Since the inception of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, public relations firms and their clients have benefited from a valuable platform allowing for instant and global communication. Essential social engagement tools such as trust, loyalty and information dissemination have been transferred from a physical, non-mediated environment to a virtual, technology mediated one. Therefore, it is now vital that public relations practitioners understand the emerging field of cyberpsychology and the important elements that nurture e-Trust, e-Loyalty and Positive Virality. Through qualitative research methods, e-Trust, e-Loyalty and Positive Virality are comprehensively and conceptually defined. Each is also operationally defined in terms of number of users, number of followers and number of tweets, shares or media impressions. A Cyber-Success Model is proposed as a way to explain how these three digital components may work together to achieve a high degree of public engagement. The specific conceptual and operational criteria as well as the Cyber-Success Model are then used to evaluate public engagement with regard to Edelman Digital campaigns executed for clients PayPal and Ebay as examples of how the model is applied. Conclusions and future recommendations for Edelman Digital, the field of public relations and the field of cyberpsychology are discussed.

The Respect Movement is the effort to reduce the number of sexual assaults at Arizona State University by the organizations Man Up and WOW Factor (Women of Worth). One of the movement's goals is to grow its membership. The aim of this thesis is to understand the members' motivations to ensure that the movement's communication responds to these motivators and to add to the scholarly investigation of volunteer motivation and communication. This research will analyze what motivates people to be involved with social change organizations. Once those motivators are discovered, the Respect Movement can start incorporating them into their communication to draw more people to the movement and to continue engaging their current members. Scholarly literature reveals that people are more motivated to participate in something if they are recognized and if they feel important and valuable to the organization. A survey was used in this study to gather responses to the following questions: 1) Are members currently motivated to attend Respect Movement functions? 2) What type of communication are they currently responding to; 3) What types of people and students are being engaged by the movement and with whom could they do a better job of connecting? 4) What motivates members when they are working toward a goal? 5) How well is the Respect Movement currently motivating its members? Overall, the findings from the survey show that the Respect Movement is effectively motivating students to be involved with the organization. The main recommendations from the survey results are: 1) increase attendance at events by making them special or meaningful to the attendees and creating a positive experience; 2) help the members find practical ways to achieve the goal of reducing the number of sexual assaults on campus by building a culture of respect as a habit in their lives; 3) make members feel appreciated by asking their advice. The respondents noted this was very important to them; 4) continue to develop the values of community, integrity, compassion and justice within the organization. Future research could include additional study of the movement's members through other research approaches such as interviews or conducting a similar survey with members from other types of community organizations.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examined how seven federal agencies utilized Twitter during a major natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy. Data collected included tweets between October 26-31, 2012 via TweetTracker, as well as federal social media policy doctrines and elite interviews, to discern patterns in the guidance provided to federal public information officers (PIOs). While scholarly research cites successful local and state government efforts utilizing social media to improve response efforts in a two-way communications interaction, no substantive research addresses social media’s role in crisis response capabilities at the federal level.

This study contributes to the literature in three ways: it focuses solely on the use of social media by federal agencies in a crisis setting; it illuminates policy directives that often hamper federal crisis communication response efforts; and it suggests a proposed model that channels the flow of social media content for PIOs. This is especially important to the safety of the nation moving forward, since crises have increased. Additionally, Twitter was adopted only recently as an official communications tool in 2013. Prior to 2013, social media was applied informally and inconsistently.

The findings of this study reveal a reliance upon a one-way, passive communication approach in social media federal policy directives, as well as vague guidelines in existing crisis communications models. Both dimensions are counter to risk management and crisis communication research, which embrace two-way interactivity with audiences and specific messaging that bolsters community engagement, which are vital to the role of the PIO. The resulting model enables the PIO to provide relevant information to key internal agencies and external audiences in response to a future crisis.

In the delivery of a public service, meeting the needs of its users through cocreation has generated considerable research. Service users are encouraged to engage with public services through dialogue, sustained interaction, and equal partnership, wherein the role of the user changes from passive to active. As the relationship between service provider and service user evolves, researchers have sought to explain how resources, time, accessibility, and bandwidth may affect such relationships, specifically concerning the economically disadvantaged. While many researchers have focused on the logistical barriers that inhibit cocreation among the economically disadvantaged presented by such factors as cost and transportation, limited research has examined the relationship between the service provider and economically disadvantaged service user. Combining previous research, this study examines what economically disadvantaged service users actually do when they cocreate value with a public service by conducting 12 in-depth interviews with participants of SNAP-Ed, nutrition education for persons eligible for government assistance. The study's findings suggest that cocreation exists through relational characteristics of collaboration, isolation, acceptance, connection, and guidance that help in the development and maintenance of relationships, and that a relationship between service provider and user could be further typified by equality. This finding suggests that equality is an independent construct not necessary in the process of cocreation--a departure from previous research--but rather a way to approach the service provider/user relationship. This study is intended as a step toward examining cocreation through the development of organization-public relationships.