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While all companies hope to create a positive organizational culture, many of the most effective use corporate narratives to communicate company values. The purpose of this article is to identify common techniques used in these organizations and develop a framework for leaders wishing to employ this method.

This article draws heavily on personal interviews conducted with individuals in organizations identified as having effective methods of corporate storytelling. The interview participants ranged from CEOs and other executives to rank‐and‐file employees. In addition, this article conducts a review of relevant literature on the subject and distills a set of key components of effective corporate storytelling.

This article identifies four distinct characteristics of effective corporate storytelling: purpose, allusion, people, and appeal. Narratives which are told with a particular purpose in mind, which allude to a company's history and role in the market, which are told by the right person to the proper audience, and which contain an inspiring emotional appeal are far more likely to impact corporate culture and employee behavior than those which fall short on any one of these categories.

This article outlines a simple and straightforward framework for corporate storytelling. For both business leaders hoping to use a narrative to enhance or change a company's culture and for those studying effective leadership techniques, this article offers new insights from successful corporate storytellers distilled from personal interviews as well as key ideas from a wide array of existing literature.

This paper seeks to outline a social epistemological and ethical warrant for engaging in knowledge exchange on the social web, and to emphasise socio‐cognitive and emotional factors behind motivation and credibility in communities supported by social software. An attempt is made to identify positive and negative patterns of interaction from this perspective and to argue for more positive intervention on the part of the information profession.

The paper outlines social epistemological and related theory, cognitive and social drivers of behaviour and then draws together evidence to justify the definition of patterns that will be important to the project.

A programme of evaluating online knowledge exchange behaviour using a social epistemological framework is needed. In order to do this, methodological development coupling formal epistemological with interpretive techniques for examining belief formation are also necessary.

Considerations for the design and deployment of knowledge platforms and for engagement with existing communities are outlined.

The ideas presented attempt to define an important role for the information profession within a new paradigm of participation and social interaction online.

The connection between social epistemology theory and LIS has long been appreciated, but social epistemology is rarely applied to practice or to online social platforms and communities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate longitudinal features of an established social question-answering (Q&A) site to study how question-answer resources and other community features change over time.

Statistical analysis and visualisation was performed on the full data dump from the Stack Overflow social Q&A site for programmers.

The timing of answers is as strong a predictor of acceptance – a proxy for user satisfaction – as the structural features of provided answers sometimes associated with quality. While many questions and answer exchanges are short-lived, there is a small yet interesting subset of questions where new answers receive community approval and which may end up being ranked more highly than early answers.

As a large-scale data oriented research study, this work says little about user motivations to find and contribute new knowledge to old questions or about the impact of the resource on the consumer. This will require complementary studies using qualitative and evaluative methods.

While content contribution to social question-asking is largely undertaken within a very short time frame, content consumption is usually over far longer periods. Methods and incentives by which content can be updated and maintained need to be considered. This work should be of interest to knowledge exchange community designers and managers.

Few studies have looked at temporal patterns in social Q&A and how time and the moderation and voting systems employed may shape resource quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of weblogs by political parties in the 2005 general election campaign. It seeks to identify why, why not, and how parties used their weblogs during the election campaign.

The weblogs of the five political parties which had a weblog were assessed, and eight party e‐campaigners were interviewed.

The findings contrast with those of studies of the 2004 US presidential campaign where blogs appeared to play a significant campaigning role. Rather, in the UK, party blogs were essentially used as one‐way communication channels which added colour to party web sites. As a result, such weblogs may have encouraged visitors to return because of some form of voyeurism, but they were not either effective conversational, campaigning, or promotional tools.

The paper is based on a UK general election of an experimental political communication channel.

Suggests the key elements required for the effective use of weblogs. Also suggests that individual candidate weblogs may be a more appropriate channel to reach electors than party‐controlled weblogs. The motivation for using a weblog seems to be essentially a judgement that it might be worthwhile experimenting with one. However, until there is significant evidence that weblogs can have a tangible effect, it is likely that they will remain merely part of the background to a UK general election campaign.

The paper provides a means of judging the value of weblogs within political communication by political actors.

The prediction of pre-election polls is an issue of concern for both politicians and voters. The Taiwan nine-in-one election held in 2014 ended with jaw-dropping results; apparently, traditional polls did not work well. As a remedy to this problem, the purpose of this paper is to utilize the comments posted on social media to analyze civilians’ views on the two candidates for mayor of Taichung City, Chih-chiang Hu, and Chia-Lung Lin.

After conducting word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging for the collected reviews, this study constructs the opinion phrase extraction rules for identifying the opinion words associated with the attribute words. Next, this study classifies the attribute words into six municipal governance-related topics and calculates the opinion scores for each candidate. Finally, this study uses correspondence analysis to transform opinion information on the candidates into a graphical display to facilitate the interpretation of voters’ views.

The results show that the topics of candidates’ backgrounds and transport infrastructure were the two most critical factors for the election prediction. Based on the predication, Lin outscores Hu by 17.74 percent which is close to the real election results.

This study proposes new rules for the extraction of Chinese opinion words associated with attribute words.

This study applies Chinese semantic analysis to assist in predicting election results and investigating the topics of concern to voters.

The proposed opinion phrase extraction rules for Chinese social media, as well as the election forecast process, can provide valuable references for political parties and candidates to plan better nomination and election strategies.

This paper aims to theorise the concept of corporate brand covenant.

Christian theology is drawn on to define and identify the source of the notion of covenant. Similarly, a review of the literature on the meaning and management of corporate branding is presented. Following a thorough review of the literature, the notion of a corporate brand covenant is conceptualised and discussed. This is firmly supported by a semiotic deconstruction of a corporate advertisement from HSBC.

Six important findings emerged from the study. The first is the Christian theological insight into the notion of covenant. This finding drew the attention of corporate branding academics to the source of this phenomenon. Second, a total of six cardinal principles (initial scenario; a covenanter, a covenant and a covenantee; the covenant is binding on all parties; the covenant is perpetual; the covenant is irreversible; the covenant stems from God and is then handed on to man) were proposed. Third, a template highlighting how the biblical covenant is managed was conceptualised. Fourth, six mandatory components of corporate branding: firm's personality; corporate positioning; interactions; corporate communications; stakeholders; corporate reputation/image; were identified. Fifth, an integrative framework highlighting the points of linkages between the biblical covenant and the corporate brand‐oriented covenant was developed. Sixth, a new definition of corporate brand covenant was suggested and supported by a semiotic deconstruction of HSBC's corporate advertising campaign.

There is little literature devoted to corporate brand covenant. The majority of works addressing this concept have done so anecdotally. Thus, by addressing this phenomenon via a Christian theological lens, the study solidifies the corporate branding literature, which at the moment lacks a strong foundation in social science theory.

Practitioners are encouraged to remember that the successful management of a corporate brand begins with a thorough understanding of what a corporate brand covenant means. An understanding of this concept will enable managers to define and deploy strategies that will promote corporate branding issues.

The paper extends the frontiers of existing anecdotal discourse on corporate brand covenant. In so doing, a fuller and more robust understanding of the concept of corporate branding among academics and practitioners is achieved.

This study aims to not only develop measurements of preferential attachment and homophily mechanisms based on their definitions and network theory but also examine the associations among these network mechanisms, community commitment, knowledge sharing and community citizenship behavior.

In total, 250 valid questionnaires are collected to examine the hypothesized associations. These hypotheses are examined by using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal both mechanisms are beneficial to develop new entrants’ emotional attachment to a virtual community, thereby motivating knowledge sharing and community altruistic behavior. The results contribute some practical and theoretical implications that are very helpful for the conceptualization of network mechanisms, community development, relationship management and incentives for extra-role behavior.

The literature on the link between network selection mechanisms and knowledge sharing remains unknown. This study is the pioneer to disclose this unknown association and examine the impacts of preferential attachment and homophily network mechanisms.

Online social networks can bridge the gap between distant individuals by simulating online experiences that closely resemble physical interactions. While people have positive experiences, such as joy, in a physical relationship and would like to enjoy those experiences online, they also have negative experiences, such as being subject to a lie. An online social network may allow users to lie to simulate a real-world social group better. However, lying must be prevented on social networks as unethical behavior. Thus, this study aims to investigate an ethical dilemma raised due to the two abovementioned perspectives.

This paper examines different aspects of lying in social networks, using a comprehensive descriptive literature review approach and a classification scheme.

Contrary to their initial intent, social networks are disrupting the traditional notion of human interaction, either by disregarding the presence of dishonesty or by attempting to regulate relationships. In this research, the authors examine the challenges of these two perspectives by identifying enablers, consequences and control measures of lying on social networks at the individual, social and technological levels. The authors also develop a framework to facilitate investigating this dilemma.

This paper examines a controversial topic. Although lying is unethical, allowing users to lie may be considered an appealing feature of social network platforms. This paper offers a framework to propose several research directions for future studies. This study’s examination focuses on the challenges associated with deception on social networks, prompting the formulation of three crucial questions regarding the potential impact of technology on such behavior.

The purpose of this study is to examine the respondents’ evaluation of the pervasiveness of fake news through various SM platforms in Kuwait. The authors also examined the respondents’ attitudes toward most fake news on SM. A total of 1,539 Kuwaitis were selected.

The questionnaire was the major tool for this study. The respondents, from whom demographic information was obtained, were asked about which SM platforms most frequently spread fake news, their attitudes toward the subjects most frequently involved in spreading fake news, their degree of use of the six SM platforms and interest in various subjects, and the attitudes toward the negative nature of SM news. SPSS was used for the data analysis.

The results showed that WhatsApp was the most likely to be used to disseminate fake news; Twitter and Instagram ranked second. The younger subjects were affected more by text and voice clips than the older ones.

The study, hopefully, produces new knowledge on the subject of fake news in social media, especially in the Arab world, since there are few studies conducted in the region. The study showed that WhatsApp was the SM tool most likely to be responsible for disseminating fake news in Kuwait, which may shed light on the usage of this application to be a news tool, rather than merely an interpersonal communication medium.

Social influence plays a crucial role in determining the size of information diffusion. Drawing on threshold models, we reformulate the nonlinear threshold hypothesis of social influence.

We test the threshold hypothesis of social influence with a large dataset of information diffusion on social media.

There exists a bell-shaped relationship between social influence and diffusion size. However, the large network threshold, limited diffusion depth and intense bursts become the bottlenecks that constrain the diffusion size.

The practice of viral marketing needs innovative strategies to increase information novelty and reduce the excessive network threshold.

In all, this research extends threshold models of social influence and underlines the nonlinear nature of social influence in information diffusion.