This document summarizes lecture notes on personal connections, blogging on Facebook and Twitter, and writing for social media. Key topics covered include the role of social cues in different media, challenges of mediated communication, theories of social presence and media richness, and how people adapt communication online through emoticons, emojis, and other strategies. The document also discusses best practices for corporate blogging and using hashtags on Twitter.

1. Week 8 Lecture Notes COM325
Personal Connections: part of chapter 3; pages 57 – 71.
Blogging: Facebook and Twitter as microblogs 76 – 82, plus part of chapter 6 (pages 153 - 168)
Everybody Writes: Part 5, sections 61-65 (about leads) (pages 188 - 214 writing for Twitter and
Facebook)

2. socialcues
 A medium’s ability to convey social cues determines
how much it is used.
 Media with fewer social cues
 -trigger hopes that people will be more equal and no
hierarchies will exist.
 -trigger fear that interaction, identities, and
relationships will be untrustworthy and shallow.
 Does the lack of social cues cause bad behavior?
 No, but it does create the opportunity for some people to
indulge in their bad side!
Digital media, which is mediated media, has reduced
social cues.

3. Embodiedversus
Mediated
Communication
 Face-to-face is embodied co-present communication
 Embodied communication is the standard against
which all communication is measured
 Telephone is less, Internet is less than telephone
 Research began in the 1970s to determine which media
to use for which task
 Presence Theory (1976) by Short, William, and Christie
Investigated audioconferencing and videoconferences
 Audio conference is the least effective way to meet!

4. SocialPresence
Theory(1980)
 Social Presence Theory (1980) focused on the medium.
 Social presence: the level of interpersonal contact and
feelings of intimacy experienced in communication.
 Social presence theory is based on the feelings of the
participants and not on a feature of the medium.
 Nonberbal cues: facial expressions, direction of gaze,
posture, dress, physical appearance, proximity and
body orientation
 Non-verbal emblems such as the thumbs-up gesture
have direct verbal translations.

5. Medium
Richness
 Medium Richness is a medium’s information carrying
capacity based on four criteria:
 1-speed of feedback
 2 use of natural language rather than numbers
 3-ability to readily convey feelings and emotions
 4- ability to communicate multiple cues
 It is assumed that tasks high in uncertainty need rich
media.
 Unequivocal tasks are best served by lean media
 For tasks involving personal identities and feelings,
mediation is inferior because
 1- messages are harder to coordinate
 2- people are depersonalized (and are often anonymous)
 3- cues to hierarchy are absent
 4-fewer social norms are present to guide behavior
 5- tasks are affected by people’s familiarity with technology
and if people know each other offline

6. TheCues
FilteredOut
Theory
 Predicted that in the absence of social norms, people
would be rude and argumentative (seen as faming)
 Said mediated communication in lean media is
emotionally impoverished.
Wrong!
 A social context can still be achieved, and people behave in
spite of the absence of social norms., though flaming
occurs.
 Flaming: extremely argumentative communication
 Flaming messages include swearing, insults, and name
calling.
 Flaming is not as widespread as said. It is overestimated and
not caused by the lack of social cues.
 Norms are negotiated through flaming. (p.67).
 Men are more likely to flame than women.
 A social context can still be achieved, and people behave
in spite of the absence of social norms

7. People findcreate
waystoenrich the
medium!
 Emotion is difficult to convey without facial expressions
and vocal intonation.
 Emoticons: In 1972 Scott Fahlman used punctuation
marks to create cues showing mood and how words are to
be interpreted ;)
 Emoticons spread and became a part of new media
 Emojis: A Japanese term combining a picture and letter.
 Another method to convey nonverbal cues when limited to
textual communication is to use asterisks as brackets,
upper-case lettering and letter and punctuation repetition
to create emphasis.
 I am *so * busy
 I am soooooo busy
 I am SO busy
 I am so busy!!!!!!!

8. ZapfDingbat
 German typeface designer Hermann Zapf invented
Zapf Dingbat typeface that was a precursor to
emoticons.
 Zapf understood how computers would shape visual
communication.
 Zapf met Steve Jobs in the 1980s, and Apple selected
three of Zaph typefaces for use on the Apple computer:
Chancery, Palatino, and Dingbats.
 The typeface had the biggest impact on modern
communication, as this “collection of scissors and
stars, squares and pointing hands, formed the basis for
Unicode's symbols, which in turn paved the way for the
today’s emoji” (Alderson, 2015).

9. ImmediacyCues
 Informal behaviors and language online that reduce
psychological distance and increase affiliation.
 Examples include non-standard spellings, deletions
(such as leaving out the noun), casual and slang
vocabulary, greetings and sign-offs, and other linguistic
markers such as acronyms like LOL.
 We use immediacy cues to show others that we are
approachable and that we are interested in them.
 Online dating: your last name is an immediacy cue.
Read “The New Dating No-No: Asking for a Last
Name” by Nicole Hong (1/25/18) See the article at the
Lakeland Library, using Nexis Uni. Place title in
search box.

10. Digital
Communication
andAdvertising
 Blogs and special media are accused of exploitation
 Social media use results in constant encounters with
advertising and a loss of privacy resulting from tracking
the uses of social media by the audience.
 In Facebook and Twitter, users have very little control
over how their data is presented, distributed, or reused.
 Commercial companies have big investments in social
media, so audiences worry about exploitation and control.
The public’s personal, social connections are tracked, and
this data is bought and sold without any regard to the
person who was tracked.
 Some theorists call this exploitation of the blogger, for
example, whose blog is on a platform that is accompanied
by advertisements tracking and selling data.

11. Facebookasa
microblog.
 On Facebook, your photos, status updates, and links
are fed into a blog called a news feed that is customized
for your friends.
 Advertisements accompany this blog.
 You have little control over your Facebook blog.
 You reach a big audience
 The newsfeed is linked to connections outside of
Facebook
 Filter bubble or echo chamber: Tight connections
within a specific group that avoids news and
information on additional viewpoints or non-group
members so that we only see others who agree with us.

12. Twitter
 Tweets work as dialogue to establish rapport and
encourage inspiration
 Write a tweet as if talking to a specific person
 Establish who you are
 Do not pitch-slap (meaning avoid promotions of the
items you are discussion)
 Personalize without getting too personal
 Be cautious with automation (avoid robosending
automated direct messages)
 Use a call to action
 Use correct grammar and spelling

13. HashtageAdvice
 The pound symbol # turns any word or group of words
into a searchable link or keyword on Twitter
 Avoid tacking a hashtag on every social media
utterance.
 Do not use more than three hashtags per post
 Hashtages can:
 help tell a story
 share a history,
 align you with your audience
 Track and follow trending hashtags at hashtags.org

14. CorporateBlogs
 Businesses blog to:
 1-Communicate directly with a customer base without
using media
 2- Boost an existing product or serve by getting fresh
attention
 3- Establish themselves as experts
 4- Support or build brand awareness
 5- Create a feedback channel for customers
 6- Reach a wider audience than the geographic audience
for the company
 7-Participate in the conversations about the company
already taking place online. Disgruntled customers have
power through posting complaints on social media.
 8-Give the public access and insights about a company
leader otherwise seen as elite or out of touch

15. Characteristicsof
CorporateBlogs
 1- The absence of ads. Business that establish blogs do
not want advertising to accompany the blog. The blog
itself is an ad.
 2-preserve the sense of personality of an individual
blogger and create a human voice
 3- builds a broader reputation
 4-gives insights, histories, and explanations to
customer base
 5-companies can set up group blogs where several
employees take turns blogging
 6-large companies post blogging guidelines

16. Howmarketers
createcontentfor
LinkedIn
 Have an optimized profile, a robust company page, and
a habit of curating news and insights via company
pages
 Be consistent and track results
 For a company page, post professional content 3 to 5
times per day
 Consider using a Sponsored Update to reach beyond
the current following
 Align content to member’s needs and interests
 Follow up all comments

17. BadCorporate
Blogging
 A blog that fails to disclose sponsorship
 Failure to follow ethical standards for marketers. A
corporate blog is a part of corporate marketing and
should follow all ethical restrictions.
 Failure to disclose free gifts reviewed in the blog
 Lying about anything at any point in the blog

18. References
 Alderson, R. (2015). Beyond Dingbats: the topographic
legacy of Hermann Zapf. Retrieved from
https://www.dezeen.com/2015/06/17/beyond-dingbats-
typographic-legacy-of-hermann-zapf/
 Baym, N. (2015). Personal connections in the digital
age (2nd ed). Malden, MA: Polity Press.
 Handley, A. (2014). Everybody writes: Your go-to guide
to creating ridicoulsly good content (2nd ed.). Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.
 Rettberg. J.W., (2013). Blogging (2nd ed). Malden,
MA: Polity Press.