How social media can afford engagement processes

The increasing popularity of social media has led many organizations to find new ways of customer engagement. This paper presents an initial pilot study to explore the affordance of social media in engagement processes. By applying the affordance theory and Porter’s process for engagement model, we used a case study approach to examine the case company’s Facebook and Twitter content to identify the engagement possibilities of social media. Our preliminary results show that social media opens a new channel for organisations to engage with their customers. We present a preliminary theoretical model to understand the how the functional affordances of social media are socialised in engagement processes, which ultimately gives rise to socialised affordances

Evaluation of the mouse mutant wasted as an animal model for ataxia telangiectasia. I. Age-dependent and tissue-specific effects.

The wasted mouse, an animal model proposed for the genetically transmitted human disease ataxia telangiectasia (AT), was examined for its biological, cytogenetic and biochemical properties. In affected homozygotes, a marked age-dependent decrease in the ratio of spleen and thymus to body weight, and a slight but significant decrease in the liver to body weight ratio were observed while no such change was found in the kidney. An age-dependent increase was observed in the frequency of both spontaneous and gamma-ray-induced chromosomal aberrations in bone marrow cells of wasted mice. In littermate control mice, neither of these alterations was observed in an age-dependent manner. The activity of a primer activating enzyme, which has been reported to be deficient in AT cells, also decreased with age in spleen cells, but not in liver cells of affected mice. However, alterations in apurinic DNA endonuclease activity were not detected in the developmental stages examined. These data indicate that this mouse mutant may serve as a useful animal model for studying the relationships between DNA repair and lymphoid tissue differentiation