The next speaker in our ECREA 2012 panel is Eli Skogerbø, whose focus is on the use of social media in last year's local election campaign in Norway. Eli begins by pointing to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's personal Facebook page, which shares a substantial amount also of his private activities; such uses of social media by politicians have become relatively well-established by now.

Social media have become quite integrated into political communication processes, then, but how are such tools generally used – especially during campaigns? Eli's project examined the Facebook and Twitter profiles of some 32 leading candidates of the …

The next paper at ECREA 2012 is presented by Jean-Marc Francony, who shifts our attention to the French presidential election and begins by noting the difficult process of shuttling between data analysis and theory-development in the context of political uses of social media. His approach is to consider the election as a media event, and the research builds on some 2 million tweets from the socialist primaries and the French presidential election. Specific live media events during this time were also investigated.

This research considers the Twittersphere as connecting individuals, organisations, and live events. The data include time-specific materials as …

Day two at ECREA 2012 starts with a panel on political communication using social media which I've had a hand in organising, and the panel begins with our paper on Twitter in the recent Queensland state elections. The slides are below – audio to follow... is also available now.

Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Sonia González Molina, whose interest is in the use of social media by the Catalan Road Service, the main source of official road information in Catalunya. She interviewed the responsible communication officers and analysed the organisation's Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as corporate documents.

Digital technology was introduced to the organisation in the 1990s, in order to enhance public communicate and develop new information services. This represents a process of convergence, and specifically enabled a greater amount of dialogue communication which – ideally – connects the organisation and its audiences, enables it …

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

The Tour is a global media event with a substantial social media audiences, and is watched for the sporting action, as an act of sports fandom, as well as as a media event in its own right …

My own paper starts the ICA-flavoured session at ECREA 2012 this afternoon; my presentation built on our research into the uses of Twitter to explore how we might reconceptualise the public sphere. The slides are below; audio will follow. now online, too.

Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere from Axel Bruns

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sheetal Agarwal, whose focus is also on Occupy-related Twitter networks. Is Occupy a networked organisation, and if so, what kind of networked organisation? How might its organisational features be assessed? There are plenty of theories about organisation, from organisational sociology to political economy, which have been applied to the study of communication networks, international relations, and digital media. Such theories variously see organisations as bounded or unbounded, intentional or emergent, membership-driven and/or issue-focussed.

Common to organisations are strategies for resource allocation, responsiveness to external environments and flows, and capabilities for long-term …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

Fairly violent clearouts of the campsite took place across the timeframe of the Occupy Oakland campaign, since October 2011. The local movement has gained a particular reputation within the overall Occupy movement.

Tim and …