Curated Participation: – A Study of Everyday Photography in Organizational Communication Strategy

Visuals are ubiquitous in strategic communication involving social media and there are high expectations on what visual social media can accomplish with regards to creating engagement among people. The research aim in this paper is to examine how employees experience curating images in social media as part of an organization’s strategic communication. The reasoning is based on an empirical study of curated participation at the photo-sharing platform Instagram to improve the reputation of a large public hospital. Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory of social life, the paper approaches the conditions of participation and employee engagement as a performance. It is argued that participation is shaped by the stage of the social media site and by negotiations between participants and the imagined audience. The study sheds light on the social conventions that underpin the performance of participation at visual social media platforms and point to the implications for employee engagement.