Earticle

What prevails in the today’s research on social media is a functional view of technology. Technology is regarded as a set of technical devices used to conduct specific social functions, such as personal communication, social networking, public posting, and corporate advertising, among others. This paper proposes that such a functional view of technology renders social media research unduly limited and constrained in its scope, level, and direction of inquiry. Problematizing on some representative social media research efforts in the field of IS, this paper provides an alternative perspective, that is, to view social media as a technology-for- being that exerts a deeper level of influence on our existence, molding and shaping the nature and mode of being itself. Such a technology- for-being perspective has been rarely explored or subscribed to in the present IS social media research. Building upon the new conception of social media as a technology-for-being, this essay explores the quality of being in the context of social media. Five such qualities are discussed, including virtuality, materiality, externality, liquidity, and hybridity. The essay also explores the deep structural problems of research to guide future social media research. Six of such problems include Problematize-the-Natural, Follow- the-Actor, Welcomethe- Frankenstein, Weber-meets-Frankenstein, Freud-meets-Frankenstein, and Marx- meets-Frankenstein. The essay concludes with discussions on the implications of the essay, its limitations, and suggestions for future work.

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is unprecedentedly changing the world since its outbreak in late 2019. Using the collected the data related to COVID-19 and the social media user data from a mobile application market research agency from January 25 to April 7, this study empirically examines the effect of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, the number news COVID-19, and the enforcement of social distancing measures on the daily active users (DAU) of two social media services – Twitter and Facebook – in South Korea. There are three important findings from the results of econometric analysis. First, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has a negative effect on the DAU of social media. Second, the number of COVID-19 news is negatively associated with the DAU of social media. Finally, the implementation of social distancing measures has no significant effect on the DAU of the social media. Theoretical implications and managerial guidelines are also discussed.

Advertising is a procedure and a non-personal communication where a message is a curriculum to publicize a product, service or an idea by an identified sponsor. Its technology that has played a major role in turning the face of traditional advertising to the new media. Social media is computer medicated technology that assists in creation as well as the sharing of information through virtual networks. Furthermore, social media has had a tremendous impact on our life’s, not only by revolutionizing the way of communication and socialization but also by making it more utilitarian, expanded, nimble and technical. Social media websites became a massive part of our society, as in our daily routine from waking up to being asleep we are connected to social media networks. Social media became voice of the advertisers that personalized the brand and aided them in extending the messages wherever they want. Eventually, it became one of the most accessible, inexpensive, and adequate modes of gaining exposure and strengthen the business.

This study attempts to synthesize the literature on radicalization and identify the role of social media in promoting radicalization. The study is based on literature review of prominent studies on radicalization in both offline and online settings. The study builds upon the literature in offline settings on radicalisation to present a research agenda for radicalization in online settings. The study also presents a model of radicalization depicting the role of social media.

Public sectors around the world utilize social media tools and technologies in their daily activities for a variety of purposes, including disseminating useful information, fostering mass collaboration, and enforcing laws and regulations. A number of social media-based government stage models have emerged to document this use. In this chapter, we conducted a qualitative meta-synthesis of four social media-based government models. These models include 1) the open government maturity model, 2) the social media utilization model, 3) the adoption process for social media, and 4) the social media-based engagement model. The concepts, metaphors, and themes contained in these developmental models are extracted through a series of in- depth semantic analyses of descriptions, resulting in a common frame of reference.

Metadiscourse refers to those aspects of texts which can lead to the construction of writer and reader interaction. Taken this into account, this study set to investigate how men and women used metadiscourse features in social media in the English language context. Being corpus-based in nature, this study privileged a corpus of 145,213 words gathered from such social media as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter divided by gender of male and female who wrote in English as the language of communication. For analyzing metadiscourse features, Hyland’s classification (2005) was applied that divides metadiscourse features into two main categories of interactive and interactional. The results indicated that in overall both male and female corpora contained more interactional metadiscourse features than interactive. In addition, female corpus contained more metadiscourse features than male corpus. Added to this, it was found that self-mentions were the most frequent instances of metadiscourse features in both male and female corpora. Moreover, it was revealed that although male corpus had instances of code glosses, the female corpus lacked it. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between males and females in using metadiscourse features. The findings of this research can have useful implications in such areas as gender studies, comparative studies, corpus-based studies, and contrastive linguistics.

Recently, Social media has become a concern for businesses, including Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs began to adopt social media to support their performance. To benefit from the application of social media, SMEs must implement the right strategy. This study aims to analyze the factors that influence the use of social media in SMEs. Furthermore, alignment between social media functionalities and strategies and their effect on SME‘s performance are investigated. A case study is conducted in Gymi, a garment SMEs in East Java, Indonesia. The data collection includes interviews with the owner of SMEs, observations, and document analysis. Data analysis is performed by pattern matching, which matches the patterns from the literature with data from the case study. The results of this study show that cost-effectiveness, interactivity, and compatibility are factors that influence the use of social media in Gymi. The social media used by Gymi are Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and LINE. However, the main social media used to support Gymi’s functions is Instagram. Gymi has a relatively good social media strategy as it has defined a specific goal, target audience, and channel selection for social media (Instagram). It also has specific resources and policies to handle social media. Gymi monitors and evaluates their social media content activities. These strategies are aligned with the Instagram feature used to support Gymi‘s function, particularly marketing, sales, customer service, and to some extent, internal operation. The alignment contributes to Gymi’s performance measured by the increase in reputation (number of Instagram followers) and sales.

Social media marketing has gained attention from marketers because of the growing number of social media users. Considering the unique context of each company or organization behind the marketing is necessary when choosing and applying various social media marketing strategies to ensure achievement of better business performance. However, previous studies have focused on context-specific marketing strategies. Accordingly, this study aims to develop context-specific social media marketing strategies. In this study, we first develop a conceptual framework with two items, namely, brand awareness and business orientation of an organization, as criteria, and classify the framework into four contexts. We then propose context- specific social media marketing strategies for each of the contexts. We examine the framework and proposed social media marketing strategies based on multiple case studies. The primary contribution of this study is our context- specific social media marketing strategies.

The dynamic capabilities of social media are changing the nature of contemporary news by allowing users to communicate and create content, deliver and share newsworthy information, and consume news. News organizations engage with social media because this computer-mediated tool provides an alternative platform for delivering news and connecting with global audiences. This role of social media is conceptualized as its complementarity. However, when mass user-generated-content is constantly shared with other users, more users are attracted to indulge in news-seeking activities on social media. This phenomenon potentially fulfills users’ news requirements on social media, which is contrary to what news companies envisioned when they began engaging with social media. This dichotomous role of social media, providing complementarity and showing the potential for becoming a superior news medium, is conceptualized as its competing- complementarity. This paper offers preliminary evidence of competing-complementarity by analyzing the news consumption of individuals. Such consumption is explained through the theoretical perspective of punctuated equilibrium by conceptualizing news consumption as a deep structure radically impacted by a disruptive technology. Although social media benefit news organizations, its competing potential poses serious challenges to their monopolistic controls on news production, distribution, readership, and revenue generation.

Online Word-of-Mouth communication, or eWOM, has dramatically changed the way people network, interact, and share knowledge. Studies have examined why consumers choose to share knowledge online, especially online product reviews, as well as the motivations of individuals to share product ideas online. However, the role of gender in shaping the motivation and types of knowledge shared online has been given little consideration. Using concepts from Social Exchange Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action, we address this research gap by developing and testing a model of gender’s influence on knowledge sharing in a social media context. A PLS analysis of survey data from 257 students indicates that reputation, altruism, and subjective norms are key motivators for knowledge sharing intention in social media. More importantly, that gender plays a moderating role within the motivation-knowledge sharing relationship. We also find that subjective norms have a greater impact on knowledge sharing with women than with men. Collectively, our research results highlight individualized factors for improving customer participation in external facing social media for marketing and product innovation.

본 논문의 목적은 일반적으로 교육, 특히 교육 및 학습 과정에서 소셜 미디어 플랫폼의 기여에 대해 논의하는 것 이다. 기존 문헌에 대한 검토를 바탕으로 소셜 미디어가 학습과 심지어 교육을 향상시키는 데 가치 있는 자원으로 활용될 수 있는지 탐구하려는 시도가 이루어졌다. 학생과 교사의 정보 활용 능력이 향상되면 소셜 미디어와 제도적 이러닝 플랫폼을 통합하면 학습자에게 더 나은 학습 결과를 제공하고 교사에게 효과적인 교육 방법을 제공할 수 있 다. 구체적인 전략으로는 학교와 일반적인 교육 환경에서 소셜 미디어를 활용하는 방법에 대해 제안하였다.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the contributions of social media platforms in education in general and in teaching and learning process in particular. Based on review of the existing literature an attempt is made to explore how social media could be valuable resources for enhancing learning and even teaching. When students’ and teachers’ information literacy is enhanced integrating social media and institutional e-learning platforms could yield better learning outcomes for learners and effective teaching methods for teachers. Specific strategies are suggested on how to make use of the social media in schools in particular and in the education settings in general.

This study is focused on the investigation of the utilization of tourism information quality in social media with respect to destination image formation. To fulfill the objectives of the study, the paper uses two methods; literature review and empirical analysis. The literature review refers to existing studies, and reestablishes the concept of tourism information quality in social media, and identifies the cognitive, affective and conative aspects of tourism destination image. On the other hand, the empirical analysis is based on the questionnaire given to the users provided with tourism information in social media. The results of the questionnaire make use of the sample size of 212 Chinese respondents who have experience of utilizing tourism information in social media. The results indicate that vividness and mutual interaction as the contextual characteristics of tourism information in social media show a meaningful positive relationship with cognitive image and affective image, and those images shows a meaningful positive relationship with conative image related with behavioral factors such as intention to visit. This study will contribute theoretically to confirming empirically the relationship between tourism information quality in social media and destination image. In addition, this provides empirical evidence supporting former studies about destination image formation. In terms of practical contribution, this study will help to build tourism marketing strategies utilizing social media to attract more tourists and construct new tourism business models or strategies related with social media.

Social media is increasingly being used as a source of information during crises, such as natural disasters and civil unrests. However, the quality and truthfulness of user-generated information on social media have been a cause of concern. Many users find distinguishing between true and false information on social media difficult. Basing on the elaboration likelihood model and the motivation, opportunity, and ability framework, this study proposes and empirically tests a model that identifies the information processing routes through which users develop trust, as well as the factors that influence the use of these routes. The findings from a survey of Twitter users seeking information about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis indicate that individuals evaluate information quality more when the crisis information has strong personal relevance or when individuals have low anxiety about the crisis. By contrast, they rely on majority influence more when the crisis information has less personal relevance or when these individuals have high anxiety about the crisis. Prior knowledge does not have significant moderating effects on the use of information quality and majority influence in forming trust. This study extends the theorization of trust in user-generated information by focusing on the process through which users form trust. The findings also highlight the need to alleviate anxiety and manage non-victims in controlling the spread of false information on social media during crises.

Mental health problems leading to depression have become a critical concern due to the growing engagement of people on social media platforms. Several past approaches have been implemented by analyzing the pattern and behaviour of the posts by users on social networking sites. This research study proposed a system for predicting users who may be depressed, based on the characteristics of users who is already affected. A combination of both the tweet-level and the user-level architecture was used to generate a more robust and reliable system where semantic embeddings trained from advanced neural networks were adopted under the tweet-level. SVM with Word2Vec and TF-IDF has been used and yielded an accuracy of 98.14% and recall of 95.63%.

Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook lead to potential security risks, which consequently raise public concerns about privacy. However, most people rarely make active efforts to protect their personal data, even though they have shown increasing concerns about privacy. Therefore, this study examines the factors that determine social media users’ behavior of using privacy settings and testifies the existence of privacy paradox in such a context. In addition, it investigates the mediating effects of implementation intentions on the relationship between intentions and behaviors. In the study, we collected data through questionnaires, and the respondents were undergraduate and graduate students in South Korea. After a pilot test (n = 92) and a set of face-to-face interviews, 266 usable responses were retrieved for data analysis finally. The results confirmed the existence of the privacy paradox regarding the use of social media privacy settings. And the implication intention did positively mediate the relationship between intention and behavior in the context of social media privacy settings. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first in the information privacy literature to introduce the notion of implementation intention which is a much more powerful explanation and prediction of actual behavior than the (behavioral) intention.

Social media websites have continued to proliferate, and the way in which people stay connected has also evolved. The issue of user loyalty a website remains crucial given that the competition is severe. Websites need loyal users who continue to use their sites to survive and be successful. In this research, we applied self-regulation framework to investigate the factors leading to user loyalty to a social media site. In particular, the role of sense of belonging, which is a common emotional reaction to a social media site, is examined. A survey of users in a popular social media site in Taiwan was conducted. Results show that both sense of belonging and service quality have direct effect on loyalty, whereas trust affects loyalty indirectly by fostering a sense of belonging. Service quality affects loyalty through trust and sense of belonging. Notably, trust has insignificant effect on loyalty as originally proposed. Users are then classified into two groups, namely, heavy and light users, based on their usage. Among light users, service quality has no direct effect on loyalty. Therefore, sense of belonging has sole direct impact on loyalty. Both service quality and sense of belonging contribute to loyalty in users who spend more time online. Implications of this study are also discussed.

Companies utilize social media to conduct social marketing and manage the brand community. This study focuses on consumer-brand relationship to investigate how to improve consumers’ behavioral intentions toward brand in the context of social media based brand community. Antecedents such as informativeness, entertainment, social interaction, and incentive are supposed to influence brand relationship quality. Meanwhile, social media use types as well as relationship orientations are assumed to interact with the antecedents to affect brand relationship quality. Consequently, brand relationship quality is supposed to enhance the behavioral intentions toward brand including willingness to buy, member continuance intention, and eWOM intention. An empirical study will be done to examine the hypotheses. There will also be a discussion about the expected contribution.

본 연구는 최근 들어 스마트폰의 등장과 함께 급속히 퍼져나가는 소셜 미디어의 사회적 의미를 짚어보고 이러한 소셜미디어와 사회자본의 관계 를 조망해보고자 한다. 특히 사회자본의 의미를 기존 질서가 아닌 새로운 커뮤니케이션 구조에서 파생하는 새로운 가치 하에서 살펴본다. 구체적으 로 소셜 네트워크 사회의 가장 중요한 가치 중에 하나인 협력에 초점을 맞춰 소셜미디어의 확산에 따른 사회 변화의 다양한 측면을 논의한다. 우 선 소셜미디어의 의미를 기존의 인터넷 그리고 웹 서비스의 연장선상에서 그려보고, 사회자본의 개념적 유래와 의미를 재조명하여 사회자본과 소셜 미디어의 관계를 살펴본다. 또한 미래 네트워크 사회의 핵심 가치라 할 수 있는 협력에 대한 논의를 사회자본과 연결하여 진행한다.

The goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between social media and social capital. This study examines the impact and implication of social media technology like smart phone in a networked society. Whether all those network connections through social media translate into the creation of actual social capital－into the development of bonds of trust and community engagement－is still very much up for debate. This study rather focuses on the main value of the social media. Specifically, 'cooperation', one of the most significant values derived from social media will be closely compared with the concept of 'competition', major value of the proprietary mass society, located in the opposite side of the spectrum, and then related with the creation and accumulation of social capital in a networked society.

본 연구에서는 기업 커뮤니케이션에 있어서 소셜 미디어의 활용 가능성을 의제설정과 소셜 프레즌스 개념을 중심으로 알아보았다. 연구 결과, 의제설정에 있어 이슈 현저성, 인지적 속성 현저성, 정서적 속성 현저성 사이에 상당한 관련성이 있는 것으로 나타났다. 사과문의 메시지 전략에 따른 소비자 태도에서는 사전태도에 비해 사후태도가 높게 나타났고, 소셜 프레즌스는 상호작용성, 사회관계성, 사회윤리성이라는 3가지 요인으로 구성되는 개념이었다. 또한, 본 연구에서는 몰입도와 SNS 이용여부에 따른 의제설정과 소셜 프레즌스의 상호작용 효과를 알아보았으며, 연구 결과를 바탕으로 향후 소셜 미디어를 활용한 기업 커뮤니케이션 전략을 수립할 때 고려해야 할 3가지 시사점을 제시했다.

In this study, we analyzed the applicability of social media in corporate communication. We especially focused on the agenda setting and social presence. Here are the main results. There were correlations among issue salience, cognitive attribute salience, and affective attribute salience in agenda-setting. Consumer's post-attitudes were higher than pre-attitudes in the message strategy of apology. And social presences also consisted of interactivity, social relationship, and social ethics. Furthermore, interaction effects were checked between agenda setting and social presence by immersion and SNS(social network service) use or not. Based on the results, we suggested the three practical implications that should be considered in further corporate's communication strategy using SNS.

본 연구는 첫째, 기업이 전략적 사회공헌활동을 수행함에 있어서 소셜 미디어를 활용함으로써 획득할 수 있는 효익요인이 사회공헌활동 수행기업과 참여자 간의 사회적 자본에 미치는 영향과 둘째, 사회적 자본이 수행기업의 이미지에 미치는 영향을 분석한다. 설문응답 자료에 대한 확인적 요인분석 결과, 개방성, 상호 작용성, 공감성 등 3개의 효익요인이 도출되었다. 또한, 수행기업과 참여자 간에 네트워크, 상호 호혜성, 신뢰 등 3개의 사회적 자본 요인이 창출된 것으로 확인되었다. 제안된 연구모델은 구조방정식모델을 활용하여 분석하였으며, AMOS 20이 사용되었다. 구조방정식모델 분석 결과, 3개의 효익요인 중 개방성은 상호 작용성과 공감성에 긍정적인 영향을 주고, 상호 작용성과 공감성은 사회적 자본의 모든 요인에 긍정적인 영향을 주는 것으로 나타났다. 또한, 네트워크는 상호 호혜성과 신뢰에 긍정적인 영향을 주며, 상호 호혜성과 신뢰는 기업 이미지를 향상시키는데 중요한 역할을 하는 것으로 나타났다.

This study examines 1) the impact of benefit factors from using social media in conducting strategic corporate social responsibility(CSR) on social capitals between companies conducting CSR and participants, and 2) the impact of the social capitals on corporate image. Using questionnaire data, confirmatory factor analyses were routine to figure out the benefit factors including openness, interactivity, and sharing emotion. The analyses also derived social capital factors including network, mutual reciprocality, and trust created between companies conducting CSR and participants. The proposed research model was tested through structural equation modeling analysis using AMOS 20. Final result of the analysis shows that the openness factor positively affects interactivity and sharing emotion. The result of the analysis demonstrates that interactivity and sharing emotion positively affect each one of the social capital factors. Moreover, the result of the analysis indicates that network factor positively affects mutual reciprocality and trust. Also, mutual reciprocality and trust play key roles in improving corporate image.