Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes.

I am researching how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) utilize social media and social networking sites (SM/SNS) in their efforts to organize, inform, and serve the communities they operate in as well as how they use these technologies to communicate and disseminate information. This study will gather data on persons posting on behalf of NGOs and examine SM/SNS data with the goal of developing a framework for both future research and contextual application of SM/SNS as a mediating artifact by NGOs. Many previous studies have addressed similar issues, but those studies are limited in context (e.g. one large software manufacturer) and they typically use only one type of research method. I will address this issue by aggregating a large data set and employing mixed methods to improve the generalizability of my findings and present a replicable framework for future studies of organizational use of SM/SNS.