Instagram has become an increasingly popular tool for sport organisations to share visual content. This study aims to examine how professional team sport organisations use Instagram for branding pu...

The emergence of social media and digital channels have expanded communication practices and also created new, virtual spaces where sports fans can interact and communicate directly with each other and with clubs. This article examines the potential for social media brand communities to develop a sense of both community and place amongst sports fans. It explores their influence in placemaking initiatives through the bonding and bridging social capital of a football club’s supporters. A netnographic study of a football club’s supporter networks (five channels) and their interactions with social media brand communities was performed. Data gathered from online sources was underpinned by interviews with 25 members of the community. Findings were analysed via NVivo using bridging and bonding social capital as a theoretical lens. The paper makes two primary contributions to knowledge. It enhances our understanding of the impact of SMBCs and their use in a sporting context—an area that has become increasingly significant during the COVID-19 pandemic enforced lockdowns that have kept fans out of venues. It also contributes to our understanding of the influence of placemaking strategies upon the social capital of supporter communities.

To attract a generation of workers and consumers who have never known a world without Wi‐Fi, smartphones, or social media, organizations increasingly have no choice but to incorporate digital technology into every aspect of their operations and processes. The leaders of Hydro‐X, a privately owned British enterprise, met the challenge of digital transformation by forming a knowledge exchange partnership with a local university and applying two business models to assess the current state of digital maturity at the firm and map out a strategy to improve it. Their experiences reflect the HINGE project planning methodology: Horizon scanning to evaluate the competition, Internal auditing, New model creation, Gap analysis, and Evaluation of options to determine next steps. As a result of their efforts, Hydro‐X fostered an intrapreneurial spirit among its staff and refined its e‐commerce platform to digitally target key audiences in order to tap into a new source of revenue.

In his work “Netnography Redefined,” Kozinets, highlights the massive growth of online communities, calling for new ways of conducting research o

Given the role of technology and social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, the aim of this article is to conduct a social network analysis of four COVID-19 conspiracy theories that were spread during the pandemic between March and June 2020. Specifically, in this article, we examine the 5G, Film Your Hospital, Expose Bill Gates, and the Plandemic Conspiracy theories. Identifying disinformation campaigns on social media and studying their tactics and composition is an essential step toward counteracting such campaigns. The current study draws upon data from the Twitter search application programming interface and uses social network analysis to examine patterns of disinformation that may be shared across social networks with sabotaging ramifications. The findings are used to generate the framework of disinformation seeding and information diffusion for understanding disinformation and the ideological nature of conspiracy networks that can support and inform future pandemic preparedness and counteracting disinformation. Furthermore, a Digital Mindfulness Toolbox is developed to support individuals and organizations with their information management and decision-making both in times of crisis and as strategic tools for potential crisis preparation.