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This study aims to investigate how a sample of US municipalities use social media for strategic communication, focusing on efforts to effectively measure and evaluate that communication. Research questions focus on measurement and evaluation practices, as well as the motivations and impacts associated with these practices.

This research uses a qualitative approach. Interviews were conducted with 12 municipal government personnel responsible for social media communication. The self-selected participants represent 10 states and all US Census regions. Data was content analyzed and categorized according to four research questions, with emergent themes described.

The results show a diverse set of approaches and motivations, with surface-level measurement and evaluation methods. Initial efforts at more ad hoc use of social media are moving toward more deliberate strategies, but limited resources inhibit progress for some municipalities.

Few studies exist which explore how US municipalities formally measure and evaluate their social media activities as part of their overall strategic communication efforts. This study adds to the existing literature by providing insight into the measurement and evaluation practices that municipalities use to assess their social media communication. The study also provides a basis for larger and deeper investigations of municipal strategic communication practices related to measurement and evaluation.

Social media's role in engaging participants in sports events, particularly during the pandemic, is acknowledged. However, previous studies often utilized sports events for diverse objectives but overlooked brand equity's influence on sports event development. And very limited research explores social media's impact on brand equity in esports events, despite its significance. Therefore, this study aims to explore how social media affects esports event brand equity and participants' satisfaction and engagement with social media through brand equity's influence.

The study focused on League of Legends World Championships (LOLWC) participants, who completed a self-judged questionnaire online. The questionnaire included demographic details and latent constructs. Data analysis involved two steps: exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to assess measurement scale validity and structural equation modeling (SEM) to study relationships between traits.

The results reveal that, within the esports event context, controlled communication exerts a meaningful and dual impact – both directly and indirectly – on the fundamental components of brand equity. This, in turn, serves as a catalyst for increasing participant contentment and their posting intention.

This study applies brand equity theories to the esports domain, exploring participant-based brand equity concepts, user behavior and the influence of social media communication on event branding and engagement. It also recommends strategies for event improvement, emphasizes controlled communication for brand equity and highlights marketing's role in brand awareness, association and participant satisfaction. Additionally, it suggests government regulation to address cyber violence during esports events.

This paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.

The authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.

The authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.

Comparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.

This study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.

This research aims to unravel the intricate relationship between luxury brands' social media marketing strategies (i.e. communication and engagement) and their impact on consumers' willingness to pay a premium and brand loyalty.

A large online consumer panel was used to conduct an online survey of 381 consumers. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was adopted for hypothesis testing.

The study's outcomes indicated that (1) perceived interactivity and perceived openness positively influence social media brand communication, (2) social media brand communication and engagement are positive determinants for consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions, (3) consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions positively influence willingness to pay a premium and (4) parasocial interactions (but not consumer empowerment) positively influence brand loyalty.

The study offers significant theoretical implications by unraveling the mechanism of social media marketing for luxury brands, which is under-researched in the current literature. More specifically, the study reveals the process of how social media brand communication and engagement reinforce luxury brand outcomes through parasocial interactions and consumer empowerment. In addition, the study provides empirical evidence to delineate the role of interactivity and openness in enhancing social media brand communication. Moreover, the study extends past research that emphasized initial adoption outcomes such as attitude and purchase intention by probing luxury brand loyalty and willingness to pay a premium.

By effectively strategizing social media marketing, luxury brand marketers can promote brand loyalty and willingness to pay a premium. Luxury brand marketers should concentrate on establishing parasocial interaction with consumers by designing optimal social media brand communication and engagement. To this end, luxury brand marketers should consider integrating the elements of interactivity and openness in their communication with consumers.

The study offers valuable insights for luxury brand marketers aiming to capitalize on the potential of social media marketing to enhance their revenue generation and customer retention. The study advances past luxury branding research by validating the role of consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions in luxury brands' social media marketing.

This study problematizes the prevailing normative and managerial-dominated view of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media from a power perspective. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of the negative aspects of this phenomenon.

The empirical material encompasses qualitative interviews with employees from 14 organizations and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary discursive power to analyze which and how discourses exert power over employee communication on social media and what role visibility plays in it.

This study indicates that employee ambassadors’ social media communication is governed by two discourses that create complex tensions, where ambassadors constantly must negotiate between self-branding requirements and an authenticity paradox. These tensions intensify through visibility on social media, where employees strategize and situationally silence their communication through self-monitoring and self-surveillance practices. Conclusively, the findings also outline the need for further critical research to offer a deeper understanding of power relations that influence the communication practices of organizational members.

The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media and highlights disciplinary power relations that go beyond organizational borders.

The findings underscore that organizations need to address the critical aspects of self-initiated employee ambassadorship and act as facilitators to support employees in their navigation process.

This paper contributes a new critical power perspective on employee ambassadorship on social media.

This study aims to determine how the most sustainable brands in Italy and Spain developed communication and awareness-raising actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether these companies were truly involved in raising public awareness of the pandemic. The authors specifically focus on sustainable companies, as health communication is considered to be an important corporate social responsibility task.

To answer these questions, the authors have used data on the social media activity (Twitter and Instagram) of these brands in Spain and Italy, extracting the posts and associated hashtags that each of them has published throughout the pandemic to be processed using social network analysis and visualization techniques.

The detailed analysis of both the levels of activity and the content of the messages provides interesting insights into the communication models of the companies and the influence of factors such as time, country and the specific social media platform used.

The authors analyze the communication of the most sustainable businesses on social media during the pandemic, adopting a highly innovative approach. The particular originality of this study lies in the parallel analysis of two different countries that were simultaneously shaken by the pandemic in very similar circumstances. This study also presents a novel use of graphical representation tools in terms of companies’ behavior for health communication on social media.

El objetivo de esta investigación es determinar cómo las marcas reconocidas como las más sostenibles en Italia y España han desarrollado acciones de comunicación durante la pandemia del Covid-19 y si estas empresas se han involucrado realmente en la sensibilización pública de la pandemia. Nos centramos específicamente en las empresas sostenibles dado que la Comunicación en Salud se considera una tarea importante de responsabilidad social corporativa.

Para responder a estas preguntas, hemos utilizado datos de actividad en medios sociales (Twitter e Instagram) de estas marcas en España e Italia, extrayendo los posts y hashtags asociados que cada una ha publicado a lo largo de la pandemia para procesarlos usando técnicas de análisis y visualización de redes sociales.

El análisis detallado tanto de los niveles de actividad como del contenido de los mensajes permite obtener conclusiones interesantes sobre los modelos de comunicación de las empresas y la influencia de factores como el tiempo, el país y el medio social concreto utilizado.

Analizamos la comunicación realizada por las compañías más sostenibles en medios sociales durante la pandemia, adoptando un enfoque muy innovador. La particularidad de este estudio radica en el análisis paralelo de dos países diferentes que fueron sacudidos simultáneamente por la pandemia en circunstancias muy similares. Este estudio también conlleva un uso novedoso de herramientas de representación gráfica en términos del comportamiento de las empresas para Comunicación en Salud en medios sociales.

本研究的目的是确定在意大利和西班牙被认为是最可持续发展的品牌在Covid-19大流行期间是如何开展传播行动的, 以及这些公司是否真正参与了提高公众对该大流行病的认识。我们特别关注可持续发展的公司, 因为健康传播被认为是企业社会责任的一项重要任务。

为了回答这些问题, 我们使用了这些品牌在西班牙和意大利的社交媒体活动数据（Twitter和Instagram）, 提取了每个品牌在整个大流行期间发布的帖子和相关标签, 并使用社交网络分析和可视化技术进行处理。

通过对活动水平和信息内容的详细分析, 可以得出关于这些公司的传播模式以及诸如时间、国家和所使用的特定社交媒体等因素的影响的有趣结论。

我们分析了最可持续的公司在大流行期间在社交媒体上进行的传播, 采取了一种非常创新的方法。这项研究的特殊性在于对两个不同国家的平行分析, 这两个国家在非常相似的情况下同时受到大流行病的冲击。这项研究还包括在社交媒体上对公司健康传播行为的图形表示工具的新颖使用。

The paper validates a framework using the media synchronicity theory (MST) to study the effect of Social Media Use at Work (SMUW) on the performance “Work Performance” (WP) of the employee. For this, the study initially observed the effect of SMUW on shared vision (SV), network ties (NT), and trust (TRUST) on the knowledge transfer (KT) and the effect of all (SV, NT, TRUST and KT) on the WP of the employees.

A survey method was used to collect responses from 157 employees working at middle and lower-level managerial positions in the chemical companies of India. The data analysis uses variance-based, partial least square SEM, which has established a relationship between the constructs.

The results found a significant effect of SMUW on the WP of the employees. It was observed that the SV and TRUST can be significantly improved with the help of SMUW, contributing to the KT and simultaneously affecting the WP of the employees.

The study has examined the positive and significant effect of SMUW on the employees' SV, NT and TRUST. Improving SV, NT and trust (dimension of social capital) through social media allows employees to transfer more knowledge. An increase in KT among the employees further positively affected the individual and group performance within the organization. SV positively affected the employee's WP, but NT and trust negatively affected the WP. The research thus provides useful insight to the managers for effective use of social media in the workplace.

The study used MST to understand the effect of the use of social media in the workplace. The study is kind of first in the Indian context which has examined the effect of employees at managerial level in chemical companies, and thus contributes to the existing literature on social networks/social media from the organizational context.

Drawing on symbolic interaction theory (SIT), this study aims to identify what makes corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication more favorable to customers in the chain restaurants context. Specifically, this study examines the direct relationships between the interactivity of CSR communication, brand trust and brand sincerity. In addition, the mediating role of brand trust (i.e. separate dimensions of brand reliability and intentions) and the moderated mediating role of self-congruity are explored.

A total of 418 US consumers with past experiences of participating in CSR campaigns organized by chain restaurants on social media were recruited using the online survey method of nonprobability sampling through Amazon Mechanical Turk in December 2021.

The results of this study revealed that the interactivity of CSR communication on social media affects brand sincerity; brand reliability and brand intentions mediate the positive effect of interactivity of CSR communication on brand sincerity; and customer’s self-congruity moderated the positive mediation effect via brand reliability.

Chain restaurant marketers need to understand the important role of interactivity as a key element of CSR communication on social media to help develop brand trust and brand sincerity in chain restaurants.

This study expands on SIT to support the symbolic benefits of interactive CSR communication on social media.

The ballooning health misinformation on social media raises grave concerns. Drawing upon the S-O-R (Stimulus-Organism-Response) model and the information processing literature, this study aims to explore (1) how social media health information seeking (S) affects health misinformation sharing intention (R) through the channel of health misperceptions (O) and (2) whether the mediation process would be contingent upon different information processing predispositions.

Data were collected from a survey comprising 388 respondents from the Chinese middle-aged or above group, one of China's most susceptible populations to health misinformation. Standard multiple linear regression models and the PROCESS Macro were adopted to examine the direct effect and the moderated mediation model.

Results bolstered the S-O-R-based mechanism, in which health misperceptions mediated social media health information seeking's effect on health misinformation sharing intention. As an indicator of analytical information processing, need for cognition (NFC) failed to moderate the mediation process. Contrarily, faith in intuition (FI), an indicator reflecting intuitive information processing, served as a significant moderator. The positive association between social media health information seeking and misperceptions was stronger among respondents with low FI.

This study sheds light on health misinformation sharing research by bridging health information seeking, information internalization and information sharing. Moreover, the authors extended the S-O-R model by integrating information processing predispositions, which differs this study from previous literature and advances the extant understanding of how information processing styles work in the face of online health misinformation. The particular age group and the Chinese context further inform context-specific implications regarding online health misinformation regulation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0157.

Drawing upon the third-person effect (TPE) theory, this study focuses on two types of misinformation countering intentions (i.e. simple correction and correction with justification). Accordingly, it aims to (1) assess the tenability of the third-person perception (TPP) in the face of misinformation on social media, (2) explore the antecedents of TPP and its relationship with individual-level misinformation countering intentions and (3) examine whether the mediating process is contingent on different social media usage conditions.

An online survey was conducted with 1,000 representative respondents recruited in Mainland China in January 2022 using quota sampling. Paired t-test, multiple linear regression and moderated mediation analysis were employed to examine the proposed hypotheses.

Results bolster the fundamental proposition of TPP that individuals perceive others as more susceptible to social media misinformation than they are. The self-other perceptual bias served as a mediator between the perceived consequence of misinformation and misinformation countering (i.e. simple correction and correction with justification) intentions. Furthermore, intensive social media users were likely to be motivated to counter social media misinformation derived from the indirect mechanism.

The findings provide further evidence for the role of TPE in explaining misinformation countering intention as prosocial and altruistic behavior rather than self-serving behavior. Practically, promising ways to combat rampant misinformation on social media include promoting the prosocial aspects and beneficial outcomes of misinformation countering efforts to others, as well as reconfiguring the strategies by impelling intensive social media users to participate in enacting countering actions

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2022-0507.