Purpose: Mobile social media (MSM), an interaction, exchange of information and creation of user-generated content, mediated by mobile devices is becoming the locomotive that drives forward evolution of the online world. a limited number of academic studies touched upon the MSM subject with all the papers being of a conceptual nature to provide recommendations to B2B firms. This paper aims to explore how B2B firms use MSM in reality.Methodology: This paper adopts the grounded theory approach to analyse interviews conducted in twenty-six B2B firms representing the UK advertising and marketing sector.Interviewees represent key decision-makers who understand the aspects of mobile technology use in their firms. Eighteen firms stressed the importance of social media as a trigger to adopt mobile devices. Follow-up data collection in these eighteen firms focuses on strategic orientation, processes, routines and skills required utilising MSM. Findings:We found that marketing and advertising firms use MSM for branding, sensing market, managing relationships and developing content. MSM is treated by businesses as a strategic firm-specific capability that drives firms' competitiveness, where imitation of such capability by competitors is limited because MSM skills are specific to individuals within organisations and MSM routines are manifested as a result of firm-specific MSM skills' interactions.Originality: This study is amongst the first to provide insights into B2B firms' practices of using MSM. Additionally, the research is novel because it discovers that MSM capability is 2 developed as a result of the overlap between individuals' and organisational knowledge and memory, contradicting existing theory on the subject.

The social media landscape creates opportunities for higher education institutions (HEIs) to amplify psychological engagement with students and to increase influence impressions by following student(s)-to-student(s) conversations and stories. Evidence of understanding how HEIs can utilise student-generated social media data for HE marketing and branding purposes is underexplored. This paper adopts a netnographic research method to illustrate how social media artefacts, such as the 'This Is Where I Study' (TIWIS) Facebook page, created by students in the form of dialogues and content, can be analysed by HEIs to listen, engage further and influence students' impressions. TIWIS illustrates that students' engagement with social media platforms such as Facebook is dynamic in nature. It comprises behavioural expressions (manifestations and actions such as likes and shares as well opinion comments) and individuals' experiences (subjective in nature stories and comments of personal experiences and views). Hence, netnographic analysis allows capturing actual behaviours via longitudinal 'big data' sets and support HEIs in proactive branding. Analysis of social media data demonstrates the value of encouraging and making accessible authentic conversations in order to create student-centred content.

The democratisation made possible by social media presents leadership studies with an opportunity to re-evaluate the often-neglected role of power in leader–follower dynamics. Drawing on Critical Leadership Studies and using a hybrid qualitative methodology, we discover that relationships between social media leaders and followers are co-produced and largely accompanied by continuous shifts and re-negotiation of power between social media leaders and social media followers. We show that social media platforms and their metrics play an important role in such power shifts by granting equal access to communication whilst potentially tilting information asymmetries in favour of the follower. The study also shows how these relationships can affect and even pervert the leaders’ problematic search for a ‘true self’. From this observation we draw attention to wider challenges in the social media context, which poses important questions for the leadership field.

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Purpose This paper aims to understand consumers’ response to the trust repair mechanisms adopted by corporate brands in a service sector context following prominent trust damaging organizational transgressions. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a qualitative approach, six focus group discussions are used to investigate three high-profile consumer trust erosion cases within the service sector. Findings Consumer trust varies by context. Despite the severity of trust damage, corporate brands can recover trust towards their brands amongst consumers not directly affected by transgressions. Not all trust repair mechanisms are equally applicable to all service contexts, and re-branding could be used as a trust repair mechanism. Corporate brands in the service sector should focus on sense-making, relational approaches and transparency. Orchestration of trust repair mechanisms needs to be integrated within the trust rehabilitation processes. Research limitations/implications This study illustrates it is important to reconsider trust repair processes to accommodate context and integrate post-transgression consumer research. Practical implications Successful corporate brand rehabilitation of consumer trust requires examination of the trustworthiness dimensions consumers express before and after the transgression to select the most appropriate trust repair mechanisms. Findings suggest organizations also have preventative trust repair management programs. Originality/value This research is the first to empirically apply the conceptual framework of Bachmann et al. (2015) to explore consumer responses to the trust repair mechanisms adopted by corporate brands by context.