Shaping organizational image-power through images: Case histories of Instagram

Popular genres of social software increasingly act as regularized discourse within organizations. Recently, image-intensive social software applications have seen rapid adoption as another communicative genre within the ecology of the contemporary organization's social software strategy. These social software genre ecologies may help organizations actively shape what Faber calls image-power, the organization's self-conscious, self-reflective management of public perception and the concomitant shaping of patron identities. This paper proposes and then explores a qualitative coding schema for understanding organizational implementations of Instagram within a prominent news organization, a non-profit, and a for-profit retailer.