Social Media Commons^™

The 2008 Us Presidential Election And New Digital Technologies: Political Campaigns As Social Movements And The Significance Of Collective Identity, Stephanie Takaragawa, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The growing role of the Internet social networking sites (SNS) has served as a flash point for debate about the democratization of information, particularly in light of their perceived roles in the 2008 presidential election. This horizontal sharing of information undoubtedly facilitated the revival of the youth vote and volunteerism in many ways mimicking traditional grassroots approaches. While the role of the Internet SNS in mobilization efforts and information-sharing cannot be overstated, its effectiveness in creating a new “public sphere,” or transforming traditional electoral campaign strategies and communicative practices must be closely examined before generalizations about the democratization of media …

A Survey Of Recommender Systems In Twitter, Su Mon Kywe, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a social information network where short messages or tweets are shared among a large number of users through a very simple messaging mechanism. With a population of more than 100M users generating more than 300M tweets each day, Twitter users can be easily overwhelmed by the massive amount of information available and the huge number of people they can interact with. To overcome the above information overload problem, recommender systems can be introduced to help users make the appropriate selection. Researchers have began to study recommendation problems in Twitter but their works usually address individual recommendation tasks. There …

Finding Thoughtful Comments From Social Media, Gottipati Swapna, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online user comments contain valuable user opinions. Comments vary greatly in quality and detecting high quality comments is a subtask of opinion mining and summarization research. Finding attentive comments that provide some reasoning is highly valuable in understanding the user’s opinion particularly in sociopolitical opinion mining and aids policy makers, social organizations or government sectors in decision making. In this paper we study the problem of detecting thoughtful comments. We empirically study various textual features, discourse relations and relevance features to predict thoughtful comments. We use logistic regression model and test on the datasets related to sociopolitical content. We found …

On Recommending Hashtags In Twitter Networks, Su Mon Kywe, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter network is currently overwhelmed by massive amount of tweets generated by its users. To effectively organize and search tweets, users have to depend on appropriate hashtags inserted into tweets. We begin our research on hashtags by first analyzing a Twitter dataset generated by more than 150,000 Singapore users over a three-month period. Among several interesting findings about hashtag usage by this user community, we have found a consistent and significant use of new hashtags on a daily basis. This suggests that most hashtags have very short life span. We further propose a novel hashtag recommendation method based on collaborative …

Community-Based Classification Of Noun Phrases In Twitter, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, William W. Cohen, Justin Betterridge, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many event monitoring systems rely on counting known keywords in streaming text data to detect sudden spikes in frequency. But the dynamic and conversational nature of Twitter makes it hard to select known keywords for monitoring. Here we consider a method of automatically finding noun phrases (NPs) as keywords for event monitoring in Twitter. Finding NPs has two aspects, identifying the boundaries for the subsequence of words which represent the NP, and classifying the NP to a specific broad category such as politics, sports, etc. To classify an NP, we define the feature vector for the NP using not just …

Nonprofit News, News Industrial Subsidies, And The Rise Of Citizen Journalism, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In this article three important policy questions are suggested in light of signs of recent growth of nonprofit news and the possibility of a great deal more similar growth in the future: 1) Does nonprofit news production pose a plausible solution to the economic troubles of the U.S. news industry? 2) Would industrial subsidies of nonprofits, like those for “welfare state” health and human services co-production offer a potential solution to the economic problems of the U.S. news industry? 3) Can the currently evolving internet-based system of news production by volunteer citizens be sustainable in the long run?

Us Presidential Election 2012 Prediction Using Census Corrected Twitter Model, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Nang Laik Ma, Ping Shung Koo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. Therewere intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of theelectorate towards the achievements of the incumbent President Obama. The campaign lastedseveral months and the effects can be felt in the internet and twitter. The presidential debatesinjected new vigor in the challenger's campaign and successfully captured the electorate of severalstates posing a threat to the incumbent's position. Much of the sentiment in the election has beencaptured in the online discussions. In this paper, we will be using the original model described …

Does Paying For Online Product Reviews Pay Off? The Effects Of Monetary Incentives On Content Creators And Consumers, Andrew Stephen, Yakov Bart, Christilene Du Plessis, Dilney Goncalves

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that although incentivizing product reviews results in more helpful content, disclosing payment lowers review consumers’ product quality expectations. This effect occurs because disclosure induces doubt in product quality and persists when more objective information is available, irrespective of disclosure specificity, across product categories and even after product trial.

Putting Their Best Foot Forward: Emotional Disclosure On Facebook, Lin Qiu, Han Lin, Angela K. Y. Leung, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Facebook has become a widely used online self-representation and communication platform. In this research, we focus on emotional disclosure on Facebook. We conducted two studies, and results from both self-report and observer rating show that individuals are more likely to express positive relative to negative emotions and present better emotional well-being on Facebook than in real life. Our study is the first to demonstrate impression management on Facebook through emotional disclosure. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of our study.

A Probabilistic Graphical Model For Topic And Preference Discovery On Social Media, Lu Liu, Feida Zhu, Lei Zhang, Shiqiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many web applications today thrive on offering services for large-scale multimedia data, e.g., Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. However, these data, while rich in content, are usually sparse in textual descriptive information. For example, a video clip is often associated with only a few tags. Moreover, the textual descriptions are often overly specific to the video content. Such characteristics make it very challenging to discover topics at a satisfactory granularity on this kind of data. In this paper, we propose a generative probabilistic model named Preference-Topic Model (PTM) to introduce the dimension of user preferences to enhance the …

Influentials, Novelty, And Social Contagion: The Viral Power Of Average Friends, Close Communities, And Old News, Nicholas Harrigan, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

What is the effect of (1) popular individuals, and (2) community structures on the retransmission of socially contagious behavior? We examine a community of Twitter users over a five month period, operationalizing social contagion as ‘retweeting’, and social structure as the count of subgraphs (small patterns of ties and nodes) between users in the follower/following network. We find that popular individuals act as ‘inefficient hubs’ for social contagion: they have limited attention, are overloaded with inputs, and therefore display limited responsiveness to viral messages. We argue this contradicts the ‘law of the few’ and ‘influentials hypothesis’. We find that community …

Social Learning Theory In The Frontline Documentary “The Merchants Of Cool”, Alixe A. Wiley

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

In the Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the relationship between major media conglomerates and their hedonistic teenage customers is examined through exploring the different tactics industries use to discover and market the next “cool” thing. Industries maintain what the documentary refers to as a “feedback loop” with their customers, which is a cyclic, supply-and-demand relationship that blurs the line between fiction and reality. It has become impossible to tell which side is imitating the other: who do the products and trends that define popular youth culture belong to? What's more, are the sexual and aggressive hormone-fueled behaviors on …

To Facebook, Or Not To Facebook, John Hilton Iii, Kenneth Plummer

Faculty Publications

A significant shift in computer-mediated communication has taken place, in which in some cases, social media is becoming the dominant form of communication. Organisations who wish to communicate effectively are turning to social media; however, there are challenges associated with using it. This article chronicles the attempts of one educational institution to implement the use of social media in their organisation.

Driving Towards Success In The Air Force Cyber Mission: Leveraging Our Heritage To Shape Our Future, David Fadok, Richard Raines

Faculty Publications

Ongoing debates address what constitutes cyber warfare and whether or not we really are at war in cyberspace. This article does not enter into those issues; rather, it suggests how the Air Force and Air University should move forward to lead and support our nation’s cyber security needs. Thus, it focuses on analogous lessons learned from history, our position today and what it needs to be, and plans for getting there with respect to our cyberspace capabilities.

Book Review: The Ethics Of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms And New Media Technology, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Discussions of new media and ethics sometimes include the notion that “ethics are ethics”—that doing the right thing is, and has been, a constant over time and across media.

The idea has a certain appeal. But it gets new twists in The Ethics of Emerging Media, by Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German, assistant professors of communication at Miami University. New media create new ethical questions and opportunities to cross ethical lines, as the thirteen contributors to this collection examine.

An Exploration Of Social Media Use In Local Television News Stations: An Evaluation And Development Of A Successful New Media Strategy, Aniseh Ebbini

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which Social media have gained popularity over the last decade, amongst the public, and especially in the television news industry. After evaluating the current ways Social media are being implemented and observing national trends, I developed a comprehensive new media strategy to serve as a guide and reference for any television station wanting to incorporate these tools into its regimen.

Our Celebrities Our Selves: Reconstructing Ourselves As Online Personalities, Arne Baruca

WCBT Faculty Publications

Celebrity influence on consumer behavior at the online macro level is the motivation for this study that addresses the nature of celebrity consumption and how consumers apply that consumption to develop their online self-presentation.

The sample for this study is limited to consumers with active accounts at online social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Methodology is a three-part design. A multi-factor qualitative exploratory study (n=73) reveals four celebrity-consumer relationships whose proposed measurement scales are tested in a quantitative pilot study (n=85). Finally, a large sample study (n=593) is used to test the measurement model and to test the proposed …

(Hidden) Social Influences In Switching Mobile Service Platforms, Virpi K. Tuunainen, Tuure Tuunanen, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During the past few years, the mobile industry has gone through a radical change from business focusing on excellence in device manufacturing and supply chain management to ecosystems around successful focal players, such as Apple and Google, controlling these service platforms. In order to compete in this environment, these firms need to understand what makes a consumer switch between these mobile service platforms. To that end, we conducted an inductive qualitative study with university students from Finland and USA as subjects (142 altogether), delving into how and why consumers switch mobile phones, and what are the factors affecting their decisions. …

The Marketing Effectiveness Of Hotel Facebook Pages: From Perspectives Of Customers And Messages, Xi Yu Leung

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the hotel industry, social media marketing has become a new trend hoteliers are chasing and an increasing number of hotels are using social media to promote their business. However, the marketing effectiveness of social media is still a big challenge in both academic and business world. Since social media marketing is totally different from traditional marketing approaches, traditional marketing theories and practices may not be applicable to social media. Besides, very few studies have examined the effectiveness of social media marketing in the academic world.

Therefore, this study intended to provide an in-depth examination on the marketing effectiveness of …

Topic Discovery From Tweet Replies, Bingtian Dai, Ee Peng Lim, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular online social information network service which allows people to read and post messages up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. In this paper, we focus on the tweets between pairs of individuals, i.e., the tweet replies, and propose a generative model to discover topics among groups of twitter users. Our model has then been evaluated with a tweet dataset to show its effectiveness.

Attitudes Toward And Behavioral Intentions To Adopt Mobile Marketing: Comparisons Of Gen Y In The United States, France And China, Rebecca Wells, Catherine E. Kleshinski, Terence Lau

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

The rapid global diffusion of mobile marketing makes it increasingly important to understand cross-­‐cultural consumer attitudes and behavioral intentions toward mobile marketing as a promotional channel. By building on the previously published research of Altuna and Konuk (2009), this work investigates the attitudes and behavioral intentions toward mobile marketing of Generation Y consumers in the United States, France, and China. Based on this analysis, Chinese Gen Y have the most positive attitude toward mobile marketing, and their overall attitude is significantly more positive than the attitudes of French and American Gen Y groups. While American Gen Y's behavioral intentions are …

Finding Bursty Topics From Microblogs, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogs such as Twitter reflect the general public’s reactions to major events. Bursty topics from microblogs reveal what events have attracted the most online attention. Although bursty event detection from text streams has been studied before, previous work may not be suitable for microblogs because compared with other text streams such as news articles and scientific publications, microblog posts are particularly diverse and noisy. To find topics that have bursty patterns on microblogs, we propose a topic model that simultaneousy captures two observations: (1) posts published around the same time are more likely to have the same topic, and (2) …

Detecting Anomalous Twitter Users By Extreme Group Behaviors, Hanbo Dai, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has enjoyed tremendous popularity in the recent years. To help categorizing and search tweets, Twitter users assign hashtags to their tweets. Given that hashtag assignment is the primary way to semantically categorizing and search tweets, it is highly susceptible to abuse by spammers and other anomalous users [1]. Popular hashtags such as #Obama and #ladygaga could be hijacked by having them added to unrelated tweets with the intent of misleading many other users or promoting specific agenda to the users. The users performing this act are known as the hashtag hijackers. As the hijackers usually abuse common sets of …

When A Friend In Twitter Is A Friend In Life, Wei Xie, Cheng Li, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim, Xueqing Gong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a fast-growing online social network service (SNS) where users can "follow" any other user to receive his or her mini-blogs which are called "tweets". In this paper, we study the problem of identifying a user's off-line real-life social community, which we call the user'sTwitter off-line community, purely from examining Twitter network structure. Based on observations from our user-verified Twitter data and results from previous works, we propose three principles about Twitter off-line communities. Incorporating these principles, we develop a novel algorithm to iteratively discover the Twitter off-line community based on a new way of measuring user closeness. According …

Negotiating Crisis In The New Media Environment: Evolution Of Crises Online, Gaining Legitimacy Offline, Augustine Pang, Nasrath Begam Abul Hassan, Aaron Chee Yang Chong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines how crises originate online, how different new media platforms escalate crises, and how issues become legitimized offline when they transit onto mainstream media. We study five social media crises, which includes United breaks guitars and Southwest Air’s too fat to fly. Crises are triggered online when stakeholders are empowered by new media platforms that allow user-generated content to be posted online without any filtering. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter emerge as top crises breeding grounds due to their large user base and the lack of gatekeeping. Facebook and blogs are responsible for escalating crises beyond the immediate stakeholder …

Visualizing Media Bias Through Twitter, Jisun An, Meeyoung Cha, Gummadi, Krishna, Jon Crowcroft, Daniele Queria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Therefore, tracking bias in everyday news and building a platform where people can receive balanced news information is important. We propose a model that maps the news media sources along a dimensional dichotomous political spectrum using the co-subscriptions relationships inferred by Twitter links. By analyzing 7 million follow links, we show that the political dichotomy naturally arises on Twitter when we only consider direct media subscription. Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-time Twitter-based application …

Online Social Networking To Support Youth College Student Learning And Behaviour, Chun Hung, Hugo Wong

Practical Social and Industrial Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Twitter: High On Celebrity Gossip, Low On News Discussion, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Twitter is regarded as a highly popular platform for online communications. It was said to have played a role in facilitating – 140 characters at a time – social movements that supported key events such as the Arab Spring. And because Twitter messages (or 'tweets' as they are called) are compact and quickly transmitted, they are widely used to spread and share breaking news, personal updates and spontaneous ideas.

Emosonet: An Emotion-Aware Social Network For Emotional Wellbeing, Zerrin Yumak-Kasap, Yu Chen, Pearl Pu

Faculty Publications, Information Systems & Technology

This paper presents our initial ideas towards developing an emotion-aware social network for the purpose of increasing emotional wellbeing. The framework will use sensors and behavior analysis methods in order to infer users’ stress level automatically with minimal user effort and use audio, animation and vibro-tactile feedback for enhanced engagement. Additionally, we will explore the role of social support, social influence and gamification for sustained behavior change.

Book Review: Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise And Reality Of A Citizen-Engaged Press, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Digital technology has changed journalism dramatically. Through a collection of research studies, essays, case studies, and interviews, Public Journalism 2.0 takes a detailed look at evolving public journalism and where audience-generated stories fit into that evolution. The editors divide the book into three sections: the history of civic and citizen journalism, current practices, and future possibilities. They conclude with their views of where professionals fit in to a citizen-engaged press.