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.