstid, samt sambandet mellan kundsentiment och bolagens svarsfrekvens undersöktes men inga betydande korrelationer påträffades. Vidare undersökning av bolagens kundbemötande ledde till en mer detaljerad bild av vilka svarselement bolagen använde vid bemötandet. Dock var inte denna analys tillräckligt omfattande för att kunna dra några slutsatser kring effekterna av varje svarselement. Denna studie ställer frågan om sentimentanalys är en effektiv metod för att förstå hur olika bemötandestrategier via sociala medier påverkar kunders attityder gentemot ett företag.

Branding in the age of social media is thriving as companies continue to pour resources into digital campaigns in the hope of engaging their customers. The onset of the COVID- 19 pandemic boosted the importance of digital communication channels as physical distancing and lockdown measures disrupted business-as-usual and limited in-person interactions between firms and their customers. By implication, the global crisis pressed companies to deliver brand messages via online content to sustain or build customer relationships. This research focuses first on the branded content of corporate communications during the pandemic, focusing specifically on whether firms used the opportunity to showcase shared personal values. Second, we examine whether using value words in social media messages impacts customer engagement with these messages. To address these related questions, we collected Twitter data from Fortune 500 firms posted between January 2020 until the end of August 2020, attending to 56,770 firm- initiated tweets (we excluded firm responses to customer messages). The first study examines the personal values expressed in the messages using the Personal Values Dictionary, based on Shalom Schwartz’s original ten-value typology. We argue that the unprompted expression of values in a text is a behavioural indicator of personal value priorities. The findings compare firms’ shifting value priorities over time and association with key events, namely the global pandemic declaration (March 11, 2020) and ensuing lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder (May 25, 2020), and BLM protests. We find that, indeed, companies did shift their value priorities. The second study assesses consumer response to the values companies put forth in their tweets, focusing on social media indicators of consumer engagement (CE), including the number of likes, retweets, replies, and CE correlation with the values promoted in the tweets. We observe a pre- post-crisis shift in CE with value-laden messages. Our findings provide managerial insights that can guide marketers to manage their social media content more efficiently and better align their marketing and branding efforts with customers' values in times of crisis.

This Master’s thesis focuses on the discursive power struggle between politicians and journalists on Finnish digital news articles where the politician’s tweets are embedded or quoted in using multimodal discourse analysis. Embedded and quoted tweets are one of the premier links between Twitter and digital news platforms but have for the most part been left out of the field of discourse analysis. This research will try to fill that gap, focusing on a time period of one month before the 2019 parliamentary election in Finland. The research material consists of 18 articles from two of the biggest digital news platforms in Finland, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat. They are analyzed using Machin and Mayr’s seven-part scheme for critical discourse analysis, focusing on the embedded and quoted tweets in relation to the text’s discourse, and also the intertwined textual and the visual sides of the articles. The analysis shows that in most articles, the discourse portrayed in the tweets is not challenged by the journalist, meaning that the politicians most often come on top in the discursive power struggle. The analysis also displays that there are multiple ways of challenging the discourse, but they are seldom used in the power struggle. In conclusion, as the tweets’ discourses often go unchallenged, both the politicians and Twitter as a platform have arguably disproportionate power to influence both the discourse on digital news platforms, as well as the readers of those.