Emerging from traditional marketing platforms in the early millennium is a brand new marketing form called social media. Having a presence in social media is a growing part of marketing communication and it gives companies a voice and a means to converse with their existing and prospective customers. Social media is starting to become a great tool for businesses to develop and maintain strong relationships with customers and is therefore a vital platform for organizations to communicate with their customers. Having a presence in social media will require businesses to be aware of the opportunities and risks that come with using the medium. Not knowing how to use the new channels and the accompanying technique while launching different social media channels can be highly unsuccessful for the business. Learning how to communicate with customers when using social media channels is therefore crucial for a business‟ success in that area. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of having a presence in social media for business-to-business companies, by focusing on the opportunities and risks. Three research questions are developed, based on the literature review. A deductive approach has been applied followed by a qualitative research with a semi-structured form, focusing on the advertising industry. Furthermore, a case study strategy has been carried out with four different advertising agencies located in Sweden. This study reveals that industry professionals believe that social media is a vital platform for brands to be present in because it allows them to keep contact with current and potential customers. They believe in the magnitude of being able to communicate and interact with people online and how that interaction can lead to new strong relationships. Furthermore, the research shows that advertising agencies have a deep understanding of what a social media can bring them in terms of creating prosperity for their businesses and generate awareness towards their brands and their work. Finally, the study terminates that having a presence in social media can provide the agencies with more positive than negative effects by gaining a great deal of success and resulting in greater campaign and brand awareness.

The distance learning environment is one that involves a complex array of factors that influence a learner’s perspective of presence, satisfaction, and learning. This study was designed to investigate Lee College freshmen and sophomore students’ perceptions of social presence. The purpose of the study was to (a) determine whether or not differences in perceptions of social presence exist among participants who differ in gender, age, and total level of education and (b) investigate whether or not there was a relationship between the participants’ perceptions of social presence and their online course activities in WEBCT®. This study was conducted using a questionnaire. The data were collected from a convenience sample of 252 freshmen and sophomore level students at Lee College in Baytown, Texas. A response rate of 62% resulted in a final sample of 156. The content validity of the questionnaire was established via expert opinion, and the internal consistency and reliability of the instrument was calculated using Cronbach’s α. Data screening techniques were employed as the first step in the data analysis process. Frequency counts, central tendencies, and standard deviations were used in the descriptive analysis of the data obtained via the questionnaire. Correlations and one-way ANOVAS were employed to answer research question 1 regarding the participants’ perceptions of social presence and their personal characteristics (i.e., gender, age, and their total number of college credits earned). Six conclusions were generated regarding the participants’ perceptions of social presence and their gender, age, and total number of college credits earned. Principal factor analysis with Varimax rotation revealed six constructs for research question 2 regarding the online course activities in WEBCT®. Differences in the participants’ perceptions of social presence in the six constructs for the online course activities in WEBCT® were obtained. A stepwise regression analysis was conducted to obtain additional information regarding the amount of explained variance added by each of the respective predictors. Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess reliability of the data. Twelve conclusions were generated for research question 2 regarding the participants’ perceptions of social presence and the online course activities. Specific human resource development practices were suggested.

This dissertation examines the effect of podcast tours on park visitor experiences. Podcast tours have emerged as a new medium in facilitating the interaction between tourists and destinations. Providing visitors with enhanced experiences through the use of interpretive technologies is especially important for national parks dealing with enhancing visitors' experiences which may influence visitors' perception of environmental stewardship and, in turn, positively affect preserving environmental resources. Furthermore, there has been a noticeable increase in consumer demand for podcast tours. Based on theoretical accounts that human voices convey rich social information, this dissertation proposes that podcast tours enhance perceived social presence and mindfulness which leads to enhanced tourist experiences (learning, enjoyment, and escape) and environmental stewardship (attitudinal and behavioral stewardship). A field experiment was conducted at Padre Island National Seashore using MP3 players containing podcast tours. The podcasts were manipulated using four experimental conditions: 2 information source compositions (single narrator voice vs. multiple narrator voices) x 2 narrating styles (formal style vs. conversational style). The questionnaire administered to subjects after they took the podcast tour included measures of social presence, mindfulness, tourist experience (learning, enjoyment, and escape), and stewardship (attitudinal and behavioral stewardship). The pre-questionnaire included question items regarding the nature of the visit, visitor characteristics, technology usage behavior, audio tour evaluation and socio-demographics. Responses from 221 visitors were analyzed using structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.7. The results provide evidence that multiple voices, and to some extent also narration style, positively increase social presence but neither experimental condition had any influence on mindfulness. The increased feeling of social presence influences park visitors' enjoyment and escape experiences but not learning. Mindfulness was found to affect visitors' learning, enjoyment, and escape experience. The results further show that enhanced experiences positively influence attitudinal stewardship which in turn leads to behavioral stewardship toward national parks. The results of this dissertation generally support the theoretical model suggesting that even if communicated through audio-only media, the human voice creates and sustains a positive social context for meaningful interaction which influences tourist experiences and stewardship. Mindfulness was also found to be an important construct impacting the quality of visitor experiences but could not be explained by the specific podcast tour designs tested. From a practical perspective, the findings provide important insights regarding the usefulness of podcast tours as interpretative media, and also suggest that specific designs are more capable of fostering feelings of social presence.

This study, adopting a case study approach with a group of beginning-level FFL (French as a foreign language) learners, investigated the possibility that initial level foreign language learners may acquire oral skills through synchronous CMC, and the impacts of synchronous CMC learning on their motivation, as well as their social presence. The participants were 12 FFL beginners in a Taiwanese university. Divided into three groups, they were required to conduct three tasks in three different learning environments (video/audio, audio and f2f) during an academic semester (18 weeks). The semester constituted cycles of three-week practices on those tasks. The contents of the tasks were inter-connected. Before each oral task, all the participants had to conduct the same task in synchronous text chat. The data for this study was collected from the participants’ performance in three oral tests held at the initial, middle and final phases of the study, their online chat records, interview transcriptions, learning journal, questionnaires completed at the beginning and the end of the study, and the instructor’s observation journal. The results suggest that these three CMC learning modes bring only partial benefits in terms of learners’ oral proficiency development. It is factors generated by the three learning environments, rather than the environments themselves, that have the largest impact on the learners’ oral proficiency development, learning motivation and attitudes towards the target language. However, the differences in the environments are reflected in particular in the learners’ perception of social presence.

This research investigated the perception of social presence that students in a virtual high school have of using computer-mediated communication (CMC): email, discussion board, tutoring sessions, and asynchronous classroom activities. The research analyzed data for social presence based on gender, years of experience in a cyber school, and self-proficiency ratings on each form of CMC. The purpose of this study was to identify if high school students in a virtual community perceive email, discussion board, tutoring sessions and asynchronous classroom activities as enhancing their social presence within the virtual community. The findings of the study are: <br>1. Students perceived that email showed more social presence than the other forms of CMC and asynchronous classroom activities showed more social presence than discussion board and tutoring sessions. <br>2. There was no significant difference found between male and females social presence in any of the CMC studied. <br>3. Students who rate their own self proficiency as being above average or expert had higher social presence scores on email and asynchronous classroom activities than students who rate their proficiency average, below average or novice. <br>4. Students perceived that email showed more social interaction than discussion board, tutoring session and asynchronous classroom activities. Asynchronous classroom activities showed more social interaction than discussion board or tutoring sessions. <br>5. The number of years a student attends a cyber school has no relationship with the student's perceived social presence in any form of CMC studied. <br> Understanding students' perception of social presence based on the use of CMC will enable cyber schools to use the appropriate form of CMC to help students develop their social skills. / School of Education / Instructional Technology (EdDIT) / EdD / Dissertation

This dissertation investigated the effects of technological mediation on second language (L2) learning, focusing, as a case study, on gains in listening perception of the subtle but important feature of pitch placement in Japanese. Pitch accent can be difficult to perceive for non-native speakers whose first language (L1) does not rely on pitch or tone as a distinctive feature, such as English (Wayland & Li, 2008). Pedagogically, Face-To-Face (FTF) interactions with native or near-native speakers are typically the most effective way to learn L2 sound system features due to social presence, but these interactions are not always possible because of physical distance. Mediation can facilitate these interactions, but it is unclear which type results in more learning gains. The current study compared three mediation types that vary in the information provided to the learner: audio-only (asynchronous), video (audiovisual asynchronous), and videoconferencing (audiovisual synchronous), as well as a fourth condition of videoconferencing which facilitated mutual eye contact. The lack of mutual eye contact in standard videoconferencing (due to the webcam being above the image of an interlocutor's face) can inhibit the perceived social presence (Bondareva, Meesters, & Bouwhuis, 2006). A pretest/posttest/delayed posttest design was used, which measured error rates and reaction times for a same/different discrimination task and a picture recognition task. The participants were English L1 speakers, with no prior study of Japanese. After the pretest, they received training in the form of two short lessons in beginner Japanese vocabulary and sentence building administered by a native speaking tutor, which did not explicitly address pitch placement, but used minimal pairs for this feature as vocabulary items. The lessons were followed by a posttest, and a delayed posttest one week later. The results showed that all four conditions succeeded in improving Japanese pitch placement detection, both immediately after and up to a week after the lessons. While an ANOVA revealed no main effect of mediation type, planned comparison results suggest videoconferencing without eye contact may lead to more gains in pitch placement perception than video. A surprising suggestion by the data was that videoconferencing with eye contact may lead to worse performance than the other mediation types. An exit survey detected the self-determination of the participants, and higher self-determination correlated with worse testing performance within the videoconferencing with eye contact condition. This suggests that the addition of eye contact increased the social presence of that condition to the point that it triggered Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety (FLSA) in the participants. Overall, this study highlights that lessons and tasks administered through mediation can be used to provide native speaker input for features that are important for listening and speaking, and this can effectively help learners attend to and learn these features.

Everyday face-to-face social interaction is increasingly being supplemented by computer- and video-mediated communication. With mediation, however, comes the potential loss of important non-verbal cues. It is therefore important to attempt to maintain the quality of the mediated interaction, such that it retains as many of the aspects of a real-world interaction as possible. Social presence is a measure of how similar a mediated interaction is to face-to-face, the most socially present situation, in terms of perceptions of and behaviour towards an interlocutor. Social presence can be mediated by many factors, one of which is mutual gaze, and social perceptions of an interlocutor are also thought to be related to task performance. For a successful interaction, therefore, an optimum amount of mutual gaze for maximising social presence and task performance is desirable. This research aims to investigate the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and social presence, in order to discover the ideal conditions under which a successful mediated interaction can occur. Previous gaze research paradigms have involved one conversational partner staring continuously at the other, and the resulting mutual gaze being measured. It is hypothesised that this method may actually suppress mutual gaze, primarily due to social reasons. It is potentially, therefore, not the optimum experimental design for mutual gaze research. The first study in this thesis used eye-tracking to explore this hypothesis and investigate the relationship between mutual gaze and task performance. A suitable paradigm was developed, based on that used in previous research into eye movements and non-verbal communication. Two participants – Instruction Giver (IG) and Instruction Follower (IF) – communicated via avatars in Second Life to solve simple arithmetic tasks. There were two between-participant looking conditions: staring (the IG’s avatar stared continuously at the IF); and notstaring, (IG’s avatar looked at IF and task-relevant objects). Constant staring did, indeed, show evidence of decreasing mutual gaze within the dyad. Mutual gaze was positively correlated with task performance scores, but only in the not-staring condition. When not engaged in mutual gaze, the IF looked more at task-related objects in the not-staring condition than in the staring condition; this suggests that social factors are likely to be driving the gaze aversion in the staring condition. Furthermore, there are no task-related benefits to staring. The second study explored further how much looking by one person at another will maximise both mutual gaze and task performance between the dyad. It also investigated the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and both manipulated and perceived social presence. Individual participants interacted with a virtual agent within the Second Life paradigm previously used in the human-human study. Participants were either told they were interacting with a computer (i.e. an agent) or another human (an avatar). This provided the between-participants manipulated social presence variable, or agency. The virtual agent was programmed to look at the participant during either 0%, 25%, 50% or 75% of the interaction, providing the within-participants variable looking condition. The majority of effects were found in the 75% looking condition, including the highest mutual gaze uptake and the highest social presence ratings (measured via a questionnaire). Although the questionnaire did not detect any differences in social presence between the agent and avatar condition, participants were significantly faster to complete the tasks in the avatar condition than in the agent condition. This suggests that behavioural measures may be more effective at detecting differences in social presence than questionnaires alone. The results are discussed in relation to different theories of social interaction. Implications and limitations of the findings are considered and suggestions for future work are made.

The mobility, flexibility, convenience, and ubiquity of mobile data services (MDS) have contributed to their enormous growth and popularity with users. MDS allow users to communicate through mobile texting (mTexting), mobile Instant Messaging (mIM), multimedia messaging services (MMS), and email. A unique feature of MDS that enhances its popularity among its users is the awareness capability, which is revolutionizing the way MDS is being used to communicate today. It allows potential communication partners to socialize through these technologies. This dissertation explored the relationship between user experience, perceived richness, perceived social presence and satisfaction with MDS. A research model for examining the antecedent conditions that influence social presence, richness, social interaction and satisfaction with MDS was developed. Partial least square analysis showed that user experience influenced both social presence and richness. Also supported was the relationship between richness, social presence and satisfaction with MDS. Social presence mediated the relationship between user experience and richness. However, only one dimension of interactivity influenced social presence.

This study examined online collegiate instructors’ perceptions of web-conferencing as an online instructional tool and as a tool for creating social presence and teaching presence and their perceptions of barriers discouraging them from using web-conferencing in online instruction. Adopting a quantitative survey research design, this study collected and analyzed survey data from 62 instructors who facilitated online instruction at a major university in northeastern Mississippi. The researcher developed the Assessment of Collegiate Instructors’ Perceptions of the Use of Web-Conferencing for Online Instruction questionnaire and administered the questionnaire via Survey Monkey to collect data of the participants’ demographic information and their perceptions about web-conferencing. Four research questions guided this study. Descriptive statistical analysis using frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations, independent samples t-tests, and a Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze the data to answer the research questions. The results of this study revealed that collegiate instructors who use web-conferencing in their online instruction have a better perception of web-conferencing as an instructional tool and as a tool for creating social and teaching presence than instructors who do not use web-conferencing. This study also shows that online collegiate instructors using web-conferencing have lower perceptions regarding barriers of using web-conferencing than those not using web-conferencing. In addition, the results from the study indicated that gender affects online collegiate instructions’ perceptions of web-conferencing as an instructional tool and as a tool for creating social and teaching presence, with female instructors having better perceptions than male instructors. The findings from this study contribute to the literature of online instruction and web-conferencing research by providing empirical evidence supporting Rogers’ (1995; 2003) innovation diffusion model and pointing out the directions for future efforts to promote online collegiate instructors’ adoption of web-conferencing. Based on the findings, this study made recommendations for future research and for facilitating adoption of web-conferencing by online collegiate instructors.

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