The study of social representations in online communities in the context of branding

Online communities have turned out to be an ideal environment for the study of social discourse in general, and social representations in particular for several reasons: firstly, because of their virtual nature, they allow the researcher to unobtrusively observe and study the discourse taking place in these environments, secondly, the written word is the main means of interaction in these communities, thus attempting to capture the full meaning of the interactions and placing far more emphasis on the actual discourse (as opposed to face-to-face interactions where body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc all convey equally important information) and thirdly, there is an abundance of research material available, on virtually any subject of interest. Of course there are also shortcomings such as the anonymous nature of the Internet opening doors to gender-bending and invented persona, the often temporary nature of online social gatherings and the necessity to use words as the...