The Semiofest Experience

Contribution to the study of social network’s conversations

by Ximena Tobi

Since the emergence of social media, companies and brands have perceived as necessary to join the virtual space where millions of people worldwide move, perform actions and communicate. In the same way, as a clothing brand open a store on the most popular city avenue, companies found as “a must” having a Facebook, Twitter and other social network profiles; and as a consequence they incorporate a new position to their staff: the community manager.

At the same time, at the University of Buenos Aires, where I teach Semiotics since 2001 (and where Gabriela and me initially met when studying the BA in Communication Sciences, in the nineties) I was analyzing for many years graphic institutional communication of Buenos Aires radiostations.

It was the crossing of my “historic” research and the social networks boom the trigger to my new object of study. Two years ago my institutional communication research shifted from graphic adds to Facebook fanpages. Specifically, I started studying how Buenos Aires radio stations use their Facebook fanpages, opening their own institutional space to their listeners voices; something that has never happened before with the previous institutional communication formats.

This report, presented at Semiofest 2013 – Barcelona, examines a methodology —developed from the combination of semiotics of media, discourse analysis and media ecology— to analyze Facebook fanpages as spaces/channels of institutional communication (brand/company-consumer), regardless of the category brand.

“The Mamushka effect”: The Facebook Fanpages as Companies’ Communication Spaces by Ximena Tobiis licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported License.