This study uses an online questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese social media users’ acceptance of firm-generated credibility-building posts (FGCPs) on Sina Weibo. The findings show that heuristic cues related to content (i.e., topics regarding competence, benevolence, and integrity) and source (i.e., firm nationality and industry types) along with the moderating role of topic, account, and platform familiarity cues significantly influence users’ acceptance level of such posts. After incorporating the insights gained from participants’ responses to open-ended questions in the questionnaire, this study concludes with practical recommendations for crafting effective FGCPs on social media platforms like Sina Weibo.

This study investigates the social media strategies that Chinese museums use in communicating on Weibo, focusing on the ways these museums engage with the public and the effectiveness of their online interactions. Combining grounded theory and content analysis, the authors analyze 319 posts from six major museums and 842 posts from 36 smaller museums. Their findings suggest that although museums effectively use social media for educational purposes, there is room for more interactive and diverse content to enhance public engagement. The study provides practical insights on how museums can optimize their social media strategies by emphasizing audience-centered communication and greater interactivity in order to foster deeper connections with the public.

Environmental discussions have increased on social media, along with the rising interest in sustainability. This study introduces a modified procedure for a deliberate metaphor analysis of environmental metaphors in two U.S. energy companies’ Twitter (now X) accounts. Its findings suggest that the two U.S. companies used HUMAN, WEALTH, COLOR, JOURNEY, WAR, SPORTS, STEWARDSHIP, EVIL CREATURE, FOOD, and CRIME metaphors to fulfill publicizing, commercial, persuasive, evocative, and interactive functions, as well as to communicate their inherent environmental identities as protectors, stewards, competitors, and collaborators. These findings provide insights into corporate environmental communication and offer new perspectives on the communicative functions of deliberate metaphors.

Employers are increasingly turning to innovative artificial intelligence recruiting technologies to evaluate candidates’ online presence and make hiring decisions. Such social media screening, or social profiling, is an emerging approach to assessing candidates’ social influence, personalities, and workplace behaviors through their publicly shared data on social networking sites. This article introduces the processes, benefits, and risks of social profiling in employment decision making. The authors provide important guidance for job applicants, technical and professional communication instructors, and hiring professionals on how to strategically respond to the opportunities and challenges of automated social profiling technologies.

This study analyzes 295 tweets by four U.S. companies engaged in discovering a vaccine for COVID-19. Tweets were analyzed to understand how their Twitter feeds balanced corporate and product branding (vaccine, medicines, etc.) and disseminated scientific information relating to COVID-19. The results suggest that these companies were actively embedding technical information about COVID-19 in their corporate and product branding. Tweets providing technical and scientific information about the progress made toward developing a COVID-19 vaccine garnered high levels of user engagement from their target audience. Findings from this study indicate the growing importance of technical communication in corporate settings during a public health crisis.

To investigate the generic features of firm-generated advertisements (FGAs) in cross-cultural contexts, this study analyzed 327 FGAs by Dell Technologies and the Lenovo Group on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Integrating affordances and multimodality into genre analysis, the study showed that the FGAs were characterized by (a) flexible move structure, (b) persuasive language, (c) visual illustration, and (d) hyperlinks, hashtagging (#), and mentioning (@) functions. The FGAs on Sina Weibo, compared with those on Twitter, tended to use more language play, emojis, and contextual product pictures and show more emphasis on the niche of products, incentives, and celebrity endorsement.

The social media account for Steak-umm, a frozen food product, achieved notoriety in 2020 for its messages about how to evaluate the quality of information. Bogomoletc and Lee proposed that the positive reaction to these messages being posted by a brand account resulted from expectancy violations and verified their idea with an analysis of 1,000 randomly selected tweets responding to Steak-umm's tweets. This comment responds to their work from a public health perspective and asks whether the expectancies that were violated were also those of nonscientists in general, allowing the tweets to serve as relief amidst a cavalcade of misinformation about COVID-19.

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

Many expected federal public health agencies to provide timely and accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic. That did not happen. In response, physicians and epidemiologists have explored new ways to educate the public about COVID-19 and protect against misinformation. One genre that has received significant uptake is the tweetorial, threaded tweets that educate followers on technical matters. This article builds on prior genre studies of the tweetorial to explore how #MedTwitter and #EpiTwitter communities have refashioned the emerging conventions of the tweetorial as part of efforts to protect the public from COVID-19 misinformation.

COVID-19 has forced many businesses to adjust their communication strategies to fit a new reality. One surprising example of this strategy adjustment came from the company Steak-umm, maker of frozen sliced beef. Instead of finding new ways to promote its products, the company shifted its focus to the public’s urgent needs, breaking down possible approaches to navigating information flow during the pandemic. This resulted in overwhelming praise on social and news media, including almost 60,000 new Twitter followers within a week. Drawing on expectancy violation theory, this case study examines Steak-umm’s strategy, the content of social media responses, and why the approach was successful.

Upon declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) orchestrated a global risk-communication outreach. The WHO’s objective was to persuade the public to upend and alter their lives so as to contain the disease and minimize its spread and infection. The WHO found a simple and efficient medium to communicate glocally through the social media application WhatsApp, through which individuals could access information without gatekeeping by governments and local agencies.

This article addresses how social media platforms can better highlight expert voices through design choices. Misinformation, after all, has exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, and platforms have struggled to address the issue. The authors examine this critical gap in validation mechanisms in the current social media platforms and suggest possible solutions for this urgent problem with third-party partnerships.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter has served as a leading public platform for sharing, receiving, and engaging with virus-related content. To protect users from misinformation, Twitter has enforced stricter content-vetting policies. This article positions Twitter as a politically motivated entity and briefly traces Twitter’s use and applications of the term “harmful content.” The author investigates how the platform’s broadening of its definition of harmful content illustrates Twitter’s strategy for combating misinformation by acting on kairotic moments in a way that is shaped by the diverse authoritative voices already guiding larger public COVID-19 discussions. The article concludes by examining the roles these observations can play in technical and professional communication classrooms.

Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. To investigate how companies use Twitter, this study analyzes the content of the Twitter accounts of four large information technology companies, focusing on the arrangement of different Twitter accounts and on message characteristics (content, message elements, and communication strategies). The results show that companies used architectures of different Twitter accounts to serve various stakeholder groups. The companies’ tweets covered diverse topics within the corporate, marketing, and technical communication domains. The tweets focused more on providing information and promoting action than on facilitating dialogue.

This article examines the tactical online rhetorical choices of a young African American professional communicator, Gina. Drawing on situated analysis to show how Gina engaged with her African American Hush Harbor (AAHH) of young professionals online, the author argues that Gina used Twitter to maintain professional network ties in her AAHH community while resisting organizational discourses of surveillance. The author further argues that analyzing particular choices in boundaryless career situations allows us to see important nontask-based professional writing activity.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

With their timely, interactive nature and wide public access, social media have provided a new platform that empowers stakeholders and corporations to interact in crisis communication. This study investigates crisis communication strategies and stakeholders’ emotions in response to a real corporate crisis—the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—in order to enhance our understanding of socially mediated crisis communication. The authors examine 8,530 responses from Chinese stakeholders to crisis communication on the Chinese microblogging Web site Sina Weibo. Their findings suggest that the integrated use of accommodative and defensive communication strategies in the early stage of postcrisis communication prevented escalation of the crisis.

Many studies have examined organizations’ use of specific types of online media, but few studies have examined how organizations generate dialogues and develop relationships by using multiple online communication platforms. This study takes an integrated approach by examining how top global organizations incorporate brand Web sites, Facebook, and Twitter to cultivate relationships with stakeholders. Its findings suggest that those particular online media are used similarly, that is, more for information dissemination than user engagement and more for one-way than two-way communication. The findings also suggest that the types of products promoted can affect the way that organizations use different online media to develop relationships.

This study examines interaction between corporate representatives and critical consumers in today’s social media environment. Applying a microanalytical form of discourse analysis to a data set of corporate Facebook page discussions, the study contributes to a better understanding of the communicative resources that organizations use as part of their impression management (IM) for upholding their acceptability and promoting their credibility. The study also reveals the complexity of the work of corporate Facebook representatives, who need to align their individual IM with that of the organization while adjusting to the technologically mediated context.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

This study examines how, in the realm of social media, Epinions Advisors voluntarily perform a role similar to that of a technical editor. Specifically, the study examines Advisors' use of politeness strategies at various levels of edit in order to motivate product reviewers to improve their work. The study categorizes Advisors' comments about 60 product reviews according to levels of edit in order to determine how Advisors address editing as they attempt to fulfill the concerns of technical editors: advocating for readers and mentoring writers. Updated reviews and Advisor–reviewer discussions suggest that Advisors motivated reviewers to edit.

This article introduces a new IText technology called Classroom Salon. The goal of Classroom Salon is to bring some of the benefits of social media—the expression of personal identity and community—to writing classrooms. It provides Facebook-like features to writing classes, where students can form social networks as annotators within the drafts of their peers. The authors discuss how the technology seeks to capture qualities of historical salons, which also built communities around texts. They also discuss the central features of the Classroom Salon system, how the system changes the dynamics of the writing classroom, current efforts to evaluate it, and future directions.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

This article offers an example case of technical communicators integrating the social bookmarking site Delicious into existing work environments. Using activity theory to present conceptual foundations and concrete steps for integrating the functionalities of social media, the article builds on research within technical communication that argues for professional communicators to participate more fully in the design of communication systems and software. By examining the use of add-ons and tools created for Delicious, and the customized use of Rich Site Syndication (RSS) feeds that the site publishes, the author argues for addressing the context-sensitive needs of project teams by integrating the functionality of social media applications generally and repurposing their user-generated data.