It looks like 2016 is destined to start with a bang rather than a whimper: I’m delighted to announce that a major collection I’ve edited with my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen in Oslo and Stockholm has now been published. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics is a 37-chapter, 560-page collection of current research on the uses of social media in political activism and electoral campaigning.

From Anonymous to the Scottish Independence Referendum, from oppositional politics in Azerbaijan to elections in Kenya, the Companion covers a broad range of social media uses and impacts. It combines this with a number of keystone chapters that review and update existing political communication theory for a social media context. My sincere thanks to our many contributors, my co-editors, and especially our hard-working editorial coordinator Nicki Hall for making this publication happen – hope you enjoy it!

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, whose focus is on the use of social media in the 2013 upper house election in Japan. Online campaigning has been studied for some time already, with considerable focus on the impact of technological innovation; such research has found that online practices often mirrored offline practices. Online political marketing in particular has been an extension of traditional offline marketing techniques, and the use of social media for campaign involvement has also been explored recently.

Post-war electoral reforms in Japan set up multimember electoral districts where members of the same party would vie for the same seats. The law also distinguishes between political and campaign activities, and governs the distribution of campaign materials (including geographical distribution, the means and content of messages, and the distribution channels).

The final speaker at CMPM2014 is Stephen Mills, whose interest is in the question of professionalisation in political campaigning. But what is being professionalised here? Individuals, institutions, systems? Does professionalisation occur when a cohort of professionals replace a previous non-professional cohort, or is this a more comprehensive institutional change through which new cultural norms are being adopted?

Since when does such professionalisation happen? Is it already over, is it continuing, or is it yet to happen? Does it happen quickly or slowly, disruptively or in an organised manner? And what is it caused by – exogenous factors such as technological change, or endogenous dynamics of adoption, adaptation, hybridisation?