The ability of professionals in student activities to inform students of scheduled events is a key factor in the success of their programs. While traditional forms of communication with students, such as newspaper announcements and campus flyers, have not been totally reliable, they remain among the standard forms of getting the word to students about campus activities and events. Other forms of communication with students now are available, such as web pages and electronic infolines, but student activities professionals still do not know with any degree of certainty which forms are preferred by students and which are most effective. The study was guided by the question, " What are students' preferred and actual record of use of selecting sources of information about campus activities at Virginia Tech?" and was intended to collect and analyze data about actual student use of various forms of formal communication to inform them about campus events. Descriptive statistics and chi-square analyses were used to portray actual use patterns of students and to test whether these patterns differ by class standing and gender. It is anticipated that findings from this study will be useful to all student groups who plan events for wide-spread participation by students, to advisors of student groups including the Virginia Tech Union, and to student affairs professionals who are responsible for enhancing student involvement on campus. / Master of Arts

The aim of this study is to analyze the use of different media channels occurred within a natural disaster situation. This research focuses specifically on charting the factors that affect audiences in their choice of media channels and how these factors ultimately lead to the complimentarily use of sources. This study is based on channel complementarity theory and utilizes a qualitative method consisting of semi-structured interviews and has been complemented with a survey that respondents were required to complete prior to the interview. The twelve college students that made up the sample for this study were selected through convenient and purposive means and have personally been involved in natural disaster situations without exception. Final results and analysis suggest that individuals utilize several media channels combined, at different points in time or simultaneously, and in random order during a natural disaster. The analysis of the results also shows that individuals use this variety of media channels in order to obtain two different perspectives: broad and narrow. Traditional media channels such as radio and television are shown to be used in order to obtain the broader perspective during a natural disaster event. In contrast, social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are used to gain the narrower perspective. The findings of this study also suggest that factors affecting media choices are accentuated by a crisis such as a natural disaster and are intrinsically connected to specific needs audiences have at one particular point in time. The most relevant factors contributing to the choice of media type and leading to channel complementarity found in this study are accessibility, compatibility of sources, tailorability, and humor appeal. Controversially, credibility appears to be disregarded as a key factor, even though it is still perceived as an influential characteristic.

Denna undersökning syftar till att undersöka sanningshalten i medias artiklar om barns TV-tittande. För att göra det, jämfördes flera tidningsartiklar med vetenskapliga artiklar som handlar om barns tv-tittande. Endast de tidningsartiklar som hänvisar till vetenskapliga artiklar användes för denna undersökning. Resultaten visar att media ibland vinklar fakta, men överdriver riskerna med yngre barns tv-tittande i jämförelse med vad som skrivs i de vetenskapliga artiklarna. I flera fall har även de positiva effekterna tonats ned, såväl i tidningsartikeln som i den vetenskapliga artikeln. Tolv av de fjorton tidningsartiklarna i denna undersökning återberättar inte vad den vetenskapliga forskningen säger på ett sanningsenligt sätt.   För att undersöka om det finns något samband mellan medias bild av barnens TV-tittande och förskollärarnas medieanvändande delades en enkät ut till flera förskollärare. Enkätundersökningen visar att hälften av deltagarna inte svarade på om de var påverkade av medias bild eller inte. De som besvarade den frågan uppgav att de antingen inte påverkades alls eller mycket lite av medias bild, eller så svarade de, men inte på den aktuella frågan. Dessa resultat är dock osäkra på grund av det låga antalet svar på enkäten. / This study aims to investigate the truthfulness in media reports concerning children´s television viewing. Several press articles were compared with scientific articles which is about children´s television viewing. The press articles referring to scientific articles for this study were choosen. Our results show that media attend some times to angle facts but exaggerate the risks with young children´s television viewing in compared to what the scientific articles report. In several cases, the positive effects have been downsized both in the press articles and in the scientific articles. Twelve of the fourteen press articles in this study failed to retell what the scientific research says in at truthful way.   To explore if there is a relationship between media´s report in children´s television viewing and preschool teachers media usage a questionnaire were handed out to preschool teachers. The questionnaire survey shows that half of the participants did not answer whether they were influenced by the media`s image or not. Those who did answer reported that they either were not affected at all or very little of media´s image or they did answer, but not to the question at issue. These results, however, are uncertain, due to the low number of responses on the questionnaire.

Social media is considered an important marketing tool for B2B companies that are operating in the current decade (Andersson and Wikström, 2017; Brink, 2017; Itani, Agnihotri and Dingus, 2017). As social media has become a well-researched topic over the last decade, it has become more popular for businesses and individuals to use (Andersson and Wikstrom, 2017; Lacka and Chong, 2016; Michaelidou, Siamagka and Christodoulides, 2011). However there are limited research on how specific industries are adopting social media (Siamagka et al., (2015). Therefore, this thesis will contribute with research on why the industrial industrys adopt social media as well as how they are using it (Ibid).   Ten industrial businesses working in Sweden have been used for the empirical data collection. A qualitative approach have been used for this study in order to satisfy the purpose. All of the interviewees have experience within social media adoption or are working with social media on a daily basis. The interviews were conducted through phone and lasted approximately 20-50 minutes.   The conclusion of this study is that academic research within this field are somewhat in an agreement with the empirical data provided within this study. The main reasons to why industrial B2B businesses are adopting social media is because businesses can reach their target customers in an easy and fast way, also the pressure from stakeholders and customers have been an important factor to why some of the practitioners within this study have adopted social media. The barriers and benefits of using social media goes hand in hand. As one of the main benefits is the communication with customers and the main barrier is the negative comments that businesses can get. Although this study has indicated that the benefits outweigh the barriers when adopting and using social media. Findings from this study has shown that LinkedIn is the most useful social networking sites for businesses to use and this statement is also confirmed with the academic research done within this field.

In the past decade, there has been a transformation in how businesses are done, many business chose to adopt digitization and others were forced to go with the flow. As a part of this digital revolution, social media has reserved a big share of this transformation in how companies do their marketing and communicate their product and brand image to their customers. Social media in a business to customer context has been very common since the birth of social media, companies had realized its benefit, and however, it is still in an early phase in a business to business context. Social media has become an effective marketing tool for B2B companies, yet, there are still drawbacks when companies fail to know how to use such platforms to their benefit and merely have a shy presence or do not have a well-defined strategy to the use of social media in the most effective way. A vital step when incorporating social media in marketing is to create a clear goals and metrics. However, it has been seen that many companies lack the expertise, resources and the know-how, to implement a social media marketing strategy. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the practices of B2B companies when they use social media without a clearly defined social media marketing strategy, what they do when they use social media.

With the emergence of new media platforms one wonders about the impact new media is having on sports fans’ media consumption patterns. Are traditional media platforms still having the same impact on the sports fan relationship, or has there been a shift across to new platforms? Looking through the lens of the Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) framework, we analyse the impact of team identification and sports fans’ media consumption patterns.Trying to gain an understanding across various sports and to reach as many fans as possible, the snowballing technique was deployed. Using quantitative data allowed us to establish emerging patterns through categorical data. This study used cross-sectional data, which allowed us to take a snapshot in time of what the current trend in fans’ sports media consumption was. 235 sports fans media consumption patterns were analysed using the PCM staging algorithm and a sports media consumption instrument.The results throughout this study reflect that new media is having an impact on team identity and sports fan media consumption. The findings suggests that fans that display higher levels of team identification on the PCM framework, i.e. attachment and allegiance to teams, are more likely to engage regularly on social media, especially Twitter. As such, marketers, sports teams and associations need to look at how they engage with social media broadly and Twitter in particular. Various constructs impact sports fans’ media consumption patterns and, as such, marketers, sports teams and organisations need to ensure that they maintain relevance with their targeted demographic to ensure the continued engagement with sports fans. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This study has evaluated how Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre (TFNC), a government institution overseeing nutrition, uses social media to enhance the nutrition literacy of caregivers and parents of children under the age of five years. The study contributes to knowledge on how Tanzania’s resource-constrained health sector’s nutrition communication can benefit from social media by answering the following research questions: Which social media platforms and features does TFNC use to share nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years? What kinds of nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years does TFNC share on social media? How is nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years posted on TFNC social media pages packaged? And, how frequently is nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years repeated on TFNC social media pages? These questions have been answered from a social-behavioral change communication perspective that has combined the Media Ecology Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior. This quantitative study has gathered data on TFNC’s social media activities (posts containing nutrition knowledge pertaining to children under the age of five years) between May 2020 to April 2023. The posts were manually extracted from the center’s pages into Microsoft Excel for coding before exportation to SPSS version 20 for analysis. The study has found that TFNC actively uses Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to share nutrition knowledge on its pages and video format is the most used. The shared educative nutrition knowledge during the observed period, the use of social media features in sharing the knowledge, and the frequency of repeating nutrition messages are limited. Overall, the center’s nutrition social media-based knowledge-sharing needs improving to optimally contribute to nutrition literacy pertaining to children under the age of five years.

The focus of this thesis is on how elderly people make use of digital screens. The study studies how these elderly individuals view their screen time and it highlights how they have adapted to an ever-changing media landscape. The empirical material has been collected through four qualitative interviews where all of the interviewed were 80 years old or older at the time of the interview. Two females and two males were part of the study. The empiricism has been coded, themed and analyzed using the qualitative method of thematic analysis. The analysis is supported by the theoretical framework where uses and gratification theory, affordances and constraints theory and the theory of adoption categories has been applied to the empirical material. The theoretical framework has contributed to understanding why people use different types of media, which affordances and constraints that people see in technologies and what types of adoption categories there are and what that means for the individual. The analysis of the empirical data finds that these older individuals utilize digital screens for various reasons, where the most prominent finds were for relaxation, cognitive fulfillment and to the gratification of affective needs. Smartphones and computers are employed for safety, social interaction and communication while television is used as a tool for escaping daily life and monitoring the world. The study identifies a widespread theme indicating a noticeable enhancement in their everyday life making various tasks easier thanks to digital screens. A social factor becomes evident where the interviewees use digital screens as a utility for keeping contact with friends and family, but also through a reoccurring theme implying that older individuals need a social network that can assist them with unfamiliar technologies that they can not manage themselves.

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This thesis examines how trade unions are meeting the two-fold challenge of a fall in youth unionisation and a changed media usage amongst youth. The researcher attempts to answer this question by examining how three different trade unions (Sveriges Ingenjörer, SI, Kommunal and Hotell och Restaurang facket, HRF) are communicating with a younger generation for the purpose of recruiting them. The thesis is based on a theoretical framework derived from communications theories and practices specifically aimed at youth, as well as theories about union recruitment strategies, civic engagement and the logic of collective action (since unions represent collective interests). The researcher has applied a qualitative approach where the thesis rests on in-depth interviews with different respondents. The findings of the thesis reveal that all the unions have started to face up to the challenge of falling youth unionisation (by applying the advice put forward in literature on youth and health communications, and union recruitment literature). However, the findings note that the unions have applied the advice to varying extent, with Sveriges Ingenjörer being furthest ahead. In addition, the findings illustrate that the unions seem to be responding to the challenge of a changing media usage amongst youth. Yet, the researcher believes that the unions might do well in exploring a more participatory style of communication, since youth today have started to expect a higher degree of participation in their communication online. The findings also highlight that both Kommunal and HRF seem to be facing tougher challenges than Sveriges Ingenjörer in communicating with youth for the purposes of recruiting them because of differences between the sectors the unions organise.Finally, the findings reveal that the unions communicate with youth in accordance with Olson’s theory of logic of collective action (Congleton, 2015), which highlights that individuals will only join a union if there is an individual gain to offset the union fee.