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 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.

Social media presents new possibilities of creating knowledge that would not have been possible using other computer-mediated forms. Social media enables enrichment of organisations’ knowledge resources with the extracted insights; however, what is not certain is the factors that are at play when taking a decision to consider social media data as the source of insight that will translate into valuable knowledge that organisations may benefit from. The purpose of this study is to investigate how organisations integrate social media into their knowledge base. The dynamic capabilities and organisational resilience in turbulent environments framework was used as a lens to look into how organisations integrate social media into their knowledge base. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was performed to identify, evaluate and interpret all the relevant material or primary studies that are available to answer the research question. Furthermore, an empirical investigation was conducted through the use of interviews and questionnaires. The contribution of the current study to the body of knowledge is twofold. Firstly, synthesis of the existing literature on the uses of social media and knowledge management as well as the evaluation of the model resulted in a revised dynamic capabilities model (DCF) where three capabilities were added, namely validating capability due to questionable SM data quality, crisis management capability for safeguarding the organisations’ reputation, and innovating capability to stay ahead of the fiercely competitive dynamic environment. Secondly, this study produced a significant number of factors that both the literature and the research participants considered key to the implementation of the proposed model. These factors can be categorised into people, processes and technology aspects. The study is significant in the sense that 1) the research findings should be of interest to organisations that are open to innovation and therefore can be used as yardsticks for decision-making; 2) the emergence of the crisis management capability is a major contribution to the body of knowledge as it highlights the importance of proactivity and alertness to responding to conversations of the organisations’ audiences and avoiding the social media backlash suffered by organisations. As the study focused on only one case study, it serves a basis for further research in different sectors of the business with the aim of validating the generality of the proposed model. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Informatics / MCom / Unrestricted

A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2019 / Many local governments around the world have adopted Twitter as a tool to enable two-way communication with its citizens. Academics in the fields of Developmental Communication, Public Administration and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have theorised that social media platforms have the ability to enhance the delivery of services by local governments (Guillamón, et al: 2016; Kavanaugh et al: 2012; Perlman: 2012). Based on this theory, the aim of this study is to determine how the Johannesburg Road Agency, a local government entity of the City of Johannesburg in South Africa, used its Twitter account as a tool to communicate with its citizens about service delivery relevant to the entity’s scope of services. For the purpose of this study the researcher used a traditional case study research approach to illustrate how the JRA uses its Twitter account to engage in two-way participatory communication with its citizens about the services it must provide. The data for the case study was collected through content analysis of policy documents, and interviews. The study’s participants, namely the staff from the JRA’s Customer Relations Management (CRM) department, were requested to provide information through these interviews and policy documents. The study found that the JRA uses strategies, policies, protocols and plans to manage its Twitter account with staff that is trained in customer relations management. The researcher argues clientelism is practised at the JRA as the entity’s policy documents and staff members identify its citizens as mere customers paying for a service and not citizens of a democracy with definitive rights. The study further explored whether the citizens of Johannesburg, that use this method of communication with the JRA, find it useful. The majority of participating citizens have expressed that they perceive this method of communication with the JRA to be useful, however, the researcher argues that this method cannot be seen as an appropriate method due to the internet access constraints that the citizens in the City of Johannesburg experience, which prevents the majority of citizens from having access to Twitter as a communication tool. The interviewed staff argued that communicating with citizens on Twitter, a public platform, makes them feel more accountable and makes the process more transparent, while admitting that in some instances they have to lie to citizens when there are problems experienced. Therefore, the researcher concludes that the JRA has not fully utilised the opportunities that Twitter has to offer to realise participatory communication between the public service providers and citizens. / NG (2020)

With the online presence of more than half the world population, social networks and social media plays a very important role in the lives of individuals as well as businesses alike. While there are advantages to using these online platforms, there as also downsides that one should be wary about. We focus on analyzing the information or the content that spreads on online platforms. Text summarization is a crucial task that helps in condensing an enormous amount of social media content. While there are multiple approaches to text summarization, the development of an automatic metric to evaluate the generated summaries remains an open problem in text summarization. We propose a novel evaluation metric, Sentence Pair EmbEDdings (SPEED) Score, for text summarization which is based on semantic similarity between sentence pairs. Our proposed evaluation metric shows an impressive performance in evaluating both abstractive and extractive summarization models and is faster than the current state-of-the-art metrics. In this research, we also put forward a multi-source transfer learning approach using models pre-trained on large-scale datasets to detect inappropriate social media content in universal language (English) and code-mixed environments. Here, sentiment analysis is the process of identifying the emotion associated with these social media texts. The presence of sarcasm in texts is the main hindrance in the performance of sentiment analysis. Inherent ambiguity in sarcastic expressions, make sarcasm detection very difficult. In this work, we focus on detecting sarcasm in textual conversations from various social networking platforms and online media. To this end, we develop an interpretable deep learning model that uses attention to identify crucial sarcastic cue words from the input.

With the growing use of Online social media (OSM), users are observing a substantial amount of information in their social feeds. Moreover, people often use multiple OSM platforms because of each platform's unique features. Because of the huge volume of information present in social feeds, it restricts a user's ability to process the relevant information since the most important information may be overwhelmed by unimportant information. For information to diffuse in OSM, the receiver's attention is the most important condition. Cognition plays an important role in determining a user's attention/responsiveness. If OSM users receive the information above their cognition limits and become less responsive, they are in an information-overloaded state. I believe there are several factors that can lead OSM users to be in an information overload state. The main purpose of this study is to explore some of the factors that can affect the ability of OSM users to respond to information while they are overloaded. In this study, I explore two major factors: (1) Influence Gradient i.e., the differences in the magnitude of influence exerted and influence experienced by each OSM user who is active in either single or multi-platform OSM, and (2) Emotion Contagion i.e., the effects on users' response capacity due to the emotional stimuli in the content of social media messages delivered from the influencers to their receivers. Experiments are designed using Information Overload Model (IOM), which quantifies an individual's current information processing capacity (IPC), and the Multi-Action Cascade Model (MACM) which simulates the information diffusion on social media. IOM is implemented into the agents of the MACM model to simulate information diffusion phenomena. They are incorporated with memory, and their IPC can be quantified along with the flow of information into the network such as the amount of information they stored to respond, new messages they received from their influencers, and the information overload they experience. Transfer entropy is used to quantify peer influence between the users in single or multi-platform OSM. I use empirical data from GitHub, Twitter, and YouTube. For GitHub, I use repositories related to the cryptocurrency community. Twitter and YouTube data is extracted from profiles engaged in narratives related to China-Pakistan economic corridor under one belt one road initiative. For the emotion contagion experiment, I use Twitter data on Venezuela's election dispute in early 2019. From this research work, I find evidence that negative influence gradients lower the IPC of OSM users active in both single and multi-platform. This shows that users who are influenced more than they can exert their influence on others are the ones to be overloaded. While the users exerting more influence on others can function at full capacity. I found that there exists emotional contagion from the influencers to receivers and un-overloaded users are affected by such contagion. Overloaded users are not supposed to be affected by emotional contagion. Interestingly, I found that overloaded users are still affected by negative emotions and chose to respond to them and ignore messages with positive emotions.

Typically, online social influence is analyzed using a single metric approach. However, social influence is not monolithic; different users exercise different influences in different ways, and influence is correlated with the user and content-specific attributes. One such attribute could be whether the action is an initiation of a new post, a contribution to a post, or a sharing of an existing post. Thus, this dissertation uses this platform-independent action classification and models the influence as multiple entities and examines social networks through the perspective of behavioral influence propagation. Two empirical studies are present in this dissertation. The first study presents a novel method for tracking these influence relationships over time, which we call influence cascades, and presents a visualization technique to understand these cascades better. These influence patterns are investigated within and across online social media platforms using empirical data and comparing to a scale-free network as a null model. Our results show that characteristics of influence cascades and patterns of influence are, in fact, affected by the platform and the community of the users. The second study applies the same framework to re-construct interconnected social networks and explores the significance of cross-platform influence on social media users in the influence process. In particular, we explore the social dynamics of users with a higher number of social influence relationships across platforms, which we call interface users, and those with fewer social influence relationships across platforms, which we call core users. Our results find that interface users are more vulnerable to being influenced and influential than core users. Further, our results show that the interface users who are influenced to do initiation action exert significantly more influence on others than those who are influenced to contribute.

Social networking sites have become popular communication tools to make connections and maintain interpersonal relationships, especially for long-disance romantic relationship. Given the popularity of this new communicative platform, this study aims at updating their pattern in terms of their benefits in maintenance romantic relationships among college students. 133 students were recruited to assess their maintenance behaviors through their uses of computer-mediated communication and some traditional communicative channels as well as their uncertainty level. This results reveal that long-distance romantic relationship partners use computer-mediated communication tools such as texting, direct messaging, Snapchat, and others more frequently than partners in geographically close relationships. In addition, this study finds that relationship maintenance performed on social media sites and face-to-face associate with relationship uncertainty. This study offers a new way to look at social networking sites as the maintenance behaviors for long-distance romantic relationship partners by comparing these new channels with the face-to-face maintenance communication. Such comparisons draw a bigger picture of how the long-distance romantic relationship maintenance operates in this digital age.

This study describes an ethnographic investigation of Communities of Play within Communities of Practice. As professional 'content creators', whose 'work' is 'play', are increasingly interacting with non-professional content consumers, whose 'play' is a kind of 'work', the barriers between 'work' and 'play' are increasingly dissolving. The purpose of this study was to examine the nature and frequency of the professionals' interactions with coworkers in an office and with the content consumers while working from home. Data were collected in the form of gameplay videos uploaded by the professional streamers from January of 2017 to March of 2018, downloaded by the researcher from Youtube.com and Twitch.tv. Interactions were coded according to Streamer environment (Work vs. Home) and type of interaction (Talk Aloud Protocol, Knowledge Exchange, or Noise). Six raters categorized interactions across 88 videos in ten-minute segments. Results indicated an effect of platform dependency between the Community of Practice on YouTube and the Community of Play on Twitch.tv. These differences, in both directionality and effect size, suggest that different 'content creator' behaviors are reinforced, depending on the platform used, and that a strategy that is successful on one platform may not be successful on another. Based off the researcher's experiences, recommendations are made for how future researchers can conduct effective ethnographic investigations for online Communities of Practice and Communities of Play.