BACKGROUND Maintaining social relationships has been defined as a core element of aging well. With a considerable amount of older adults living alone, social media provides the possibility to engage in meaningful social contact, e.g. by joining online social networks and online discussion forums. OBJECTIVE The review encompasses current knowledge of prerequisites in social media use of older ...

In the rapidly evolving world of social media, social networks, mobile applications and citizen science, online communities can develop organically and separately from larger or more established organisations. The One Health online community is experiencing expansion from both the bottom up and the top down. In this paper, the authors review social media's strengths and weaknesses, earlier work...

Building on the extant research on branding and social media, this study examines the nature of an online brand community as a B2B brand communication platform through netnographic analysis of the CISCO LinkedIn Group discussions. The empirical analysis yielded four distinct themes characterizing B2B brand communication within the online community that contribute to the existing theory: company...

To what extent do frame-building and frame-setting processes manifest themselves in the interplay between online public discourse and traditional (offline) media discourse? Employing a content analysis of 206 online posts and 114 news reports regarding a sociopolitical incident in China, we test the associations and causal relationships between the salience of opinion frames and media frames. O...

In this paper we describe the ways participants of the Scratch online community, primarily young people, engage in remixing of each others’ shared animations, games, and interactive projects. In particular, we try to answer the following questions: How do users respond to remixing in a social media environment where remixing is explicitly permitted? What qualities of originators and their proje...

In a large social media corpus (2.9 million tokens), we analyze Flemish adolescents’ non-standard writing practices and look for correlations with the teenagers’ social class. Three different aspects of adolescents’ social background are included: educational track, parental profession, and home language. Since the data reveal that these parameters are highly correlated, we combine them into on...

Many foreign companies see social media as a low cost marketing space for entering the vast Chinese market. This is fraught with complexity, requiring an understanding of social media behaviour, social media marketing, and the Chinese context. In this exploratory pilot study, we develop the notion of ‘franding’ (online friending of brands) as a unifying metaphor, and suggest that effective soci...

Online communities emerged as a new communication and cooperation paradigm around new media based on information and communication technology. At the beginning they were considered a social phenomenon, but soon it became clear that online communities can be of great economic importance and might provide efficient organization forms in certain application areas. This provoked the need for their ...

This narrative review examines assessments of the reliability of online health information retrieved through social media to ascertain whether health information accessed or disseminated through social media should be evaluated differently than other online health information. Several medical, library and information science, and interdisciplinary databases were searched using terms relating to...

Aims and method To assess the compliance of contemporary online media output with guidelines for the responsible reporting of suicidal acts. A search engine was used to identify online media reports of suicide from UK sources over the course of 1 month. Each article was assessed against guidelines for the responsible reporting of suicide produced by the Samaritans, a UK mental health charity. R...