The next ECREA 2012 speakers are Hallvard Moe and Anders Larsson, who compare social media use in the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish elections. They begin by noting that social media, and specific platforms, are deeply integrated with each other and with the wider mediasphere, and that this raises questions over the genres of use for each of these platforms, and the key actors which emerge in each case.

The next speaker in our ECREA 2012 panel is Eli Skogerbø, whose focus is on the use of social media in last year's local election campaign in Norway. Eli begins by pointing to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's personal Facebook page, which shares a substantial amount also of his private activities; such uses of social media by politicians have become relatively well-established by now.

The next paper at ECREA 2012 is presented by Jean-Marc Francony, who shifts our attention to the French presidential election and begins by noting the difficult process of shuttling between data analysis and theory-development in the context of political uses of social media. His approach is to consider the election as a media event, and the research builds on some 2 million tweets from the socialist primaries and the French presidential election. Specific live media events during this time were also investigated.

Day two at ECREA 2012 starts with a panel on political communication using social media which I've had a hand in organising, and the panel begins with our paper on Twitter in the recent Queensland state elections. The slides are below – audio to follow... is also available now.

Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Sonia González Molina, whose interest is in the use of social media by the Catalan Road Service, the main source of official road information in Catalunya. She interviewed the responsible communication officers and analysed the organisation's Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as corporate documents.

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

My own paper starts the ICA-flavoured session at ECREA 2012 this afternoon; my presentation built on our research into the uses of Twitter to explore how we might reconceptualise the public sphere. The slides are below; audio will follow. now online, too.

Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere from Axel Bruns

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sheetal Agarwal, whose focus is also on Occupy-related Twitter networks. Is Occupy a networked organisation, and if so, what kind of networked organisation? How might its organisational features be assessed? There are plenty of theories about organisation, from organisational sociology to political economy, which have been applied to the study of communication networks, international relations, and digital media.