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Exploring ways in which social networkers contribute to online groups: A case study of one Facebook group?s discussion of Australian broadcaster Channel 9 during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games
Abstract
The advent of the Internet has allowed consumers more opportunities to communicate than ever before. The emergence of the Internet has decreased the gate-keeping role of the media in that Internet users can interact with media outlets and other users in real time. This study breaks ground in the analysis of media messages as one Facebook group is studied to uncover how Internet users virtually protested media outlets on social networking Web sites. © First Monday. 2013, Olan Kees Martin Scott, Ryan Bradshaw, and Paul Larkin.
... community directed comments that reflect a desire for identification and interaction within the community). Researchers have also found that SM enables consumers to interact with one another as SM defies geographic barriers creating a truly global community (Scott, Bradshaw, and Larkin, 2013). Pronschinske, Groza, and Walker (2012) examined how Facebook page attributes influenced fan participation and found that the number of fans on a Facebook page is determined by authenticity (i.e. ...
Social media provides a strategic means for non-profit organizations to build and maintain strong relationships with consumers. The purpose of this study was to apply branding theory and frameworks to the use of Facebook by National Olympic Committees in two countries, Australia and Canada over specific time periods related to three Olympics Games. These Facebook pages were examined to determine the types of brand-related post content and communication style utilized as well as the consumer response to these posts. The two organizations generally used Facebook to broadcast product related brand attributes such as information about athletes and teams. There was also a significant difference in Facebook post use and focus by two organizations indicating some international differences in using Facebook for branding a sport organization. The results also provide practical implications for nonprofit sport organizations using Facebook to build positive brand images, promote fan engagement and ultimately create brand ambassadors.
Social media platforms provide a space where sport fans can interact directly with sport organizations; however, researchers have not empirically examined users’ motivation and usage. Guided by uses and gratifications theory, the authors explored whether social media users’ motivations differed when following a sport organization on two similar microblogging services: Twitter and Weibo. Data gathered from an online survey of users who followed the Los Angeles Lakers on both Twitter (n = 299) and Weibo (n = 796) were analyzed using the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes model. Findings showed that Weibo users had higher motives for obtaining information, entertainment, technical knowledge, passing time, and escaping from their life than Twitter users, while Twitter followers had higher motivations to express team support than their Weibo counterparts. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis suggested that Weibo users had high motives in information gathering and expressing team support, and they also tended to be more interactive. Twitter users were more interested in interacting with a sport organization if their motives for obtaining entertainment information and technical information were met. Results of this study will assist sport organizations to learn to understand users’ motives for following a sports team in both China and America and then develop more effective strategies to engage these users in these two main markets.
Social media provides a strategic means for non-profit organizations to build and maintain strong
relationships with consumers. The purpose of this study was to apply branding theory and frameworks
to the use of Facebook by National Olympic Committees in two countries, Australia and Canada
over specific time periods related to three Olympics Games. These Facebook pages were examined
to determine the types of brand-related post content and communication style utilized as well as the
consumer response to these posts. The two organizations generally used Facebook to broadcast product
related brand attributes such as information about athletes and teams. There was also a significant
difference in Facebook post use and focus by two organizations indicating some international
differences in using Facebook for branding a sport organization. The results also provide practical
implications for non-profit sport organizations using Facebook to build positive brand images, promote
fan engagement and ultimately create brand ambassadors.
During the 2002 U.S. Open, Serena Williams received a great deal of attention for wearing an outfit described as ”a body-clinging, faux leather, black cat-suit.” It was not necessarily the catsuit itself that the popular media found especially controversial but rather the visibility of her physique the outfit provided. The ways in which Serena Williams, the outfit, and her body were discussed offers a particular site at which to interrogate the production of blackness in 21st-century, U.S. society. This article argues that the processes of differentiation the popular media used to characterize her are located within racialized discourse. By representing Williams through oppositional rhetorics, that is, setting her multiple identities in contradistinction to other women on the tour, accounts concerning her appearance in the catsuit reproduce the hegemonic racialized order in women’s tennis.
As online social networking grows in popularity, the number of users placing personal information online does as well. Previous studies have shown that undergraduates and medical students put high levels of personal information online, including inappropriate or unprofessional information, which can be easily accessed by anyone. This study focused on an undergraduate psychology major population and assessed how many of them were using Facebook, how much personal information was made publicly available, and how much of that information was questionable in nature. Major findings include the majority of students 1) use Facebook, 2) have a publicly accessible account, and 3) a sizable minority have content of a questionable nature on their publicly viewable accounts.
This article discusses the theoretical foundations of Internet-mediated communities (IMCs), i.e., groups of people who share interests and make use at some time of the same Internet tools (for instance, a web site-the special concern of this study) in order to exchange information about the shared interests. From November 1999 to February 2001 a rationale was developed and validated for such communities and their web sites, due to the lack of theory unification in the field. The authors carried out five case studies of widely known IMCs, seven action researches with established groups of people who were given customized web sites to mediate their interaction, and an exploratory research supported by open-ended interviews with those groups. Additional empirical research is now needed to apply the theoretical grounds here developed to varying IMC contexts and to different communication technologies.
Research seeking to describe and explain the extraordinary attention received by the Olympic Games has elaborated useful models of fan interest and motivation. In this paper, implications for the theory and practice of marketing sport are reviewed. Olympics research shows that audience interest is maximized via the simultaneous presence of multiple narratives, embedded genres, and layered symbols. Multiple narratives create stories attractive to varied audience segments by recounting dramas of enduring cultural interest or by incorporating contemporary, nonsport political or social concerns. Embedded genres (e.g., festival, spectacle, ritual, game) appeal to a diverse audience by serving as parallel and simultaneous invitations to consumer interest. Appropriately layered symbols (e.g., awards, banners, flags, uniforms, anthems) promote spectator interest by making ceremonies and rituals representative of more than a mere game or contest. The use of multiple narratives, embedded genres, and layered symbols in the planning, design, and promotion of sporting events is discussed. These strategies are contrasted with positioning (i.e., communication strategies designed to obtain a unique representation for products in consumers' minds). It is argued that multiple narratives, embedded genres, and layered symbols function affectively and thereby complement positioning, which functions cognitively, as marketing strategies.
British television coverage of the 1990 soccer World Cup provides a context in which to explore some of the ways in which television seeks to construct coherent narratives about ongoing events. In telling such stories television draws upon distinctive narrative strategies and on extensive reservoirs of stereotypes. This is seen in elementary form in the techniques by which television commentary defines and develops particular `characters', and more elaborately in the construction of extended narrative accounts of the activities of national teams — notably, in this paper, Cameroon and England. These accounts are seen to be rooted in discourses that formulate key distinctions in terms of race and national identity, and, by circulating applications of such systems of stereotypes, television contributes to the production and reproduction of our everyday knowledge of `Them' and `Us'.
This article proposes a hypothesis on the nature of power in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age. It argues that the ability to control connection points between different networks (e.g. business, media and economic networks) is a critical source of power in contemporary society. It then tests this hypothesis through a case study of Rupert Murdoch, CEO of NewsCorp. The operational dynamics of Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp are examined in order to illustrate how corporate media actors negotiate the power dynamics of the network society to serve their overarching business goals. It identifies key strategies used by these actors to penetrate new markets and expand audience share including: political brokering, leveraging public opinion, instituting sensationalist news formulas, customizing media content and diversifying and adapting media holdings in the face of technological and regulatory changes.
This article argues that empirical considerations of production processes have been largely neglected in discussions of the global/local flows associated with telecasting mass-mediated sport. An ethnographically oriented analysis of the labor processes involved in televising the 1995 Canada Cup of Soccer (CCS) was conducted in order to establish the contexts, pressures, and discourses that operate at the level of production. The article focuses on how conditions created by global capitalism altered the labor processes involved in the production of the event. As a result, the crew's interpretations of the CCS operated both within and through a consumer-oriented global logic.
This article considers how American cyclist Floyd Landis is commodified, or produced and reproduced (hereafter “re/produced”), for consumption through the multiple texts of his mediated campaign to fight doping allegations, a campaign that emphasized digital media. Critical discourse analysis revealed several intertextually related narratives deployed for consumption by fans and supporters, narratives that commodified Landis in a variety of complex and interrelated ways. The overriding self-referential narrative across the defense campaign texts commodified Landis as the epic (American) hero fighting for justice against insurmountable odds, institutional forces, and foreign conspiracies, yet remaining grounded, accessible, and available for consumption by fans and supporters. It is suggested here that the effective consumption of Landis’s campaign is partly due to features of digital media that render it a powerful site for guiding interpretations and for performing identities in ways that directly re/ produce users and fans as part of the promotional cycle. Equally, using digital media simultaneously enacted other key discourses (such as justice and democratization) mobilized in the campaign.
Children and adolescents today are the first generation raised in a society in which technological literacy is essential for effective citizenship in the 21st century. With many more youth using digital technologies for educational and recreational purposes, there has been an increase in social problems in cyberspace, exposing them to different forms of cyberviolence. This article gives an overview of the developments in cyberspace, describes different types of cyberviolence, and focuses on cyberbullying among girls and adolescent females as both victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying. At-risk online activities among girls and adolescent females as well as strategies to promote cybersafety are presented. Current research and future directions for research are reviewed.