I takt med den ökade betydelsen av symbolisk konsumtion har begreppet Social Media Influencers, SMI, grundats. SMI är ett samlingsbegrepp för de oberoende personer som genom sina sociala medier påverkar och inspirerar sina följare genom att vara en förebild inom mode, skönhet, livsstil, hälsa och inredning. SMI representerar dagens opinionsledare då de genom sina sociala medier sprider marknadsföring som människor uppfattar som uppriktig och genuin. Idag används SMI strategiskt av företag för att nå ut till kunder på ett individualiserat och anpassat sätt. Den här nya typen av marknadsföringsstrategi kan ses som en modern version av Word of Mouth (WOM). Marknadsföringsstrategin grundas i att informationen som kommer från en SMI ofta uppfattas mer som rekommendationer än reklam. SMI har en betydande roll på marknaden idag då det är viktigare än någonsin att visa upp vilken social grupp man tillhör. Speciellt för unga kvinnor, som finner det viktigt att passa in och följa nya trender. Instagram är utsedd till en av de mest skadliga sociala medierna för ungdomars mentala hälsa. Detta då det bidrar till en ohälsosam självbild och skapar höga krav på människors liv. Samtidigt som SMIs roll på marknaden växer, blir konsumenter allt mer reklamtrötta. Därför ifrågasätts SMI som fenomen och 329 kvinnor runt om i Sverige har besvarat en webbenkät kring sin inställning till SMI på Instagram. Det är tydligt att många kvinnor har svårt att bilda en konkret uppfattning kring sin inställning till fenomenet och många varierar sig i sina ställningstaganden. Undersökningen visar att kvinnor med högre utbildning och i äldre åldrar är kritiska till budskapen SMI sprider via Instagram, medan kvinnor med lägre utbildning och i den yngre generationen anser marknadsföringen från SMI som uppriktig och ärlig i en högre grad. Undersökningen visar också att trots att många kvinnor har en negativ inställning till SMI säger de sig ändå handla produkter som SMI rekommenderar. / In line with the increased importance of symbolic consumption the notion of Social Media Influencers, SMI, has been found. SMI is a concept used to describe independent people who both influence and inspire other people on their social media channels by being a role model in fashion, beauty, lifestyle, health and interior design. SMI represents today’s opinion leaders by using their social media channels to spread advertising and marketing to people who perceive the information as sincere and genuine. Today SMI are used in companies business strategies to reach out to customers in a individualized and faithful manner. This new kind of marketing strategy can be seen as a modern version of Word of Mouth (WOM). The purpose by using this kind of marketing is that the information that comes from an SMI are often perceived more as recommendations than advertising. SMI’s got a significant role on the market today and it’s more important than ever before to show what social group you belong to. Especially for young womens, who finds it important to fit in and follow the last trends. Instagram is one of the social media platforms which is the most detrimental for young people’s mental health. It contributes to an unhealthy self-image and creates high demands on people's life. At the same time as SMI is rapidly growing, consumers gets tired of being constantly chased by advertising. Therefore people are now questioning SMI as a phenomenon. 329 women in Sweden have participated in a web survey about their approach to SMI at Instagram. It’s shown that many women find it hard to form a concrete perception of their attitude towards the phenomenon and many women varies in their positions. The survey shows that older women and women with higher education are critical towards what SMI’s are posting on Instagram, while women with lower education and in younger generations consider SMI's marketing to be sincere and honest. The survey also shows that despite the fact that many women got a negative attitude towards SMI, they’re still keen on buying whatever that SMI recommends them to buy.

Social Media ist Kommunikation, ein weiterer Evolutionssprung in den zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen. Die damit verbundenen Tools, wie Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, XING, Blogs, Wiki, und Co, sind nur Werkzeuge, die, wenn man sie strategisch und professionell nutzt, erheblich den aktuellen und vor allem den zukünftigen unternehmerischen Erfolg ausmachen werden. Social Media verändert das Verhalten der Bürger und ist ein Element des sich gegenwärtig vollziehenden Kulturwandels. Das Gesundheitswesen insgesamt steht noch am Anfang der Nutzung von Social Media. Die vom Autor durchgeführten Befragungen, Analysen und Wertungen haben diese Einschätzung bestätigt. Erfolgreiche Beispiele der Anwendung von Social Media in Krankenhäusern und Arztpraxen dürfen nicht darüber hinweg täuschen, dass von der Mehrheit der medizinischen Einrichtungen, die Möglichkeiten der Nutzung von sozialen Netzwerken für die externe und interne Kommunikation und damit für die Erhöhung des unternehmerischen Erfolges nicht ausreichend erkannt werden. Aktives Zugehen auf die Zielgruppen, permanente Nutzung der Tools und des Feedbacks für die Erhöhung des Bekanntheitsgrades der Einrichtung, die Integration der Mitarbeiter und Dienstleister führen zu einer Verbesserung der Patientenzufriedenheit. Sie sind der Schlüssel nicht nur für mehr, sondern auch für qualitativ hochwertigeren Umsatz. Social Media führte zu einem Wertewandel in der Arbeitskultur auch der medizinischen Einrichtungen. Von Beginn an bei der Arbeit mit sozialen Netzwerken müssen alle Mitarbeiter in den Prozess integriert werden. Ihr Wissen über moderne Medien sollte gezielt und mit Übertragung von Verantwortung eingesetzt werden. Social Media muss zu einem integrierten Arbeitsmittel im Unternehmen werden, denn es lebt von der Einheit externer und interner Kommunikation und trägt entscheidend zur Mitarbeiterzufriedenheit bei. Die Aktivitäten zur Nutzung von Social Media werden erfolgreich, wenn für alle Arbeiten genügend Zeit und die erforderlichen Ressourcen für die ersten Schritte und für das notwendige permanente Controlling bereitgestellt werden. Der Erfolg von Social Media ist nicht zuletzt davon abhängig, welches Wissen in den medizinischen Einrichtungen vorhanden ist. Die oft zitierten Risiken beim Einsatz sozialer Netzwerke reduzieren sich im Wesentlichen auf ein nicht professionell geführtes Herangehen. Datenrechtliche- und Sicherheitsrisiken sind mit entsprechendem Wissen und einer klaren Positionierung was, wie, durch wen und wo publiziert wird beherrschbar. Der Erfolg ist nur dann erreichbar, wenn mit exakten Zielvorgaben, machbaren Schritten, klaren Verantwortungen und professionellem Controlling herangegangen wird. Die Arbeit gibt Anregungen für die Anwendung von Social Media in der Praxis, wie und mit welchen Methoden an den künftigen Einsatz der sozialen Netzwerke herangegangen werden kann, welche rechtlichen Fragen zu beachten sind und das ein effektives Monitoring unbedingt installiert werden muss. Social Media ist eine strategische Aufgabe und sollte in jedem Unternehmen so angesehen und eingeordnet werden. Ein brauchbares Mittel für die weitere Arbeit sieht der Autor in den erarbeiteten Leitfäden für Entscheider.

In the last few years the World Wide Web has dramatically changed the way people are communicating with each other. The growing availability of Social Media Systems like Internet fora, weblogs and social networks ensure that the Internet is today, what it was originally designed for: A technical platform in which all users are able to interact with each other. Nowadays, there are billions of user comments available discussing all aspects of life and the data source is still growing. This thesis investigates, whether it is possible to use this growing amount of freely provided user comments to extract quality related information. The concept is based on the observation that customers are not only posting marketing relevant information. They also publish product oriented content including positive and negative experiences. It is assumed that this information represents a valuable data source for quality analyses: The original voices of the customers promise to specify a more exact and more concrete definition of \"quality\" than the one that is available to manufacturers or market researchers today. However, the huge amount of unstructured user comments makes their evaluation very complex. It is impossible for an analysis protagonist to manually investigate the provided customer feedback. Therefore, Social Media specific algorithms have to be developed to collect, pre-process and finally analyze the data. This has been done by the Social Media monitoring system AIM (Automotive Internet Mining) that is the subject of this thesis. It investigates how manufacturers, products, product features and related opinions are discussed in order to estimate the overall product quality from the customers\\\' point of view. AIM is able to track different types of data sources using a flexible multi-agent based crawler architecture. In contrast to classical web crawlers, the multi-agent based crawler supports individual crawling policies to minimize the download of irrelevant web pages. In addition, an unsupervised wrapper induction algorithm is introduced to automatically generate content extraction parameters which are specific for the crawled Social Media systems. The extracted user comments are analyzed by different content analysis algorithms to gain a deeper insight into the discussed topics and opinions. Hereby, three different topic types are supported depending on the analysis needs. * The creation of highly reliable analysis results is realized by using a special context-aware taxonomy-based classification system. * Fast ad-hoc analyses are applied on top of classical fulltext search capabilities. * Finally, AIM supports the detection of blind-spots by using a new fuzzified hierarchical clustering algorithm. It generates topical clusters while supporting multiple topics within each user comment. All three topic types are treated in a unified way to enable an analysis protagonist to apply all methods simultaneously and in exchange. The systematically processed user comments are visualized within an easy and flexible interactive analysis frontend. Special abstraction techniques support the investigation of thousands of user comments with minimal time efforts. Hereby, specifically created indices show the relevancy and customer satisfaction of a given topic. / In den letzten Jahren hat sich das World Wide Web dramatisch verändert. War es vor einigen Jahren noch primär eine Informationsquelle, in der ein kleiner Anteil der Nutzer Inhalte veröffentlichen konnte, so hat sich daraus eine Kommunikationsplattform entwickelt, in der jeder Nutzer aktiv teilnehmen kann. Die dadurch enstehende Datenmenge behandelt jeden Aspekt des täglichen Lebens. So auch Qualitätsthemen. Die Analyse der Daten verspricht Qualitätssicherungsmaßnahmen deutlich zu verbessern. Es können dadurch Themen behandelt werden, die mit klassischen Sensoren schwer zu messen sind. Die systematische und reproduzierbare Analyse von benutzergenerierten Daten erfordert jedoch die Anpassung bestehender Tools sowie die Entwicklung neuer Social-Media spezifischer Algorithmen. Diese Arbeit schafft hierfür ein völlig neues Social Media Monitoring-System, mit dessen Hilfe ein Analyst tausende Benutzerbeiträge mit minimaler Zeitanforderung analysieren kann. Die Anwendung des Systems hat einige Vorteile aufgezeigt, die es ermöglichen, die kundengetriebene Definition von \"Qualität\" zu erkennen.

Today, marketers and media companies face a changed environment, affected mostly by the rise of the Internet era. The emergence of various technology applications, combined with the global change of customers is affecting the communication between marketers and consumers. Consumers and marketers are changing their roles; consumers are now media producers, programmers, and distributors, through the use of the social networking applications. The aim of the thesis is to analyze this trend, to predict its lifetime and to provide useful insights for the parties that are involved in it. Main point of evaluation are; the structure of the social media marketing ecosystem; the impact that social networking has on the business environment; the relationship of social media and the conventional media, and the legal and ethical concerns of the use of social media. Social networking is a new, experimental trend that has been accepted by many companies, as a part of their communication strategy. The trend has introduced many challenges for businesses, both positive and negative. To seize the positive challenges, marketers need to invest further in learning the rules of the new marketing trend, and in improving their social networking strategies.

Der Trend zur Auswertung aller nur möglichen Datenbestände für kommerzielle Zwecke ist eine nicht mehr aufzuhaltende Entwicklung. Auch für die Kreditwürdigkeitsprüfung wird überlegt, Daten aus Sozialen Netzwerken einzusetzen. Die Forschungsfrage entsteht, wie die Nutzer dieser Netzwerke reagieren, wenn Banken ihre privaten Profile durchsuchen. Mit Hilfe einer Befragung von 271 Probanden wurde dieses Problem erforscht. Die Ergebnisse sind wie folgt: Die betroffenen Bürger sehen die Entwicklung mit Sorge. Sie begreifen ganz rational die neuen Geschäftsmodelle und ihre Logik und erkennen die Vorteile. Sie stehen dem Big-Data-Ansatz nicht vollkommen ablehnend gegenüber. Abgelehnt wird es aber, wenn sich Daten aus sozialen Medien negativ für eine Person auswirken. Wenn man schon sein Facebook-Profil einer Bank öffnet, dann will man einen Vorteil davon haben, keinen Nachteil. Ein Teil der Gesellschaft lehnt das Schnüffeln in privaten Daten strikt ab. Insgesamt sind die Antworten deutlich linksschief verteilt mit einem sehr dicken Ende im ablehnenden Bereich. Das Schnüffeln in privaten Daten wird als unethisch und unfair empfunden. Die Menschen fühlen sich im Gegenzug berechtigt, ihre Facebook-Daten zu manipulieren. Eine wie-Du-mir-so-ich-Dir-Mentalität ist festzustellen. Wer kommerziell ausgeschnüffelt wird, der antwortet kommerziell mit Manipulationen seiner Daten. Insgesamt ist Banken zu raten, nicht Vorreiter der Entwicklung zu sein, sondern abzuwarten, welche Erfahrungen Fintechs machen. Banken haben zu hohe Opportunitätskosten in Form des Verlustes von Kundenvertrauen. / The trend to analyze all conceivable data sets for commercial purposes is unstoppable. Banks and fintechs try to use social media data to assess the creditworthiness of potential customers. The research question is how social media users react when they realize that their bank evaluates personal social media profiles. An inquiry among 271 test persons has been performed to analyze this problem. The results are as follows: The persons are able to rationally reflect the reasons for the development and the logic behind big data analyses. They realize the advantages, but also see risks. Opening social media profiles to banks should not lead to individual disadvantages. Instead, people expect an advantage from opening their profiles voluntarily. This is a moral attitude. An important minority of 20 to 30 % argues strictly against the commercial use of social media data. When people realize that they cannot prevent the commercial use of private data, they start to manipulate them. Manipulation becomes more extensive when test persons learn about critical details of big data analyses. Those who realize that their private data are used commercially think it would be fair to answer in the same style. So the whole society moves into a commercial direction. To sum up, banks should be reluctant and careful in analyzing private client big data. Instead, banks should give the lead to fintechs as they have fewer opportunity costs, because they do not depend on good customer relations for related products.

The purpose of the study is to create an understanding of whether, and in such cases how, employers in IT-firms examine jobseekers' social media as a part of the company's recruitment process. The study has been limited to recruiters in the IT-industry as it was considered extra interesting to examine the recruitment process related to social media due to the technical skills that are required within the IT industry. The choice of industry was also based on the fact that it is estimated that 70.000 new employees will be needed until the year of 2022, to meet Sweden's demand of employees within the IT-industry. Ten respondents with various positions in different IT-firms, that are responsible for the recruitment process, have participated in the study through semi-structured interviews. The conclusions drawn from the respondents' answers in relation to the theoretical framework are that all respondents actually examine job seekers' social media. This is done regardless of whether the company has considered that this is something that should be avoided or not. It was shown that the recruiters examined the job seekers' social media by their own initiative rather than on the basis of established guidelines. It did not appear that any specific guidelines nor policies existed or was used by any company regarding the review, and neither that there exists any form of internal dialogue regarding any specific approach. The majority of the respondents performed the review of social media in the final stages of the recruitment process. It has, however, been shown that the review is not used as a decisive decision in the recruitment process, rather as a complement for the overall picture. Even so, it turned out that there is content on social media that could have been decisive, but this only applies to individual cases where the content was considered extreme. Examples of such content were strong political statements that for instance regarded racism or other statements concerning inequality.

I det ständigt förändrande digitala landskapet har det för företag växt fram nya möjligheter för marknadskommunikation och sociala media marknadsföring (SMM) har blivit en stor del av företags marknadsstrategier. En växande trend är att använda sociala media influencers (SMI) för exempelvis reklamsamarbeten eller varumärkesexponering. Forskning inom området tyder på att marknadskomunikation med hjälp av SMI:s är effektivt men varför en del SMI:s är mer effektiva än andra framgår inte tydligt. Därför valdes detta område som fokus för studien, med syftet att undersöka vilka variabler inlägg med högt interaktions- och affektionsvärde innhåller. Detta med intention att etablera ett ramverk som företag kan använda vid val av SMI.Studien är en explorativ undersökning av deduktiv ansats, innehållande två kvantitativa innehållsanalyser vilka undersöker totalt 77 intagraminlägg från 17 svenska skönhetsinfluencers. Resultatet påvisade att det finns en tydlig korrelation mellan specifika variabler och högt interaktion- och affektionsvärde. Resultatet visar att inlägg som förekommer inom kategorin hög interaktion och hög affektion antingen innehåller en bild på SMI:n eller denne tillsammans med anhöriga samt använder emojis i inläggstexten. En slutsats kunde dras gällande värdet av att SMI:n även interagerar med sina följare samt har ett inläggsmönster och värderingar som som stämmer med de företag som ett samarbete avses ingås med. Även vikten av parasocial interaktion vilken skapas genom tillit och intimitet till SMI:n belyses i studiens slutsats. / In the ever-changing digital landscape, new opportunities for marketing communication have emerged for companies. Social media marketing (SMM) has become a large part of companies marketing strategies and a growing trend is to use social media influencers (SMI) by, for example, advertising collaborations or exposure of a brand. Research indicates that this trend is effective for marketing communication. However, there are no studies on why some SMI:s are more effective when it comes to marketing communication on Instagram than others. Therefore, the researchers chose to design a study where selected variables ¬¬were examined in instagramposts to determine which variables constitute high interaction and affection value. For the purpose of establishing a framework for what companies should keep track of when choosing to collaborate with an SMI.The study is an exploratory study with an deductive approach that contains two quantitative content analyzes and examined a total of 77 Instagram posts from 17 Swedish beauty influencers.The results showed that there is a clear correlation between specific variables and high interaction- and affectionvalue. Furthermore, the results show that posts that occur in the category of high interaction and high affection contains either a picture of the SMI or the SMI together with relatives. The use of emojis also occur in this category. The conclusion refers to the importance of a SMI:s interaction with its followers. It also proves important to having a post pattern that matches with the value of the brand which a collaboration is initiated with. In addition to this, the study's conclusion highlighted the importance of creating a strong parasocial interaction (PSI) by incorporating trust and intimacy of the followers.

Användningen av sociala medier i organisationer har ökat och bland annat kan det unika verktyget användas för att supporta kunskapsdelning mellan individer inom och bortanför organisationens gränser. En förståelse av individens upplevelse av sociala medier är kritiskt för såväl informatikforskningen samt för organisationer som kan dra lärdom av det vid införande av sociala medier i verksamheten. Därför är studiens syfte att beskriva och söka förståelse för vad individer i en organisation uppfattar att sociala medier kan bidra med till deras kunskapsdelning och utöka kunskapsområdet för hur teknik uppfattas ur ett affordance-perspektiv. Syftet besvaras genom en fallstudie och sju kvalitativa forskningsintervjuer. Det transkriberade materialet har hanterats individuellt och tolkats utifrån tidigare forskning samt analyserats utifrån den teoretiska modell som studien tar fram. Resultatet visar att kontexten har mångfaldig inverkan på hur individen uppfattar sociala medier och hur artefakten kan användas. Kunskapsdelning på sociala medier kan öka möjligheten till att identifiera expertis, skapa en kunskapskarta och bredda sitt sociala nätverk men leda till för mycket information och en kritisk syn på innehållet. Studien stödjer den forskning som visar på att explicit kunskap kan spridas på sociala medier och framför allt genom att den kombineras med annan explicit kunskap. / The use of social media in organizations has increased and among other things the unique tool can be used to support knowledge sharing between individuals within and beyond organization boundaries. An understanding of the individual's experience of social media is critical for both informatics research and organizations that can learn from it when introducing social media in businesses. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to describe and seek understanding of what individuals in an organization perceive that social media can contribute to their knowledge sharing and expand the research area for how technology is perceived from an affordance perspective. The purpose is achieved by a case study and seven qualitative research interviews. The transcribed material has been processed individually and interpreted in accordance with previous research and analyzed on the basis of the theoretical model that this study elaborated. The results show that context has multiple impacts on how an individual perceives social media and its area of use. Knowledge sharing on social media can increase the opportunity to identify expertise, create a knowledge map and broaden one's social network, but can also produce too much information and a judgemental view of the content. The study supports previous research that shows that explicit knowledge can be shared on social media foremost by combining it with other’s explicit knowledge.

Purpose: The study aims to explore the effects of social media influencers' credibilitydimensions (attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise) on consumer behavior (purchase intention and attitude towards the brand) while considering the followers' loyalty as the mediating variable in the fashion industry.Theoretical approach: The proposed conceptual model of the study is based on assumptions of source credibility theory and theoretical reasonings provided in the previous literature related to social media influencer marketing.Design/methodology: Quantitative research design is used and data is collected through selfreported questionnaires. The population of the study consists of social media users who follow social media influencers on different social media platforms. Findings – Based on data collection from 225 Pakistani respondents, the analysis of the study indicates a positive impact of the three social media influencer credibility dimensions on the purchase intention, and followers’ attitude towards the endorsed brands. Moreover, influencers’ credibility positively impacts followers’ loyalty to the influencers. In addition to the direct effects, followers’ loyalty towards the influencers partially mediated (1) the relationship between influencers’ credibility and purchase intention, as well as (2) the relationship betweeninfluencers’ credibility and followers’ attitude towards the brand. Practical implications – The findings of the thesis provide implications for businesses and marketers to understand the role of credible social media influencers in shaping consumer behavior and it also answers the question of how they influence it.Originality/value – This study adds to the influencer marketing literature by investigating the mediating role of followers’ loyalty in between the relationship of influencer’s credibility and purchase intention of followers as well as their attitude towards the brand.

This research intended to investigate how the arising SNS component of algorithms acts as a mediator for affecting SNS user habits amongst high school and university students in Sweden. The testing of this specific correlation was realized by first investigating previous research regarding algorithms, various components of user habits, and the complementary component of algorithm awareness separately. By extracting interesting and valuable findings from the previous studies, a questionnaire was constructed, implementing the previous knowledge into the response alternatives to provide components useful for building testing variables. The questionnaire collected 419 respondents, whereas 341 were considered valid after implementing a sampling phase based on the specified demographics. Testing variables were conceptualized to be able to provide the ability of testing in SPSS to show statistical significance by using chi-square testing. This was conducted to test 4 hypotheses, grounded on what was to be answered by the 2 research questions. The testing of the variables was not able to provide any statistical significance and had in general low testing validity. Thus, none of the hypotheses could be accepted, which furtherly did not provide scientifically valid answers to any of the research questions. Several potential factors could be considered to have impaired the testing, including the complexity of the variable construction, and an imbalance between the volume of respondents fitting within the constructed variables to mention a few majorly discussed arguments. However, the data collection provided valuable insights, answer data frequencies, and knowledge that have the potential to facilitate future studies, both regarding the perspective of informatics and also a range of areas of which perspective was not used for this research. Hence, it also enables and suggests future studies to evaluate the collected data, reconstruct variables, or investigating interesting responses of questions left redundant.