Social Media Commons^™

Survey Examination Of How An Anonymous Source Gains Credibility In The Political Discourse: @Karametwatan Twitter Account As An Example, Yousef A. Aldaihani

Student Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated how anonymous sources on Twitter can gain credibility by Twitter users. The researcher examined @karametwatan Twitter account as an example of anonymous sources. A formulated theory, Anonymous Leaders was employed in order to test its assumptions. The main purpose of this study is to figure out how Kuwaiti Twitter users trust @karametwatan and the role of opposition leaders who were advocates of this account toward attributing this account as credible. A total of 650 Kuwaiti Twitter users participated in this study. The results of this study showed that @karametwatan’s followers trust its tweets and attribute it …

Whom Should We Sense In 'Social Sensing' - Analyzing Which Users Work Best For Social Media Now-Casting, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given the ever increasing amount of publicly available social media data, there is growing interest in using online data to study and quantify phenomena in the offline 'real' world. As social media data can be obtained in near real-time and at low cost, it is often used for 'now-casting' indices such as levels of flu activity or unemployment. The term 'social sensing' is often used in this context to describe the idea that users act as 'sensors', publicly reporting their health status or job losses. Sensor activity during a time period is then typically aggregated in a 'one tweet, one …

What's Hot In Software Engineering Twitter Space?, Abhishek Sharma, Tian Yuan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular means to disseminate information and currently more than 300 million people are using it actively. Software engineers are no exception; Singer et al. have shown that many developers use Twitter to stay current with recent technological trends. At various time points, many users are posting microblogs (i.e., tweets) about the same topic in Twitter. We refer to this reasonably large set of topically-coherent microblogs in the Twitter space made at a particular point in time as an event. In this work, we perform an exploratory study on software engineering related events in Twitter. We collect a …

Bird’S Eye View: Using Twitter In #Clubroesch, Katy Kelly, Hector Escobar

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

For many libraries, social media is usually another platform to share information about library resources and events. For some, the term has become overused so much that the social aspect has fallen by the wayside. Facebook page updates or tweets are only part of what you can bring to and achieve from social media.

In this article we discuss how students communicate with our academic library on Twitter, and how we used conversations to improve library spaces, technology, and services. We will explain the process of tracking and responding to student tweets, as well as the pros and cons of …

Classifying Political Similarity Of Twitter Users, William K. Paustian

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The emergence of large scale social networks has led to research in approaches to classify similar users on a network. While many such approaches use data mining techniques, recent efforts have focused on measuring the similarity of users using structural properties of the underlying graph representing the network. In this paper, we identify the Twitter followers of the 2016 presidential candidates and classify them as Democrat, Republican or Bipartisan. We did this by designing a new approach to measuring structural similarity, PolRANK. PolRANK computes the similarity of a pair of users by accounting for both the number of candidates they …

Student-Athletes’ Attitudes And Beliefs Towards Social Media, Emily Boissonneault

Graduate Theses

The purpose of this study was to identify the attitudes and beliefs of student athletes towards social media. To address this question, student athletes completed a survey focused specifically on: the image they present on social media profiles, content included, and their thoughts on the social media education provided by their athletic department. Student athlete (SA) responses were also compared to non-athletes (NA) for a better understanding of social media profiles. Frequencies showed strong similarities in a number of content shared or not shared, like humorous photos (SA 74.1% and NA 73.3%) and sexy photos (SA 82.4% and NA 82.6%). …

Use Of Social Media To Promote Continuous Learning: A Phased Strategy For Graduate Medical Education Fellowship Implementation, Jaswant Singh Basraon, Deborah Simpson, Anjan Gupta

Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews

Purpose

Clinical developments continue to grow at an accelerated rate, challenging the existing paradigm of information access, dissemination and learning by trainees. The aim of this study was to deliver relevant, concise and newly emerging information on cardiovascular disease using Twitter, and assess its impact.

Methods

A Twitter account for our institution’s cardiovascular disease fellowship program was established. All fellows and faculty were encouraged to follow tweets for clinical developments. To assess Twitter use, participation rates and the number of tweets by topics and followers were tracked longitudinally. Impact on fellows was assessed through a brief evaluation survey and an …

Mathematical Modeling Of Trending Topics On Twitter, Jonathan S. Skaza

Honors Projects in Mathematics

Created in 2006, Twitter is an online social networking service in which users share and read 140-character messages called Tweets. The site has approximately 288 million monthly active users who produce about 500 million Tweets per day. This study applies dynamical and statistical modeling strategies to quantify the spread of information on Twitter. Parameter estimates for the rates of infection and recovery are obtained using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The methodological strategy employed is an extension of techniques traditionally used in an epidemiological and biomedical context (particularly in the spread of infectious disease). This study, which addresses …

Use Of A High-Value Social Audience Index For Target Audience Identification On Twitter, Siaw Ling Lo, David Cornforth, Raymond. Chiong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the large and growing user base of social media, it is not an easy feat to identify potential customers for business. This is mainly due to the challenge of extracting commercially viable contents from the vast amount of free-form conversations. In this paper, we analyse the Twitter content of an account owner and its list of followers through various text mining methods and segment the list of followers via an index. We have termed this index as the High-Value Social Audience (HVSA) index. This HVSA index enables a company or organisation to devise their marketing and engagement plan according …

Parody Social Media Accounts: Influence And Impact On Organizations During Crisis, Sarah Wan, Regina Koh, Andrew Ong, Augustine Pang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the uptake of the use of social media, the communication field has seen a rise in a new phenomenon: parody social media accounts. Through study of five such accounts, this paper shows how parody social media accounts can arise from a crisis or paracrisis, which is “a publicly visible crisis threat” that is triggered online (Coombs & Holladay, 2012, p. 409). The study also examines the behavior of these accounts and how they enforce negative perceptions and impede an organization's efforts and initiatives. Using the social-mediated crisis communication model as its theoretical lens, this study seeks to examine parody …

Traffickacts.Org: Turning Advocacy To Action To Combat Human Trafficking Through The Public, Sarah Gardner

MA IDS Thesis Projects

This paper discusses in depth one of the most controversial topics today in the field of development and social justice: human trafficking. Examining it from an activist perspective, this paper defines human trafficking, reviews the history of slavery as it relates to human trafficking, and examines current and emerging trends in combating this human rights violation. Various best practices are explored in the realm of anti-trafficking campaigns and programs. A primary focus of this paper is providing a model for combating trafficking through the engagement of the general public. Therefore social media advocacy is also defined and analyzed in the …

Exploring Ways Social Media Data Inform Public Issues Communication: An Analysis Of Twitter Conversation During The 2012-2013 Drought In Nebraska, Adam Wagler, Karen J. Cannon

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

Social networking sites often are used to maintain close social ties, but increasingly they are used for information and news dissemination, specifically about major events and crises. In 2012, a historic drought struck the Midwest, destroying or damaging portions of major field crops in major agricultural production states. By the end of August 2012, 90% of Nebraska was declared in extreme or exceptional drought, leading to bans on irrigation, damaged crops, and record-low yields as well as damaging the state’s leading economic sector. This case study used social media monitoring and analysis to explore online Twitter conversations related to this …

Twitter Use And Its Effects On Student Perception Of Instructor Credibility, Jocelyn M. Degroot, Valerie J. Young, Sarah H. Vanslette

Applied Communication Studies Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This study investigates college student perceptions of instructor credibility based on the content of an instructor’s Twitterfeed and student beliefs about Twitter as a communication tool. Quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to explore the effects of three manipulated Twitter feeds (e.g., tweeting social topics, professional topics, or a blend) on student perceptions of instructor credibility and examine how students perceive Twitter as a teaching tool. Quantitative results suggest that the profile with professional content was most credible. Credibility ratings were also associated with other Twitter use variables, including positive student attitudes about instructors who use Twitter and Tweet frequency. …

Social Media & Audience Participation In Regard To Television, Jean Marie Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Jean McBride

Major: Communications: Radio/TV Broadcasting & Mass Media Production

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Social Media & Audience Participation in Regard to Television

The purpose of my honors project was seeing if social media had an influence on television show ratings and popularity by incorporating audience participation. Especially in regards to television shows that have been around for years, I was interested to see if television ratings went up when using Twitter compared to when they did not use Twitter to increase viewers and audience participation. I surveyed forty-nine collegiate women between the ages …

Data Preparation For Social Network Mining And Analysis, Yazhe Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the problem of preparing good-quality social network data for data analysis and mining. Modern online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have rapidly grown in popularity. The consequent availability of a wealth of social network data provides an unprecedented opportunity for data analysis and mining researchers to determine useful and actionable information in a wide variety of fields such as social sciences, marketing, management, and security. However, raw social network data are vast, noisy, distributed, and sensitive in nature, which challenge data mining and analysis tasks in storage, efficiency, accuracy, etc. Many mining algorithms cannot …

Issues Of Social Data Analytics With A New Method For Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor J. C. Tong, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social media data consists of feedback, critiques and other comments that are posted online by internet users. Collectively, these comments may reflect sentiments that are sometimes not captured in traditional data collection methods such as administering a survey questionnaire. Thus, social media data offers a rich source of information, which can be adequately analyzed and understood. In this paper, we survey the extant research literature on sentiment analysis and discuss various limitations of the existing analytical methods. A major limitation in the large majority of existing research is the exclusive focus on social media data in the English language. There …

Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection in sentiment analysis refers to detecting abnormal opinions, sentiment patterns or special temporal aspects of such patterns in a collection of data. The anomalies detected may be due to sudden sentiment changes hidden in large amounts of text. If these anomalies are undetected or poorly managed, the consequences may be severe, e.g. A business whose customers reveal negative sentiments and will no longer support the establishment. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a vast source of information, which includes user feedback, opinion and information on most issues. Many organizations also leverage social media platforms to publish information …

Identifying The High-Value Social Audience From Twitter Through Text-Mining Methods, Siaw Ling Lo, David Cornforth, Raymond Chiong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Doing business on social media has become a common practice for many companies these days. While the contents shared on Twitter and Facebook offer plenty of opportunities to uncover business insights, it remains a challenge to sift through the huge amount of social media data and identify the potential social audience who is highly likely to be interested in a particular company. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter content of an account owner and its list of followers through various text mining methods, which include fuzzy keyword matching, statistical topic modeling and machine learning approaches. We use tweets of …

Book Review: Twitter: Social Communication In The Twitter Age, By Dhiraj Murthy, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Twitter has helped to shape social communication in today’s world. In his book, Dhiraj Murthy recognizes Twitter’s impact as a communication medium and puts it in context.

Sharing Political News: The Balancing Act Of Intimacy And Socialization In Selective Exposure, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One might think that, compared to traditional media, social media sites allow people to choose more freely what to read and what to share, especially for politically oriented news. However, reading and sharing habits originate from deeply ingrained behaviors that might be hard to change. To test the extent to which this is true, we propose a Political News Sharing (PoNS) model that holistically captures four key aspects of social psychology: gratification, selective exposure, socialization, and trust & intimacy. Using real instances of political news sharing in Twitter, we study the predictive power of these features. As one might expect, …

Toward A Uses And Gratification's Model Of Twitter, Philip Ryan Johnson

Theses - ALL

This study proposed a uses and gratifications model of Twitter, an internet medium and micro-blog--a platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sending short messages to others. A survey was conducted among 242 Twitter users to test the model, including a standard investigation of gratifications sought and gratifications obtained of Twitter usage. In addition, expectations and availability of usage behaviors from McLeod and Becker's (1981) uses and gratifications model were examined. In the model, expectations were conceptualized as user expectations of satisfaction and operationalized as the difference between users' gratifications sought and gratifications actually obtained. Usage behavior availability …

On Macro And Micro Exploration Of Hashtag Diffusion In Twitter, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This exploratory work studies hashtag diffusion in Twitter. The analysis is conducted from two aspects. From the macro perspective, we study general properties of hashtag diffusion, and classify hashtags into three main classes based on their temporal dynamics referred as 'single spike', 'multi-spikes', and 'fluctuation', and find that each of these classes has some unique characteristics. From the micro perspective, we investigate individual diffusion.We adopt Edelman's 'topology of influence' theory to identify four type of users with different influence levels in diffusion based on their dynamic retweet behaviors. The results of our study are useful for gaining more insights of …

"Warning: This Is A Must Read": Participation And Disruption In Social Artifacts And Spaces, Angela M. Harrison Eng

English Theses & Dissertations

As I show in three separate case studies, content, technology, and participant relationships are key components in the design of social artifacts and spaces. One study highlights the invention and evolution of content across multiple spaces. The second shows content used as leverage for authority. The last case study examines the relationship between content and technological interfaces and how disruption may not always be successful.

All of these components make up what I refer to as disruption. Disruption describes participant acts that are executed to change existing power-based structures of information sharing. Using the insights gained from this research, I …

Tweeting The Boston Marathon Bombings: A Case Study Of Twitter Content In The Immediate Aftermath Of A Major Event, Rebekah Dawn Giordano

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

The project explored and analyzed the use of the social media tool Twitter in the immediate aftermath of a major event. Tweets and re-tweets from the first hour following the Boston Marathon Bombings on April 15, 2013 were collected and analyzed. The project used the application SIFTER from the company Textifer to identify the related tweets by inputting sixteen previously documented keywords related to the Boston Marathon Bombing. The tweets were then divided into several categories and subcategories to be analyzed. The company Twitter Counter was used to obtain accurate information, such as followers on, for various individual Twitter accounts. …

Gatekeeping The Social Games In A Post-Broadcasting World: A Qualitative Content Analysis Of Nbc And User-Generated Olympic Twitter Coverage During The 2012 London Games, Daniel Anthony Sipocz

Dissertations

This study examined the Twitter use of both traditional gatekeepers, such as NBC, and audience members during the 2012 London Summer Olympics. The exploratory study examined NBC and audience members as gatekeepers with a particular interest in the audience’s role as a gatekeeper through social media use. NBC used Twitter, a social media platform, in ways that supported traditional gatekeeping models. The network aimed to drive audiences back to the traditional television broadcast while providing the audience with the illusion of having an influence on Olympic coverage. Most significantly, this study argues that the audience became a gatekeeper of Olympic …

Like, Retweet, Repeat: Social Media's Impact On Real Estate Marketing, Emily Kendall

Masters Theses

With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, people from all walks of life in all parts of the world have the ability to connect electronically, impersonally, and constantly. Small businesses are just beginning to unlock the power of social media marketing, specifically real estate professionals. Shelly Chaiken created the Heuristic Systematic Model of persuasion, the descendant of the Elaboration Likelihood Model. This study applies the tenets of Chaiken's HSM to the methods of persuasion employed by real estate agents via Facebook and Twitter. Fifty participants were surveyed by the researcher in order to gauge their activity, interest level, and motivation …

Adolescents And The Social Media: The Coming Storm, Daniel Houlihan, Meghan Houlihan

Psychology Department Publications

In her book Failure to Connect: How computers affect our Children’s Minds, sounded the alarm to the educational community that computers would not impact the intellectual growth of children in the ways that had been anticipated by the Clinton Administration when they started the push to have the world-wide web integrated into American classrooms by passing the Classroom 2000 education initiative. In a speech in April of 2013, Clinton would follow-up by saying that the modern internet has forced a change in what we consider to be forms of good citizenship. The future will redefine how we should act and …

Predicting Events Surrounding The Egyptian Revolution Of 2011 Using Learning Algorithms On Micro Blog Data, Benedikt Boecking, Margeret A. Hall, Jeff Schneider

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

We aim to predict activities of political nature in Egypt which influence or reflect societal-scale behavior and beliefs by using learning algorithms on Twitter data. We focus on capturing domestic events in Egypt from November 2009 to November 2013. To this extent we study underlying communication patterns by evaluating content-based and meta-data information in classification tasks without targeting specific keywords or users. Classification is done using Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Support Distribution Machines (SDM). Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to create content-based input patterns for the classifiers while bags of Twitter meta-information are used with the SDM to …

Information Architecture For Social Media: A Case Study On Building An Event Backchannel With Twitter, Robert L. Moore

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper presents a case study on creating a backchannel through Twitter for the live event, featuring the Secretary of the US Navy, hosted by the School of Government. The project, which ultimately was successful in creating social media buzz for the lecture, was a new approach for the School of Government in how it markets its events. The study discusses the tools and processes used in the backchannel's creation and development. This paper was written because the author discovered a gap in existing literature on creating backchannels. It outlines how the adaptation of best practices from the general population's …

Information Vs Interaction: An Alternative User Ranking Model For Social Networks, Wei Xie, Ai Phuong Hoang, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent years have seen an unprecedented boom of social network services, such as Twitter, which boasts over 200 million users. In such big social platforms, the influential users are ideal targets for viral marketing to potentially reach an audience of maximal size. Most proposed algorithms rely on the linkage structure of the respective underlying network to determine the information flow and hence indicate a users influence. From social interaction perspective, we built a model based on the dynamic user interactions constantly taking place on top of these linkage structures. In particular, in the Twitter setting we supposed a principle …