Evaluation of the Choose Life North Lanarkshire Awareness Programme: Final Report

The Centre for Men’s Health at Leeds Metropolitan University, with consultants from MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, and Men’s Health Forum, Scotland (MHFS), were appointed to conduct the Choose Life (North Lanarkshire) evaluation, beginning in March 2011. The key evaluation questions are: 1. How has the social marketing approach to increase awareness of crisis service numbers and de-stigmatise understandings and attitudes about suicide worked? 2. Has the programme as implemented been effective? Which aspects of the programme have been particularly effective? 3. Has this programme been of benefit to the community, in particular young men aged 16-35? 4. What contribution has the community made to the effectiveness of the programme

Understanding Social Media Shopping : Instagram and the reconfiguration of the practice of shopping

In the recent past, social media has gradually evolved from a platfrom for communication and personal exchange to a space where contemporary consumer desires are awakened, directed, and also fulfilled. Instagram, in particular, is one of the social media platforms that has made specific design decisions to combine the social and entertaining aspects of the native, virtual social media experience with shopping and consumption. At the same time, Instagram and similar platforms have become an integral and meaningful part of many people’s daily routines.Based on these considerations, this dissertation examines the consequences of introducing social media to thepractice of shopping. Using a sociomaterial practice approach, it examines how social media – as a sociomaterial assemblage – reconfigures shopping. Drawing on a digital ethnography centering on Instagram as the research field for collecting empirical material, it conceptualizes and vividly illustrates how social media shopping is emerging as a new form of shopping, what defines, enables, and constrains it, and shows how social media ultimately shapes practical shopping enactments.Moreover, this work conceptualizes the social media shopper as a hybrid actor that is shaped and constituted by both virtual and analog, both human and non-human entities. It presents how this actor, referred to as the ”social media shopper”, is gradually taking shape in and through practice, while also pointing to the consequences that this form of shopping has for its practitioners’ everyday lives. It is shown that social media shopping can be both a leisure activity and a demanding profession – often resulting in practitioners having to meet different demands at the same time. For example, they often feel challenged as they must simultaneously cater to their audience and their personal relationships, or maintain individuality and authenticity while adhering to specific social media scripts.As such, this work expands our understanding of how humans and technologies interact and constitute eachother. This dissertation also allows us to more critically understand the role that technology plays in everyday life by illuminating both positive and negative implications. By showing how social media contributes to the blurring of previously established boundaries and roles – such as buyer/seller or digital/analog etc. – it demonstrates that social media is decisively contributing to shopping becoming an integral part of the mundane and ordinary life of a mostly young, very social media-savvy consumer group. This dissertation therefore offers new insights into the understanding of novel, technology-driven consumption habits, and sheds light on a special group of consumers who have firmly integrated social media into their everyday lives. In doing so, it contributes to the broader discussion on the transformation and digitalization of retail

An Approach for Time-aware Domain-based Analysis of Users Trustworthiness in Big Social Data

In Online Social Networks (OSNs) there is a need for better understanding of social trust in order to improve the analysis process and mining credibility of social media data. Given the open environment and fewer restrictions associated with OSNs, the medium allows legitimate users as well as spammers to publish their content. Hence, it is essential to measure users’ credibility in various domains and accordingly define influential users in a particular domain(s). Most of the existing approaches of trustworthiness evaluation of users in OSNs are generic-based approaches. There is a lack of domain-based trustworthiness evaluation mechanisms. In OSNs, discovering users’ influence in a specific domain has been motivated by its significance in a broad range of applications such as personalized recommendation systems and expertise retrieval. The aim of this paper is to present an approach to analysing domain-based user’s trustworthiness in OSNs. We provide a novel distinguishing measurement for users in a set of knowledge domains. Domains are extracted from the user’s content using semantic analysis. In order to obtain the level of trustworthiness, a metric incorporating a number of attributes extracted from content analysis and user analysis is consolidated and formulated by considering temporal factor. We show the accuracy of the proposed algorithm by providing a fine-grained trustworthiness analysis of users and their domains of interest in the OSNs using big data Infrastructure

Influencer marketing on TikTok: the effectiveness of humor and followers’ hedonic experience

This work examines the determinants of the success of influencer marketing on the youth-focused TikTok, the fastest growing social network. It analyses the effects of influencers' account characteristics (originality, quality, quantity and humor) on their followers' hedonic experience and perceived opinion leadership, and how these impact on their intentions to follow influencers’ accounts and advice. A survey of followers of a popular Spanish TikTok influencer showed that originality and opinion leadership play important roles and that, because TikTok is distinctive, humor increased the effectiveness of messages (through hedonic experience). Suggestions are made to advance the understanding of this novel phenomenon

German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds

This study reviews – through desk research and expert interviews with Mittelstand companies, startups and ecosystem experts – the current status of the Israeli startup ecosystem and the Mittelstand region of North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW), Germany. As a case study, it highlights potential opportunities for collaboration and analyzes different engagement modes that might serve to connect the two regions. The potential synergies between the two economies are based on a high degree of complementarity. A comparison of NRW’s key verticals and Israel’s primary areas of innovation indicates that there is significant overlap in verticals, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), sensors and cybersecurity. Israeli startups can offer speed, agility and new ideas, while German Mittelstand companies can contribute expertise in production and scaling, access to markets, capital and support. The differences between Mittelstand companies and startups are less pronounced than those between startups and big corporations. However, three current barriers to fruitful collaboration have been identified: 1) a lack of access, 2) a lack of transparency regarding relevant players in the market, and 3) a lack of the internal resources needed to select the right partners, often due to time constraints or a lack of internal expertise on this issue. To ensure that positive business opportunities ensue, Mittelstand companies and startups alike have to be proactive in their search for cooperation partners and draw on a range of existing engagement modes (e.g., events, communities, accelerators). The interviews and the research conducted for this study made clear that no single mode of engagement can address all the needs and challenges associated with German-Israeli collaboration

The far-right’s influence on Twitter during the 2018 Andalusian elections: an approach through political leaders

New technologies allow politicians to spread their messages omitting the role of mediators. In this context, the Internet has also promoted the emergence of a new actor, digital opinion leaders, who go beyond traditional politics and seek to set the public agenda. One of the main questions nowadays is whether social media, and in particular Twitter as a consolidated tool for political communication, is only used as a sounding board for their political statements, spurring the messages of populist forces. With this in mind, the main objective of this research is to explore the influence of the far-right in the public debate of political leaders on Twitter, analyzing the specific case of the Andalusian regional elections held in December 2018. These elections can be considered a political turning point, with an extreme right party winning seats in a Spanish regional election for the first time in 35 years. In this paper we analyze if Vox used a differentiated strategy via this social network compared to the candidates of the traditional parties: PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, and Adelante Andalucía. Using content analysis on Twitter as a method, this research determines how Vox candidates worked as influencers of the digital political debate, despite being extra-parliamentary. Vox marked the agenda for the rest of the leaders, while generating great expectation among the audience