Advertisers of today are facing a great challenge in a landscape where it becomes even more difficult to break through the clutter and convince consumers to buy their products. In order to succeed, they need to come up with new ways of communicating with their customers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if micro-blogging could be considered an effective media choice in order to enhance the perception of brand associations and traditional communication effects. The subject is of interest as brands are putting increasingly more resources into this communication channel. However, at the current date the marketing effects of micro-blogging is unexplored in academic research.

The urbanization of the world is increasing. How it affects bird populations have been well studied during the last decade, and comparisons between urban and non-urban habitats have been carried out. A common method for measuring habitat quality is to calculate the population density. This method is easy to use, but have been criticized during the last couple of years. In this study, data of population densities was compared with data on reproduction success.

This research aim was to examine the relationship between the choice of lunch dish, level of education, gender and age of the participants. The understanding of diet and it´s influence on health was also of interest to the research, as was cooking interest and travel habits. The goal was to demonstrate how these factors affect the adult individuals in their choice of lunch. A questionnaire was filled in by 99 guests in a chosen restaurant. The results show that many of these factors influence the choice of dish, especially those related to gender.

Within the last year many companies have proactively started to communicate their flaws and weaknesses, believing that this will lead to they being perceived as more personal and human. Dominos Pizza is one of many examples of a company using this practice as a strategic tool for communication. However, the problem concerning the above arises as we found that there was a very limited amount of research defining the effects of communicating flaws, where the company's both dispatcher and initiator. Our study aims to fill the gap between this growing trend and the limited research explaining the communication effects. The study was carried out as an experiment where a total of 420 respondents participated.

A case study was done of Sthlm Policy Group, a consulting agency that mainly targets NGOs and government agencies in the peace and security sector. The goal of the case study was to explore the tendency of NGOs in Sweden to hire commercial consulting companies. The main interest was to see what the key reasons are for NGOs to hire private consulting agencies, but also to explore what problems that might be associated with such relationships. Interviews were carried out with representatives of the consulting agency, with its clients as well as with other NGOs that were identified as potential clients. The interviewed NGOs and government agencies were found to approve of the use of commercial consultants.

At the time of the study, there is no law to prevent an employer from doing criminal background checks. Employers for School and childcare have to do criminal background checks before hiring but the background checks have increased significantly in other industries as well. The aim of this thesis is to analyze and explain what interest employers may have in jobseekers history and how it can affect people?s privacy. To do this I have used right dogmatic approach combined with four interviews with different employers to get their perspective on the subject.

The company Microshop is interested in implementing new features in their product-website, and would like to examine the possibility and usefulness of introducing such functionality. When designing interaction for commercial websites, it is important to make the menus easy to use, and refrain from using deep hierarchies in order to avoid causing unnecessary burden for the users. There is an interest among users for adaptive functionality, but this requires great amounts of trust in the website from the user. Something which can be created by refraining from using implicit information, and provide detailed explanations throughout the website. A usability test was conducted in order to complement the data gathered from the theoretical study, the interviews and the expert evaluations.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine what needs and expectations the patrons have on the local public library services for adult students. With increased knowledge of these matters the library will be able to support and improve the service for users. The focus is on adult students with immigrant background who study Swedish as second language in a municipal adult education school. The main questions are: How do adult students use the library at present? What do they consider to be most important when using the public library for their studies? How do these expectations correspond to their experience of the library services? Two focusgroups and one in-depth interview were carried out.

The aim with the study is to find key factors relating to internal marketing and to improve the process between the operating organization and its customers. A qualitative study is carried out within an organization active in the Swedish healthcare. The qualitative approach is carried out by collecting empirical data through observations, personal interviews and group interviews.The Physiotherapy Clinic at the Karolinska University Hospital is in the focus of the empirical study. The study locates existing differences in perceptions and comes up with recommendations for actions to improve the process of organisations within the Swedish healthcare and their customers. The study's results are that internal marketing can bring a lot to service-selling organizations and that the organizations internal conditions are as important as the external ones.Communication appears to be a key factor for an organization that has applied internal marketing.

Agency theory describes the conflict of interest between the principal (stockholders) and the agent (CEO). Aligning the incentives of executives with those of the owners is the most direct way to mitigate the agency problem. If there is no meaningful link between CEO compensation and company performance, it is doubtful that the large sums of assets in public corporations are being managed efficiently. In theory the solution is simple reward the CEO when shareholders wealth increases. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if there is a relationship between company performance and CEO compensation among Swedish companies, in materials and information technology industry.

The purpose of this study has been to investigate the virtual world that people are part of on online dating sites. To do this we have investigated two different research questions, which are the following: What functions do the online dating sites provide? Why and how are the online dating sites being used by their members? In order to gather information about these matters, we have used a qualitative method consisting of participating observation, scrutinizing and single person interviews. Our results indicate that people have different goals with their usage of online dating sites; some are looking for love, a long-term relationship while others are looking for sexual contact. There are many different online dating sites to choose from depending on the users? objective.

This thesis addresses online marketing within gaming industry. Some customer identifying methods and website development were introduced as well as examined over the Internet. An empirical study focusing on two gaming companies has been carried out. The purpose has been to describe the use of internet by online gaming companies for online marketing. The thesis will focus on finding out how online gaming companies identify their target groups on internet and how they use internet to reach out to their consumers.

This report is focusing on problems with introducing standard enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) in businesses. A study has been carried out on a service and support department at a Swedish heat metering company, SVM North Node. The study aims to help the company become a better customer in choice and customization of a new ERP system. We make a description of the department studied and the work carried out there, on the basis of learning, knowledge and cooperation. As a final point we present some ideas on how computer systems could support their work, hoping that this will result in them making adequate demands on a new ERP system.

In this Master thesis interest is directed towards approaches toinformation literacy (IL) and critical thinking in the educationalactivities of university libraries. The aspiration of universitylibrarians to promote the critical abilities of students isproblematized. At the center of attention is the project?Lärandemål för informationskompetens? [Learning outcomes forinformation literacy], which in 2006 was carried out incollaboration between the Swedish university libraries, in responseto the educational reforms connected to the Bologna Process.Through the discourse analytical framework of NormanFairclough, documents related to the project ?Lärandemål förinformationskompetens? are studied in order to identifydominating approaches to IL. The purpose is to investigate anddiscuss the possible implications of the dominating perspectives,with regard to the development of critical thinking amongstudents.The study results in the identification of two main discourses, thestandardization discourse and the discourse on employability.

This master thesis is a result of the work carried out for Research Electronics at Siljansnäs. The company develops customized electronical systems. Because of the rapidly increasing interest in colour displays there has been a desire within the company to represent information from sensors and electrical systems in a more advanced way.Due to the mentioned reason above we were given the assignment to solve how a colour display using the STN technique works. The technique is used by small displays, the size of QVGA. Our ambition of this diploma work is to develop a fully functionally test prototype to evaluate the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and the LCD controller.