The use of social media has increased the need of interactivity and information sharing. Individuals are sharing thoughts about different issues. Today, environmental issues have become an everyday matter for many. This matter is manifested through opinion leaders and their blogs or accounts. These opinion leaders possess an incredible power to influence others, which they in many cases take advantage of to inform their readers about topics that matters. This thesis will study how individuals respond to opinion leaders’ publications of green product exposure on social media. The purpose is to deepen the understanding and analyze possible influences related to the individuals’ responses. Green consumption habits are being highlighted as important and green products are exposed through many opinion leaders’ profiles on social media, since they often have an influence on individuals purchasing decisions. To investigate consumer responses on social media a qualitative study has been implemented. This has been done through observations and the construction of a focus group with the aim to strengthen the observational results. The results have mainly showed that individuals often respond positively to opinion leaders’ posts of green products, but their positive responses are related to the opinion leader rather than highlighting the green attributes. These results have been discussed to arisen from the individuals strive to identify themselves with opinion leaders. Furthermore, additional theory has been used to analyze the comments and explain possible influences. The conclusion of this thesis includes proposals for future research related to this topic.

Användningen av sociala medier ökar allt mer i dagens samhälle och banker använder sig i dagsläget av sociala medier till kundservice samt i marknadsföringssyfte. Banker är den vanligaste finansieringskällan av externt kapital för små företag i Sverige och för att undvika kreditförluster gör banker en kreditbedömning av det kreditsökande företaget. I en anställningsprocess som kan likna personbedömning vid kreditgivning används sociala medier, detta väckte författarnas intresse att undersöka möjligheten att även använda sociala medier vid kreditgivning. Användning av sociala medier vid kreditgivning har tidigare inte studerats och syftet med denna studie är därför att skapa förståelse för hur och varför sociala medier beaktas i bankers kreditgivning till företag samt beskriva i vilka delar av kreditgivningsprocessen banker använder sig av sociala medier. Genom tolv kvalitativa intervjuer med kreditgivare och ansvariga för sociala medier har studiens problem- formulering besvarats. Hur och varför används sociala medier i bankers kreditgivning till företag? Resultatet av denna studie visar att kreditgivare använder sig av samt kan tänka sig att använda sociala medier vid kreditgivning till företag. I dagsläget är användningen begränsad men sociala medier används till viss del för att skapa ett första intryck och känsla för kredittagaren innan första mötet. Detta leder till både teoretiska och praktiska implikationer beträffande sociala mediers användning vid kreditgivning. Sociala medier inverkar i olika utsträckning i kreditgivningsprocessen med störst påverkan i det första steget, kreditansökan, men även vid kredituppföljning som varningssignaler och indirekt vid kreditbedömning och när kreditbeslutet tas. Sociala medier kan dessutom utgöra ytterligare ett nätverk för kreditgivaren och leda till att en bättre personbedömning görs, banken kan därmed undvika kreditförluster. Studien har även bidragit till att utveckla en modell som förenklar kreditgivarnas förståelse för hur de kan beakta sociala medier vid kreditgivning. / The use of social media is increasing in today's society, and in the current situation, banks use social media for customer service and for marketing purposes. For small businesses in Sweden, banks are the most common source of financing of external capital, and to avoid credit losses, banks makes a credit assessment of the credit applicant. In the recruitment process, that could resemble the personal assessment when granting loans, social media is used; this has brought the authors interest in exploring the possibility of also using social media in the lending process. Since the use of social media in lending previously never have been studied, the purpose of this study is to understand how and why social media are taken into account in banks lending to companies, and also to describe in what parts of the lending process banks use social media. Twelve qualitative interviews with lenders and managers of social media have been done to answer the problem statement. How and why do banks use social media in lending to businesses? The results of this study show that creditors use and are willing to use social media in credit granting for companies. In the current situation, the use of social media is limited but is to some extent used to create a first impression and feeling of the borrower before the first meeting. This leads to both theoretical and practical implications regarding the use of social media in lending. Social media affects the credit granting process in varying degrees with the greatest impact at the first stage, the credit application. It also affects the follow-up of the credit as warning signals, and indirectly the credit assessment and credit decision. Social media can also form an additional network for the creditor and lead to a better assessment of the applicant, through this; the bank can avoid credit losses. The study has also developed a model that facilitates lenders understanding of how to incorporate social media in credit granting.

Corporations are increasingly using social media as a tool for communicating Corporate Social Responsibility. Marketing researchers have conducted ample research on the topic, however, a communication perspective is missing. In order to fill this gap and gain a nuanced understanding of how corporations are communicating CSR and potentially enacting power relations, this thesis focuses on linguistic elements in CSR- related Facebook posts. A content analysis was performed on the Facebook pages of three oil corporations, covering a total of 120 posts. Results demonstrate that all three companies aim for engagement with the audience, using various semantic and sensory interactivity elements, and maintaining an informal writing style. Despite the latter seemingly contradicting the assumption that corporations are enacting power, there are elements that support this claim. The corporations implement a constraint of content in their posts through the use of abstract writing, and include a constraint on positions through the narrative styles of accounting and advertisement, which offer limited encouragement for participation. Regarding rhetoric, the ethos included in the posts carried significant interconnection with the CSR topics discussed, through which the companies seemed to enforce constraints of content. Shell and Total emphasize certain environmental issues, while not focusing on other impacts. BP does not not target environmental issues and mainly highlights positive social impact. Although the enactment of power is not present in each of the linguistic structures of the posts, there are elements that indicate the presence of power relations, which could offer groundwork for further research.

The focal point of this thesis is on whether and how digital practices can challenge and reintroduce values and concepts related to self-awareness and spatial sensitivity. It uses prosuming practices of food and social media as a research and learning tool. Prosumption is a compound word formed by joining the words production and consumption and, in brief, it means producing for one’s own consumption. This study is conducted in the area of digital media and architecture. The main architectural interest lies in the way that place (and notions related to the private and public spheres) is perceived by its users and how this experience can be affected by prosuming social media platforms every day. In particular, this study explores if and how digital media, especially the prosuming of social media content, alters preestablished issues related to spatial sensitivity. A thorough critical examination of the prevailing views on these topics, as well as their evolution in time, is described. The present status of the matters studied is approached by a literature review and an empirical study using mainly phenomenological methods of approach. Food prosuming is explored first and the conclusions reached, related to self awareness and spatial sensitivity, are then further tested and attempts are then made to apply these to social media content prosuming. The research methods used involved in-depth interviews with 35 participants over a period of two years. Individuals who covered a spectrum of different ages, social groups and professional categories were selected for interview. Data relating to the documentation of prosuming practices of the participants, questionnaires, and personal reflections through blogging and social media practices were recorded. Furthermore, one intervention of public prosuming activity was also investigated. As it was found in food prosumerism, there is a significant difference if practiced occasionally and when practiced in the frame of habitual everydayness. This differentiation can be related to and affect issues such as privacy and the personal and social spheres. It was also found that while casual prosuming in the digital domain of social media involves aspects and values of the public domain, everydayness transforms these digital prosuming practices into familiar practices as they are habituated in the private domain. Schematically, this can be represented as: Public → Casual → Private. Everyday digital prosumerism cultivates and incorporates issues of the private domain, whereas by definition it should incorporate issues of the social domain. This is what in this thesis is referred to as issues of the public-private domain. This remark, though, affects the essence of spatial sensitivity, the understanding of the private and the social sphere and the values and tendencies involved. Our findings suggest that, in most cases of food prosuming, when sharing, the host aims to instil a specific mood for the event, to be responsible for the setting, the ambience, the atmosphere of the sharing experience with the guests and the facilitation of sharing. In the digital domain, the mood and ambience of the sharing setting might follow the same pattern as is facilitated by the host, but at the same time the process of sharing sets the mood in an accelerated process; it is co-created, continued or totally altered by the public private sphere. Prosumerism as explored so far is correlated positively to issues of selfactualization and personal wellbeing (Xie, Troye and Bagozzi, 2008). Do digital prosuming practices share the same qualities? Personal atmospheres today, or what we call in this thesis aetherspheres, incorporate values and issues cultivated and fed by the fused atmosphere of the physical and the digital domain, forming a new ethos of prosumerism and crafting new norms.

Social computing initiatives that mark a shift from personal computing towards computations involving collective action, are driving a dramatic evolution in modern decision-making. Decisionmakers or stakeholders can now tap into the power of tremendous numbers and varieties of information sources (crowds), capable of providing information for decisions that could impact individual or collective well-being. More information sources does not necessarily translate to better information quality, however. Social influence in online environments, for example, may bias collective opinions. In addition, querying information sources may be costly, in terms of energy, bandwidth, delay overheads, etc., in real-world applications. In this research, we propose a general approach for truth discovery in resource constrained environments, where there is uncertainty regarding the trustworthiness of sources. First, we present a model of diversity, which allows a decision-maker to form groups, made up of sources likely to provide similar reports. We demonstrate that this mechanism is able to identify different forms of dependencies among information sources, and hence has the potential to mitigate the risk of double-counting evidence due to correlated biases among information sources. Secondly, we present a sampling decision-making model, which combines source diversification and reinforcement learning to drive sampling strategy. We demonstrate that this mechanism is effective in guiding sampling decisions given different task constraints or information needs. We evaluate our model by comparing it with algorithms representing classes of existing approaches reported in the literature.

Communicating archaeological findings to the public has become increasingly important in contract archeology in recent years and is now a legal requirement. Public contacts earlier meant that it was the experts, the archaeologists, who would communicate the knowledge to the public. Today, social media offers new opportunities to reach new groups and to communicate. Simultaneously the archaeologists, employed by different firms, find themselves in a new competitive situation. It may therefore be important to present the own activities in a way that strengthens the brand and to legitimize the business for the County Administration that shares the commissions, as well as for those providing the funding, the taxpayers. This paper is based on a case study on how archaeologists produce narratives on themselves, their profession and archaeology as a science on a Facebook page and on blog posts, connected to an archaeological project in the county of Östergötland in Sweden. The Facebook posts and snapshots from the blog have been reviewed and classified in an analysis of the narrative the archaeologists mediates. The study shows how building a brand is as prominent a reason for using social media as presenting the scientific findings. It is also evident that as an information source with great potential, social media could be utilized much more structured and focused.

Background: The tourism industry and especially those that market destinations, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), face challenges to meet generation Y, with an uncertainty of how to do it. DMOs need to be adaptable to an everyday changing market in order to attract visitors to their destinations. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how destination marketing organizations can market their destinations to reach domestic tourists within the population of generation Y. Method: A literature review was made in order to explore previous research regarding DMOs’ marketing strategies and tourists’ information search behavior. The literature review has been used in order to make hypotheses and a research model which lay the foundation for the design of a survey to test the hypotheses. An interview guide, based on the literature review, was made to address potential tourists and get deepen understanding of the field. Contrast and compare have been made between potential tourists’ opinions and the theoretical part, in order to draw conclusions on the subject. Results and conclusions: Results of this study have shown that for the chosen population, generation Y, are search engines and DMOs’ websites seen as the best way to reach tourists. DMOs have high possibilities to be seen on the web (their website and social media sites) if they actively use search engine optimization. Social media sites are also important, but in a different way, and DMOs need to work harder and cleverer on these sites to market their destinations.

In a dynamic world of constant changes, social and technological developments have made crisis communication and crisis management more valuable than ever to organisations. Previous research has suggested that organisations with a certain entrusting relationship to stakeholders might not share premises for crisis communication with corporate organisations. Furthermore, the field of crisis communication suffers from a lack of studies focusing on organisations´ communication on social media during crisis. Using text analysis, this study investigates the Swedish trade union Kommunal’s communication on Facebook during the crisis in January 2016. Results show that Kommunal did not utilize a crisis frame similar enough to the crisis frame used by stakeholders and media, and that Kommunal did not accept enough stakeholder and media attributions of crisis responsibility. The results produces questions for further research about the balancing act between being consistent and adjusting to the crisis situation when communicating during crisis, as well as about if organisations are affected not only by their own crisis history and prior relationship reputation, but by the crisis history and prior relationship reputation of similar organisations as well.

Due to the development of new technology, there has been a shift in many communication concepts. With consumers now gaining more control in the online environment, more influential consumers, or ‘opinion leaders’, can also gain from this increase in power. However, insufficient research has been conducted regarding the concept of social media opinion leadership, and in particular what the relational nature of these new opinion leaders is. Therefore, this study aims to explore this issue within the social media opinion leadership theory. A qualitative research design was applied to get a more in depth insight to the issue, in where interviews were conducted with followers of specific opinion leader on a social media platform. The empirical data was analyzed through the means of coding and interpretation which then lead into the theory of what possible relationships can be found amongst social media opinion leaders and their followers. Conclusively, three types of relationships emerged as most dominant: the trustworthiness relationship, the friendly relationship and the passive relationship. The theoretical contributions of this paper together with practical implications and suggestion for future research are discussed based on that conclusion.

The increasing involvement of individuals in social media over the past decade has enabled firms to pursue new avenues in communication and sponsoring activities. Besides general research on either social media or sponsoring, questions regarding the consequences of a joint activity (sponsoring activities in social media) remain unexplored. Hence, the present study analyses whether the perceived image of the brand and the celebrity endorser credibility of a top sports team influence the perceived brand value of the sponsoring firm in a social media setting. Moreover, these effects are compared between existing customers and non-customers of the sponsoring firm. Interestingly, perceived celebrity endorser credibility plays no role in forming brand value perceptions in the case of the existing customers. Implications for marketing theory and practice are derived. (authors' abstract)