Social Media Commons^™

The Influence Of Social Media On International Students: Case Study Analysis Of International Students From Arabian Gulf, Faisal A. Almutairi

Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Social media is increasingly becoming an important tool mainly for communication. However, organizations and institutions are embracing the platforms for marketing. Educational institutions have not been left behind in this regard, with most leveraging these platforms to increase their numbers while mainly targeting international students. This dissertation thus delves into the influence of social media on international students. The focus is on the effectiveness and efficiency of social media in influencing international students’ decision-making during selection of their preferred educational institutions.

Connecting The Dots: How Iot Is Going To Revolutionize The Digital Marketing Landscape For Millennials, Chloe E. Spilotro

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The growing phenomenon of the Internet of Things (IoT), which is that any item capable of being connected to the Internet will be, presents an unprecedented opportunity for businesses. Using an extensive literature review, the current research examines the significant shift in marketing strategies that need to take place to target the millennial generation of as they adopt IoT. Most research defines the Millennial generation as those born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. As individuals in this generation grow older, there are two behavioral implications: 1) their acceptance of technology suggests they will be quick to adopt …

"We Can't Do It Without You!" Crowdfunding As Cultural And Economic Negotiations Within Neoliberal Culture, David Zachary Gehring

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is a qualitative study that critically examines crowdfunding campaigns established to fund music projects. It argues that these campaigns are instantiations of neoliberalism, influenced by and reflective of cultural commitments operative within music communities and a shifting industrial context. For this study, neoliberalism represents a particular mode of free market capitalism characterized by discourses emphasizing individual agency free from regulatory constraints, and the rearticulation of cultural values rhetorically prioritized over market interests. Emerging within this cultural and industrial ecology informed and motivated by neoliberalism, and shaped through the dynamic flux of fan/artist relationships and industrial uncertainty, the crowdfunding …

Buying Love Through Social Media: How Different Types Of Incentives Impact Consumers’ Online Sharing Behavior, Yueming Zou

Marketing Theses & Dissertations

A key issue in social media marketing is insufficient consumer participation and engagement. Oftentimes companies have to devise tactics to encourage more social sharing of brand messages, such as through the use of incentives and rewards. Previous research has investigated incentive effects under the traditional offline context, which addresses mostly economic exchanges and fails to consider the social dynamics of the social media environment. Addressing this gap, this research aims to answer the following research question: how can companies target different consumers with different incentives to maximize consumer sharing through social media? Specifically, the present research proposes three factors that …

The Strength Of Weak Social Ties: Social Activism And Facebook, Nichole Akai Giraldi

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The use of Social Networking Sites, Facebook in particular, has become a major avenue of communication; Facebook has become a platform where people can discuss any topic of their choice to include social issues within society. While some argue Facebook is only a disseminator of information, others argue that in addition to being a disseminator of information it is also a motivator of social activism. Facebook profiles consist of one’s social ties, both strong and weak, which have the potential to expose users to different information daily. Using Mark Granovetter’s strength of weak social ties theory as a framework, the …

What Makes A Music Track Popular In Online Social Networks?, Jing Ren, Jialie Shen, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tens of thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through social networks that focus on music and videos, as well as portal websites. While some of the content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been completely ignored. So what makes a music track popular? Can we predict the popularity of a music track before it is released? In this research, we will focus on an online music social network, Last.fm, and investigate three key factors of a music track that may have impact on its popularity. They include: the …

Celebrities’ Expansive “Right Of Publicity” Infringes Upon Advertisers’ First Amendment Rights, Jon Siderits

The University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Washington State School District Superintendent Use Of Social Media For Public Relations And Communication, Jonathan R. Tienhaara

Education Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine usage and perception of superintendent participation in social media for the purposes of public relations and communication in the State of Washington. Tenets of Social-Customer Relationship Management (Social-CRM) were used as the theory to support how social media can be used to establish and enhance public relations with school district stakeholders. Washington’s (N = 295) school district superintendents were electronically surveyed to collect data on their use and perception of social media utilization for public relations and communication. The data were analyzed to determine how Washington superintendents use social media for …

The Effect Of Relational And Interactive Aspects Of Parasocial Experiences On Attitudes And Message Resistance, Riva Tukachinsky, Angeline Sangalang

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

This study examines direct and interaction effects of parasocial interactions (PSIs) and relationships (PSRs) on message resistance (reactance and counterarguing) and message-consistent attitudes. PSI involves the give-and-take within the media encounter, whereas PSR entails the relational bonding with the media figure that continues to exist outside the context of any particular media exposure. A 2 (high/low PSI) × 2 (high/low PSR) experiment revealed that PSI (but not PSR) can increase message resistance, particularly when PSR is low. No significant effects of PSR/PSI on attitudes were found. The study suggests that, contrary to past theorization, PSIs may facilitate, rather than reduce, …

Establishing A Brand: How To Create A Household Name For A Wine Brand Through Social Media And Image, Megan Rodrigues

Journalism

This paper was conducted as a Senior Project for the Journalism Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California during a 10 week quarter. This paper explores the topic of wine branding through social media and image. The research for this paper consisted of interviews with three experts that are currently working in the wine industry as well as a literature review of several articles and books that support the topic. The questions that arose about wine branding, brand recognition, social media, wine label and image during the literature review were then asked to the three experts: …

Helping Smes Understand Consumers And Competitors, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Learning To Find Topic Experts In Twitter Via Different Relations, Wei Wei, Gao Cong, Chunyan Miao, Feida Zhu, Guohui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Expert finding has become a hot topic along with the flourishing of social networks, such as micro-blogging services like Twitter. Finding experts in Twitter is an important problem because tweets from experts are valuable sources that carry rich information (e.g., trends) in various domains. However, previous methods cannot be directly applied to Twitter expert finding problem. Recently, several attempts use the relations among users and Twitter Lists for expert finding. Nevertheless, these approaches only partially utilize such relations. To this end, we develop a probabilistic method to jointly exploit three types of relations (i.e., follower relation, user-list relation and list-list …

Public Relations In The Restaurant Industry: Using Visual Social Media To Increase Consumer Relationships, Carly M. Cady

Journalism

As daily social media usage grows, marketing through these platforms become increasingly important for public relations professionals. Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms, provides a new way to instantaneously reach millions of potential customers through the use of visuals. However, with limited knowledge of this new public relations tool, standing out and creating a successful presence for your business is difficult. This study is to explore how visual social media, specifically Instagram, can be used to increase consumer knowledge in the restaurant industry.

Investigation of current literature regarding the topic and gathered opinions of industry professionals will …

Social Incentives In Pervasive Fitness Apps For Obese And Diabetic Patients, Yu Chen, Mirana Randriambelonoro, Antoine Geissbuhler, Pearl Pu

Faculty Publications, Information Systems & Technology

Social incentives such as cooperation and competition are found to motivate users in pervasive fitness applications. This work investigates how social incentives work for individuals with obesity and diabetes. We used a mobile fitness application called HealthyTogether as an experimental platform, which allows dyads to achieve fitness goals together and compete in an online community. We conducted a fourweek study with 16 obese and diabetic patients who used HealthyTogether to exercise with a buddy. Results show that participants exercised more with social incentives compared with their baseline. Collaborating with buddies to compete in a community was reported as motivating for …

When More Information Does Not Help: The Connection Between Facebook Monitoring Behavior, Relationship Uncertainty, And Relationship Quality, Tyler Morgan, Mackenzie Salitsky, Katjana Stutzer, J R. Thomas

Communication Studies Student Scholarship

This study examines the connection between relationship uncertainty, relationship satisfaction, and Facebook monitoring activity. We hypothesized that (1) people who monitor a romantic partner’s Facebook activity will also report feeling less satisfied in their current relationship, (2) increased monitoring of Facebook will correlate with greater uncertainty in romantic relationships, and that (3) greater uncertainty in a relationship will adversely affect relationship quality. Using an online survey taken by a volunteer sample of 77 participants across the United States, we found support for these hypotheses.

Layer-Switching Cost And Optimality In Information Spreading On Multiplex Networks, Byungjoon Min, Sang-Hwan Gwak, Nanoom Lee, K. I. Goh

Publications and Research

We study a model of information spreading on multiplex networks, in which agents interact through multiple interaction channels (layers), say online vs. offline communication layers, subject to layerswitching cost for transmissions across different interaction layers. The model is characterized by the layer-wise path-dependent transmissibility over a contact, that is dynamically determined dependently on both incoming and outgoing transmission layers. We formulate an analytical framework to deal with such path-dependent transmissibility and demonstrate the nontrivial interplay between the multiplexity and spreading dynamics, including optimality. It is shown that the epidemic threshold and prevalence respond to the layer-switching cost non-monotonically and that …

Ranking Of High-Value Social Audiences On Twitter, Siaw Ling Lo, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Even though social media offers plenty of business opportunities, for a company to identify the right audience from the massive amount of social media data is highly challenging given finite resources and marketing budgets. In this paper, we present a ranking mechanism that is capable of identifying the top-k social audience members on Twitter based on an index. Data from three different Twitter business account owners were used in our experiments to validate this ranking mechanism. The results show that the index developed using a combination of semi-supervised and supervised learning methods is indeed generic enough to retrieve relevant audience …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

"Facebook To Mobilize, Twitter To Coordinate Protests, And Youtube To Tell The World": New Media, Cyberactivism, And The Arab Spring, Mohamed Arafa, Crystal Armstrong

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Research on media and contentious politics in the Arab world point to the vital role that social media played in the Arab Spring. For the purposes of this article, the Arab Spring is defined as a series of demonstrations and democratic uprisings—and in the cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen armed rebel movements—that arose independently and spread across the Arab world from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2010-2011 and beyond. This article advances the theoretical assumption that while not causing the Arab uprisings, New Media (defined here as all forms of digital communication technology including …

Wikia: Between Documentary Simulacra And Documented Fictions, Caroline Courbières, Sabine Roux

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Wikis are digital community spaces that have attracted high traffic but virtually no study as socio-communicational platforms. These platforms offer individuals the possibility of engaging in unique writing activities by defining a distinct material configuration and imposing a protocol of enunciation. Wikis are platforms developed through the contributions of anyone, and constitute collaborative encyclopedias dedicated to a cultural topic. This article more specifically examines the Harry Potter Wiki, which is devoted to the literary universe of J.K. Rowling. Our semio-communicational analysis concerns the structure, the authors and the contents of the French and Anglo-Saxon versions of this wiki. First we …