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The chapter examines the employment of unique social media concepts (e.g., dialogue, engagement, mobilization, authenticity, influence, and transparency) for CSR communication among top companies in Latin America. A quantitative content analysis of 1,000 tweets from corporate official accounts of the top 25 largest firms in the Latin Trade ranking was performed. Tweets were randomly selected if contained hashtags or keywords related to CSR concepts (CSR, sustainability, citizenship, society, environment, etc.). Transparency was the social media concept most employed on CSR-related messages on Twitter. However, most of the companies did not include any of the social media features analyzed. The results of this chapter are consistent with previous studies that social media is used as another traditional informational channel. This work only analyzed tweets sent by Latin American companies, it did not take into consideration responses to messages (replies or retweets of the followers of each company). Future studies can examine stakeholders’ response regarding CSR communication for in-depth analysis of the use of social media by Latin American companies. Organizations and companies can benefit from the results of this work in order to craft effective content on social media that includes features and strategies that can resonance to different groups of stakeholders. CSR social media communication studies that focused on Latin America are scarce. Our study is pioneer in analyzing the usage of social media concepts for CSR communication in Latin America.

Introduction – In the twenty-first century, which is the age of communication and information, the time and space concepts have changed with new media technologies and changes have occurred in habits and ways of doing business using the Internet. In this respect, crowdsourcing concept comes first among the new applications with which internet users can share content. The crowdsourcing, which may be understood as ‘mass-based work’ or ‘crowded resource’, consists of a combination of ‘crowd’ and ‘source’, and refers to the use of a great number of human societies to do a common work. The crowdsourcing concept, used commonly as of the 2000s for different purposes, is included in the literature as a concept showing the power of crowds. It is a method in which communication and internet technologies are used with efficacy in the advertising and marketing fields.

Purpose – The objective of the present study is to determine the pros and cons of the crowdsourcing concept through new media applications in the form of critical evaluations by examining sample case studies that use the crowdsourcing concept, which is becoming widespread in Turkey and in the whole world in recent years.

Methodology – In this study, the ‘Case (Sample Event) Study Analysis’, which is one of the qualitative research methods and which is a methodological approach that includes examining how the crowdsourcing system works in-depth, will be used.

Findings – Crowdsourcing is becoming a worldwide business model and allows anyone with free time and an internet connection to contribute to economic productivity. This study has discussed the importance of crowdsourcing for companies in contextual terms and has made predictions on how to make this concept become a better model in which fields.

When a concept is diffusely defined or, as this article argues, “taken for granted”, it becomes very difficult to track such concept on the literature and have some continuity as researchers build on top of previous results. This article proposes a definition for user-generated content, a term that though has lost some saliency, stands in the center or the social media phenomenon, so it should not be disregarded as an object of study.

Celebrating 20 years of the concept, this research performs a multidisciplinary literature review of 61 academic articles on UGC. Through deconstruction of the acronym UGC, it builds on the present converging, conflicting and diverging definitions and/or approaches to UGC on an attempt to consolidate a broader definition that encompasses the complexities of the phenomenon in a context of consolidation of social media, to be applied to social sciences.

Following the present analysis, UGC is defined as any kind of text, data or action performed by online digital systems users, published and disseminated by the same user through independent channels, that incur an expressive or communicative effect either on an individual manner or combined with other contributions from the same or other sources.

This is the first academic effort that aims to create an in-depth dialogue over the different approaches to UGC across disciplines on the social sciences field. It should help reignite interest in the acronym, which got somehow eclipsed by the broader field of social media; whilst without UGC, social media would not exist or would not have the same social impact it does in its current form. Analogously, UGC as a topic of research has been deeply affected by the emergence and consolidation of Social Media. As this debate evolves, this contribution should be helpful as a reference to operationalize UGC on future research.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0258

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a framework of small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) strategic orientation (SO) and its impact on social media performance. Moreover, it introduces a new concept, social media orientation (SMO) (composed of sales and business development (SBD) and visibility) to add in the model.

A quantitative approach was used and, based on a study of 257 SMEs, analyses were performed. A smartPLS analysis was judged appropriate regarding the sample size.

Results show that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and customer orientation have a positive influence on SBD which in turn has a positive influence on social media performance. Visibility is positively influenced by EO and has an indirect effect on social media performance. Social media performance is therefore directly influenced by SBD and indirectly by visibility.

The authors complete previous research that called for the introduction of different SO on a same study and go further as the author highlight the role of EO on visibility (and not only on business or performance). A second contribution lies in the conceptualization of SMO (defined here with SBD and visibility) and third in the measurement of social media performance through growth and attention.

SMEs first need to develop their visibility, and then link it to SBD.

This research is one of the first to explore SMEs’ SO on social media and proposes a new concept defined as SMO. It gives SMEs future direction on how to perform on these platforms.

This paper focusses on demonstrating the role of social media engagement and considering emotional intelligence (hereafter EI) as a critical concept to successful employment, mainly when individuals fail to reach the desired employment despite “meeting” the role requirements.

The authors adopted a qualitative approach through semi-structured in-depth interviews of some randomly selected university students in the UK, young adults aged 19–32. The participants were selected based on different demographics to provide a broader and less biased representation of young adults in the UK.

This research suggests that recruitment organisations should introduce the latest requirements and trends of employers to ensure that the expectations of employers and potential candidates are aligned to improve the employment rate in young adults.

This research extends the literature regarding EI in social media engagement and successful employment. It also brings new perspectives on successful employment in young adults by demonstrating the role of social media engagement and EI traits leading to a conceptual framework exploring successful employment based on the role of social media engagement and EI.

This paper is aimed at both researchers and organizations. For researchers, it seeks to provide a means for better analyzing the phenomenon of social media implementation in organizations as a knowledge management (KM) enabler. For organizations, it seeks to suggest a step-by-step architecture for practically implementing social media and benefiting from it in terms of KM.

The research is an empirical study. A hypothesis was set; empirical evidence was collected (from 34 organizations). The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, thereby forming the basis for the proposed architecture.

Implementing social media in organizations is more than a yes/no question; findings show various levels of implementation in organizations: some implementing at all levels, while others implement only tools, functional components, or even only visibility.

Two main themes should be further tested: whether the suggested architecture actually yields faster/eased KM implementation compared to other techniques; and whether it can serve needs beyond the original scope (KM, Israel) as tested in this study (i.e. also for other regions and other needs – service, marketing and sales, etc.).

Organizations can use the suggested four levels architecture as a guideline for implementing social media as part of their KM efforts.

This paper is original and innovative. Previous studies describe the implementation of social media in terms of yes/no; this research explores the issue as a graded one, where organizations can and do implement social media step-by-step. The paper's value is twofold: it can serve as a foundational study for future researches, which can base their analysis on the suggested architecture of four levels of implementation. It also serves as applied research that will help organizations searching for social media implementation KM enablers.

When comparing the annotated relevance and the actual application of social media, enormous discrepancies show. This paper aims to introduce the concept of “Social Media Governance” as a means to accelerate the establishment of social media in communication practices and seeks to analyse its status quo in German organizations.

The data presented here stem from a quantitative online survey among communication professionals that was carried out in Germany.

The results indicate that although many organizations claim to have strategies for social media communications, nine out of ten had no explicit regulatory frameworks. Strategic pillars, such as managerial commitment and a participative corporate culture, were reported by one third of the organizations. This is crucial, because correlation analyses have revealed that the presence of such structures has a positive effect on skill levels, strategies and the level of activity.

In terms of theory, the concept of governance may be used in order to analyze the dynamics of introducing new modes of online communication.

According to structuration theory, the actions of individual agents will only succeed if everyone involved can resort to structures in the sense of a common stock of (informal) rules and resources. This research indicates that public relations (PR) practices should focus on developing basic structures for social media communications and should not be limited to communications activities.

While previous studies have focused on single aspects of social media governance, e.g. guidelines, very little research has been done on the overall concept. Also, the interconnection of strategic and structural aspects of social media communication has been neglected as a research topic so far.

The aim of this paper is to conceptually explore how spatial features of social media can be explained.

Based on a conceptual approach, specific spatial features of social media are reviewed in terms of location, locale and sense of place within the wider frame of the social media landscape.

In the literature stream of social media management and marketing, central conceptualisations relate implicitly to the notions of space and place. By drawing from the field of human geography, this implicit spatiality of social media is made explicit by approaching social media applications as the building blocks of digital space in which digital places are created, maintained and integrated with each other over time as a result of interactions and relationships forming between users that inhabit digital places.

The present paper contributes to extant literature by providing a spatial approach to social media that depicts the character of social media, its interrelation with the physical world, as well as how it currently transforms and evolves. Furthermore, it also addresses how social media places represent settings in which social meaning of commercial relevance is created that affects the way consumption activities take place beyond the physical realm of human co-existence.

This study aims to investigate how the gratifications obtained through brand-related social media content affect brand intimacy and thereby influence customer extra-role behavior.

Using the uses and gratification theory, this study proposes information, entertainment and remuneration content that motivates customers to develop brand intimacy and thereby perform customer extra-role behavior. The study also tests the moderated moderation effect of self-congruence and customer experience using 704 observations from South India in the food industry context.

The study’s results reveal the influence of entertainment and remuneration content on brand intimacy, which further influences customer extra-role behavior (civic virtue, cocreation, sportsmanship and helping behaviors). The study confirms a moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and civic virtue and brand intimacy and sportsmanship behaviors.

The study suggests that brands may include entertainment and remuneration elements in their social media content to build intimate customer relationships, further influencing customers’ extra-role behaviors. Besides, brands should focus on customers’ self-concepts and experiences to encourage them to act voluntarily.

This study makes a unique contribution by investigating the influence of brand-related social media content on customer extra-role behavior through brand intimacy. It uses self-congruence and customer experience to test their moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and customer extra-role behavior.

This paper aims to discuss major influencing factors causing users’ mobile social media fatigue and divides them into three hierarchies, including causal factors, intermediary factors and outcome factors. The study also sorts out connections between different levels of factors, thus providing effective guidance for the sustained development of social media.

Based on the grounded theory and by collecting data through in-depth interviews, the authors use open coding, axial coding and selective coding to analyze major influencing factors of users’ mobile social media fatigue, build a model using the software NVivo 11, organize and analyze mobile social media fatigue behavior and identify the relationships by combining the interpretive structural model and explore connections among the factors.

The influencing factors of mobile social media fatigue behavior conform with the stressors-strains-outcomes (SSO) theoretical framework, where stressors (S) include the five factors of fear of missing out, perceived overload, compulsive use, time cost and privacy concerns; strains (S) include the five factors of a low sense of achievement, emotional anxiety, reduced interest, social concerns and emotional exhaustion; outcomes (O) include the six factors of neglect behavior, diving behavior, avoidance behavior, tolerance behavior, withdrawal behavior and substitution behavior.

It focuses on the discussion of the interactions between users’ stressors, strains and outcomes without fully considering the impact of social environment and educational background on social media fatigue behavior. This study only focuses on one social media platform in the Chinese context, namely, WeChat. We reply on the qualitative research method to construct the relationships between social media fatigue factors because we were mainly interested in how users would respond psychologically and emotionally to social media fatigue behavior.

The study has extended the application of the SSO theory. Additionally, the research method and model used in this paper may serve as guidelines to other interested scholars who intend to explore relevant variables and conduct further research on the influencing factors of social media fatigue. In analyzing the causality of social media fatigue, the study has integrated the intermediary factor strain to display users’ strains from social media stress with a more detailed path discussion on the causality of social media fatigue, which has not received broad attention in previous research literature on social networking services users’ use.

In this study, text data are collected in a diversity of forms combined, allowing respondents to answer questions without being limited by the questions in the questionnaire, which helped us to identify new variables of social media fatigue. As a result, we were able to dig out the fundamental causes of social media fatigue and potential connections between the factors. Relevant scholars, users and businesses may analyze, manage and forecast users’ social media fatigue behavior by analyzing the type of social media stress and users’ state, providing guidance for the proposal of corresponding management strategies.

Most relevant studies focus on the sustained use of social media, and there is a scarcity of studies on social media fatigue in China. There is very limited research that conducts model analysis of social media fatigue through the integration of stressors, strains and outcomes.