Social Media Commons^™

Manipulation In Digital Word-Of-Mouth: A Reality Check For Book Reviews, Nan Hu, Indranil Bose, Yunjun Gao, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Built upon the discretionary accrual-based earnings management framework, our paper develops a discretionary manipulation proxy to study the management of online reviews. We reveal that fraudulent review manipulation is a serious problem for 1) non-bestseller books; 2) books whose reviews are classified as not very helpful; 3) books that experience greater variability in the helpfulness of their online reviews; and 4) popular books as well as high-priced books. We also show that review management decreases with the passage of time. Just like fraudulent earnings management, manipulated online reviews reflect inauthentic information from which consumers might derive wrong valuation especially for …

An Analysis Of The Structure And Evolution Of Networks, Guangying Hua

2011

As network research receives more and more attention from both academic researchers and practitioners, network analysis has become a fast growing field attracting many researchers from diverse fields such as physics, computer science, and sociology. This dissertation provides a review of theory and research on different real data sets from the network perspective. The focus is primarily on the structure and dynamics of social networks.

This dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay examines a professional online community, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the first paper to address the social network of physicians. The …

Social Networking Sites: What They Are And How To Navigate Them (Leader Guide), Maria Deguzman, Deborah J. Weitzenkamp Dr., Anita Hall, Deanna Vansickel-Staudt, Car Mun Kok, Jessica Lake

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

The use of social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn has dramatically increased in recent years. Today, over 50 percent of teens and 35 percent of adults in the U.S. are using at least one type of social networking site. If used well, these sites can have many personal and professional benefits. Social networking can be a fun way to communicate with others, and an effective way to expand one’s social and professional connections. It is important to practice good judgment and proper “netiquette” when developing personal profiles and interacting with others through such sites. This community program will …

Social Media At Academia's Periphery: Studying Multilingual Developmental Writers' Facebook Composing Strategies, Kevin Eric Depew

English Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the writing strategies second-language students use to compose on social media sites. These alternative and unconventional sites for learning provide language learners opportunities to acquire language by using multiple modalities to respond to various rhetorical situations. In comparison to these sites, academic writing contexts, particularly the developmental-writing course, impose monolingual norms and deficient identities on students. Where these courses articulate these language learners as possessing inadequate skills to perform well in mainstream writing courses, the students' social-media compositions demonstrate that these students have the potential to respond to communicative situations in rhetorically complex ways. This study …

Social Networking Sites: What They Are And How To Navigate Them (Participant Manual), Maria Deguzman, Deborah J. Weitzenkamp Dr., Anita Hall, Deanna Vansickel-Staudt, Car Mun Kok, Jessica Lake

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

The use of social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn has dramatically increased in recent years. Today, over 50 percent of teens and 35 percent of adults in the U.S. are using at least one type of social networking site. If used well, these sites can have many personal and professional benefits. Social networking can be a fun way to communicate with others, and an effective way to expand your social and professional connections. Nonetheless, it is important to practice good judgment and proper “netiquette” when developing personal profiles and interacting with others through such sites. This community program …

Exploring The Impact Of Social Media On Regional Festivals In Ireland: A Public Relations Perspective, Niamh Mccarthy

Theses

This study looks into the area of social media use in Irish festivals from a public relations perspective. The aim of the study is to provide an understanding of the effect social media is having on the regional festival industry in Ireland.

The study also accesses how social media has affected the public relations industry and reveals the predicted future of social media in Ireland. I’he study used a qualitative method of research through use of semi-structured interviews. Interviews were carried out face-to-face, online and on the telephone. All interviewees in the study had relevant experience in the social media …

Fundraising In Changing Times: The Pr And Media Relations Tactics That Non Profit Organisations Use In Their Fundraising Campaigns - A Case Study Analysis, Sharon Louise Noonan

Theses

This study aims to explore the public relations (PR) tactics that non-profit organisations (NPO’s) are using in their fundraising campaigns. The two case studies that were researched were the Cork Simon Community and the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind. (IGDB) The lack of current research into this topic as well as the changing nature of NPO’s and the PR industry was of great interest to the author, thus prompting the idea for this study.

The literature review defines PR, media relations and fundraising whilst providing the opinions and perspectives of professionals on the topic in question.

A qualitative research …

Librarianship Presence In Virtual Worlds, Jenny M. Baum, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

Librarianship has stereotypically been about books, communities, and the connection between the two. With the emergence of new media and technology, the concept of books has expanded to include information of all types and in multiple formats: eBooks, DVDs, videogames, electronic databases, et cetera. Meanwhile, the idea of community has stayed the same. For example, public libraries primarily serve communities defined by geographic lines; academic libraries serve their campus communities. In non-profit, medical or corporate libraries, communities are defined by their organization’s particular mission. However, now that virtual worlds are becoming mainstream, librarians are redefining community, just as they redefined …

Cacophony Or Empowerment? : Analyzing The Impact Of New Information Communication Technologies And New Social Media In Southeast Asia., Jason P. Abbott

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The capabilities, tools and websites we associate with new information communication technologies and social media are now ubiquitous. Moreover tools that were designed to facilitate innocuous conversation and social interaction have had unforeseen political impacts. Nowhere was this more visible than during the 2011 uprisings across the Arab World. From Tunis to Cairo, and Tripoli to Damascus protest movements against authoritarian rule openly utilized social networking and file sharing tools to publicize and organize demonstrations and to catalogue human rights abuses. The Arab Spring, or Jasmine Revolution, was an event that was both witnessed and played out in real time …

A Comparative Study Of How Social Media And Web 2.0 Tools, Such As Facebook, Twitter And Viral Marketing, Can Be Used By Small Businesses, To Integrate A Business Strategy Of Augmenting The Company Profile And Awareness With Their Publics, Robyn Foley

Theses

The object of this dissertation was to explore the public relations techniques implemented by small businesses located in Cork.

How Does Facebook Browsing Affect Self-Awareness And Social Well-Being: The Role Of Narcissism, Lin Qiu, Han Lin, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social networking sites such as Facebook have become extremely popular recently. In this research, we studied how Facebook browsing affects self-awareness and social well-being. Our results show that after Facebook browsing, individuals high in narcissism raised their public self-awareness while those low in narcissism reduced their public self-awareness. We also found that individuals low in narcissism perceived their friends' lives to be better than their own and consequently experienced negative social well-being and emotion. However, this effect did not occur for individuals high in narcissism.

The Impact Of Social Media On Software Engineering Practices And Tools, Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude, Arie Van Deursen, Li-Te Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today's generation of software developers frequently make use of social media, either as an adjunct or integrated into a wide range of tools ranging from code editors and issue trackers, to IDEs and web-based portals. The role of social media usage in software engineering is not well understood, and yet the use of these mechanisms influences software development practices. In this position paper, we advocate for research that strives to understand the benefits, risks and limitations of using social media in software development at the team, project and community levels. Guided by the implications of current tools and social media …

Mining Interesting Link Formation Rules In Social Networks, Cane Wing-Ki Leung, Ee Peng Lim, David Lo, Jianshu Weng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Link structures are important patterns one looks out for when modeling and analyzing social networks. In this paper, we propose the task of mining interesting Link Formation rules (LF-rules) containing link structures known as Link Formation patterns (LF-patterns). LF-patterns capture various dyadic and/or triadic structures among groups of nodes, while LF-rules capture the formation of a new link from a focal node to another node as a postcondition of existing connections between the two nodes. We devise a novel LF-rule mining algorithm, known as LFR-Miner, based on frequent subgraph mining for our task. In addition to using a support-confidence framework …

Wsm'10: Second Acm Workshop On Social Media, Susanne Boll, Steven C. H. Hoi, Roelof Van Zwol, Jiebo Luo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Social Media (WSM'10) is the second workshop held in conjunction with the ACM International Multimedia Conference (MM'10) at Firenze, Italy, 2010. This workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners from all over the world to share information on their latest investigations on social media analysis, exploration, search, mining, and emerging new social media applications.

Personal Vs. Social, Magdalini Eirinaki

Faculty Publications

The last few years we witnessed an impressive growth in social networks and in applications that add value to their amassed information. At the same time, the continuing expansion of mobile platforms and applications (e.g. iPhone), combined with the overwhelming supply of information and services, makes effective personalization and context-awareness much required features. One may consider "personal" and "social" data management as comprising two distinct directions with conflicting characteristics. However, it can be argued that they complement each other and that in future applications they will ultimately converge. This "personal vs. social" predicament presents a number of interesting topics that …

What Difference Does It Make?: E-Learning And Faith Community, Mary E. Hess

Faculty Publications

By adopting a relational model of teaching and learning we can better align our programs of Christian education with our fundamental understandings of the faith. Digital technologies can help us do this more fully and more effectively.

Extracting Common Emotions From Blogs Based On Fine-Grained Sentiment Clustering, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Ge Yu, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, blogs have emerged as the major platform for people to express their feelings and sentiments in the age of Web 2.0. The common emotions, which reflect people’s collective and overall sentiments, are becoming the major concern for governments, business companies and individual users. Different from previous literatures on sentiment classification and summarization, the major issue of common emotion extraction is to find out people’s collective sentiments and their corresponding distributions on the Web. Most existing blog clustering methods take into account keywords, stories or timelines but neglect the embedded sentiments, which are considered very important features of blogs. In …

Legal And Ethical Implications Of Corporate Social Networks, Gundars Kaupins, Susan Park

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Corporate social networking sites provide employees and employers with considerable opportunity to share information and become friends. Unfortunately, American laws do not directly address social networking site usage. The National Labor Relations Act, civil rights laws, and various common law doctrines such as employment at-will and defamation provide the pattern for future social networking laws. Ethical considerations such as productivity, security, goodwill, privacy, accuracy, and discipline fairness also affect future laws. Corporate policies on corporate social networking should balance the employer‘s and employee‘s interests. Existing laws and ethical issues associated with social networking should impact social networking policies related to …

Understanding The Psychological Motives Behind Microblogging, Lin Qiu, Angela K. Y. Leung, Jun Hao Ho, Qi Min Yeung, Kevin Joseph Francis, Pei Fen Chua

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This research aims to understand the psychological motives behind microblogging. We conducted two studies to investigate if social exclusion and existential anxiety would lead to a high tendency to microblog. Our results show that participants did not use microblogging to satisfy their needs for social connection and affiliation, but highly extraverted participants did use it to relieve their existential anxiety.

Learning To Speak Through Writing: The Case For Microblogging In The Language Classroom, Pilar Munday

Languages Faculty Publications

The case for microblogging with Twitter in the Foreign Language Classroom. Examples from a Spanish course.

Finding Meaning In Facebook, Kelly Patrick

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Twitterrank: Finding Topic-Sensitive Influential Twitterers, Jianshu Weng, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Qi He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can …

Media And The Non Profit World: A Case-Study On Wwf-Malaysia's Use Of Media Tools To Champion Advocacy, Anita Devasahayam

Social Space

As issues and campaigns for various causes in the non-profit space have begun to proliferate across Asia, the struggle to remain relevant and gain critical attention is growing. Author Anita Devasahayam discusses how the Malaysian chapter of the World Wide Fund for Nature tackled the challenge by devising new media strategies and advocacy campaigns to remain relevant in an increasingly connected and cause-conscious world.

Social Media Perceptions And Usage By Generation Y And Relevant Marketing Implications, Irene J. Dickey, William F. Lewis

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

One of the most common ways in which Internet users connect and network with each other is through "social media." Social media is the content that is provided and maintained by the user on a website. It is clear that social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming increasingly pervasive in the lives of students, professionals and consumers. A literature review, as well as the results from our survey, reveals that not only have social networks evolved rapidly during the last few years, but so too have consumers’ behaviors. Subsequently, marketing strategies and tactics, and the potential for practitioners …

Sense Of Community And Political Mobilization In Virtual Communities: The Role Of Dispositional And Situational Variables, Kevin Y. Wang

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This paper explores the psychological processes that connect virtual communities to political behavior. Drawing on previous findings in political psychology, I argue that the psychological sense of community may be an important mechanism that dictates people’s behavioral responses toward incoming information or mobilization pressure in the online environment. I then discuss the role of different dispositional and situational variables in: a) contributing to the formation of sense of community in the virtual world, and b) serving as potential moderators to influence the strength of virtual sense of community and its subsequent impact on individuals’ political behavior. Finally, I consider the …

Local Political Information On The Web: The Case Of The 2007 Philadelphia Mayoral Campaign, Lee Shaker

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scholars and pundits have widely discussed the decline of print journalism, but there has been very little empirical research focused on examining online alternatives. This article utilizes a unique sample of online local political content related to the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign to address this void. A content analysis of this dataset has three objectives: to depict the range of sources of online local political information (LPI) available to Philadelphians, to compare the LPI provided by these various sources, and to determine the amount and provenance of the original LPI that is available on the web. New media sources of …

Finding A Voice: Using The Internet For Free Speech And Expression In Iran, Chelsea Zimmerman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In July 2009, many Iranians took to the streets to protest the results of the presidential election in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won with a reported 62% of the vote. The protests, stemming from allegations of electoral fraud, quickly exposed the government's limited tolerance for dissent. In addition to street demonstrations, protestors utilized social networking websites to express their opposition to the election results. The world, following Internet feeds, witnessed the restrictive mechanisms Iran’s government placed on expression and speech. People throughout the world admonished Iran for the government's interference with cell phone and Internet networks. Iran’s free speech and expression …

Legal And Ethical Issues Associated With Employee Use Of Social Networks, Gundars Kaupins, Susan Park

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help employees enhance a company’s marketing, recruiting, security, and safety. However, employee’s use of social networking sites and employers’ access of those sites can result in illegal and unethical behavior, such as discrimination and privacy invasions. Companies must gauge whether and how to rely upon employees’ use of personal social networking sites and how much freedom employees should have in using networks inside and outside of the companies. This research summarizes the latest legal and ethical issues regarding employee use of social networks and provides recommended corporate policies.

Google Analytics: Analyzing The Latest Wave Of Legal Concerns For Google In The U.S. And The E.U., 7 Buff. Intell. Prop. L.J. 135 (2010), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The next wave of concern regarding Google involves web analytics. Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. The concerns of web analytics use touches on issues of online user privacy, government use of personal information, and information on website user activity. While Google Analytics is not the sole web analytics product on the market, it is widely used by corporate, non-profit, and government organizations. The product has been reported to have a 59% market share among web analytics vendors in a 2008 study.

Web analytics technology …

The Evolution (Revolution) Of Social Media And Social Networking As A Necessary Topic In The Marketing Curriculum: A Case For Integrating Social Media Into Marketing Classes, Irene J. Dickey, William F. Lewis

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

This research first examines social media and social networks as a social phenomenon and its influence on marketing practice. Survey data and an extensive literature review reveal that not only have social networks evolved rapidly during the last few years, but so have social media, consumer behaviors, and subsequently, social media marketing tactics, which are increasingly being integrated into marketing programs. The authors explore the question of whether more time should be devoted to these topics and whether they should be incorporated into the marketing curriculum. This research provides important information, insights and recommendations for incorporating the topic of social …