scholarly journals Inferring Activities from Social Media Data

Author(s):  
Emmanouil Chaniotakis ◽  
Constantinos Antoniou ◽  
Georgia Aifadopoulou ◽  
Loukas Dimitriou

Social media produce an unprecedented amount of information that can be extracted and used in transportation research, with one of the most promising areas being the inference of individuals’ activities. Whereas most studies in the literature focus on the direct use of social media data, this study presents an efficient framework that follows a user-centric approach for the inference of users’ activities from social media data. The framework was applied to data from Twitter, combined with inferred data from Foursquare that contains information about the type of location visited. The users’ data were then classified with a density-based spatial classification algorithm that allows for the definition of commonly visited locations, and the individual-based data were augmented with the known activity definition from Foursquare. On the basis of the known activities and the Twitter text, a set of classification algorithms was applied for the inference of activities. The results are discussed according to the types of activities recognized and the classification performance. The classification results allow for a wide application of the framework in the exploration of the activity space of individuals.

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Etter ◽  
Elanor Colleoni ◽  
Laura Illia ◽  
Katia Meggiorin ◽  
Antonino D’Eugenio

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 1053-1075
Author(s):  
Vidushi Pandey ◽  
Sumeet Gupta ◽  
Manojit Chattopadhyay

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how the use of social media by citizens has impacted the traditional conceptualization and operationalization of political participation in the society. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on Teorell et al.’s (2007) classification of political participation which is modified to suit the current context of social media. The authors classified 15,460 tweets along three parameters suggested in the framework with help of supervised text classification algorithms. Findings The analysis reveals that Activism is the most prominent form of political participation undertaken by people on Twitter. Other activities that were undertaken include Formal Political participation and Consumer participation. The analysis also reveals that identity of participant does not play a classifying role as expected from the theoretical framework. It was found that the social media as a platform facilitates new forms of participation which are not feasible offline. Research limitations/implications The current work considers only the microblogging platform of Twitter as the data source. For a more comprehensive insight, analysis of other social media platforms is also required. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few analyses where such a large database covering multiple social media events has been created and analysed using supervised text classification algorithms. A large proportion of previous studies on social media have been based on case study and have limited analysis to only a particular event on social media. Although there exist a few works that have studied a vast and varied collection of social media data (Gaby and Caren, 2012; Shirazi, 2013; Rane and Salem, 2012), such efforts are few in number. This study aims to add to that stream of work where a wider and more generalized set of social media data is studied.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511989732
Author(s):  
Alireza Karduni ◽  
Eric Sauda

Black Lives Matter, like many modern movements in the age of information, makes significant use of social media as well as public space to demand justice. In this article, we study the protests in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by police in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 2016. Our goal is to measure the significance of urban space within the virtual and physical network of protesters. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identify and study urban space and social media generated by these protests. We conducted interviews with protesters who were among the first to join the Keith Lamont Scott shooting demonstrations. From the interviews, we identify places that were significant in our interviewees’ narratives. Using a combination of natural language processing and social network analysis, we analyze social media data related to the Charlotte protests retrieved from Twitter. We found that social media, local community, and public space work together to organize and motivate protests and that public events such as protests cause a discernible increase in social media activity. Finally, we find that there are two distinct communities who engage social media in different ways; one group involved with social media, local community and urban space, and a second group connected almost exclusively through social media.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikas Kumar ◽  
Pooja Nanda

With the amplification of social media platforms, the importance of social media analytics has exponentially increased for many brands and organizations across the world. Tracking and analyzing the social media data has been contributing as a success parameter for such organizations, however, the data is being poorly harnessed. Therefore, the ethical implications of social media analytics need to be identified and explored for both the organizations and targeted users of social media data. The present work is an exploratory study to identify the various techno-ethical concerns of social media engagement, as well as social media analytics. The impact of these concerns on the individuals, organizations, and society as a whole are discussed. Ethical engagement for the most common social media platforms has been outlined with a number of specific examples to understand the prominent techno-ethical concerns. Both the individual and organizational perspectives have been taken into account to identify the implications of social media analytics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Anatoliy Gruzd ◽  
Jenna Jacobson

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N=1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that: (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data; (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion; and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.


Author(s):  
Clara Moningka

In this chapter, the author is interested in studying self-comparison in social media and its effect to the self-esteem in emerging adults. In Indonesia, social media are widely used by various groups. Jakarta is even referred as the capital of a text-based social media. Data in 2016 indicated that social media users in Indonesia have reached high ranking. Indonesia ranked fourth in the world for social media users and ranked first with Facebook with 111 million users, followed by Twitter. Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association explained that the biggest users were dominated by adolescents, amounting to 75.50% of the total users. The use of social media can be influenced by collective culture. This culture can influence how individuals evaluate themselves, including their self-esteem. The topic of the psychological effects of social media has been much discussed. A lot of research conducted on the effect of social on development of self-esteem. Social media becoming a place for comparing oneself to others and it turn out it has a great effect.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
A.K. Siti-Nabiha ◽  
Norfarah Nordin ◽  
Boon Kar Poh

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to examine how small- and medium-sized hospitality organisations engage with social media and how social media data are used by their managers to inform business decisions.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was used in this research in which interviews were conducted with top management, comprising the owners/directors and other key managers from small- and medium-sized organisations based in Penang, Malaysia. Fan and Gordon's (2014) categorisation of the social media data analysis process and Simon's (1995) concept of the interactive and diagnostic usage of data were used in the analysis of data.FindingsThe managers of small- and medium-sized hospitality organisations engage with social media for customer relationship management and the understanding of key main competitors. Social media is used to understand, build and manage relationships with current and potential customers; these activities are also linked to actions taken to protect a company's reputation. Even though, for the companies concerned, data gathering is still at the capture stage with no formal procedures and processes in place, the data are utilised in an interactive way to inform two areas’ major business decisions-making, i.e. those related to pricing and promotion and the strategic formulation and reorientation of the business.Research limitations/implicationsThe respondents of this study were mainly from smaller hospitality organisations. Hence, the insights gained are limited to the context of smaller hotels.Originality/valueA significant number of social media studies within the hospitality sector have focussed on marketing aspects. This study explored the wider use of social media in the case of smaller hospitality organisations and how they compete and position themselves in the competitive hospitality industry.


Author(s):  
Umoloyouvwe Ejiro Onomake

Ethnography has been used to research various people and topics online, primarily using netnography and digital ethnography. Researchers and businesses employ digital ethnographic methods to access an assortment of social media platforms in order to learn about social media users. Researchers seek to understand relationships between social media users and organizations from both academic and practitioner perspectives. These organizations run the gamut from for-profit businesses, to nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies. The specific focus here is on social media research as it relates to businesses. Organizations make use of social media in a variety of ways, but chiefly to market to clients and to gather information on followers; the latter of which, in turn, helps them understand their target markets. While this social media data is both quantitative and qualitative in nature, the emphasis here centers on qualitative data, particularly the ways businesses interact with social media users. While some firms mainly use older forms of one-way marketing that solely focus on disseminating information, other firms increasingly seek ways to interact with customers and co-create products with clients. Additionally, social media users are creating their own communities, formed due to a shared interest in a brand. Companies strive to learn more about their customers through these groups. Influencers also play a role in the relationship between organizations and social media users by linking their own followerships to products and brands. In turn, influencers develop their own relationships with organizations through sponsorships, thus becoming brands themselves. Influencers risk losing their followerships when followers perceive them as no longer accessible or authentic. This change in perception can occur for a variety of reasons, including when followers believe that an influencer has prioritized brand alignment over building connections with followers. Due to multiple relationships with different brands and their followers, influencers must negotiate the ambiguity and evolving nature of their role. As social media and digital spaces develop, so must the tools used by anthropologists. Anthropologists should remain open to incorporating hallmarks of ethnographic research such as fieldnotes, participant observation, and focus groups in new ways and alongside tools from other disciplines, including market and UX (user experience) research. The divide between practitioners and academics is blurring. Anthropologists can solve client issues while contributing their voices to larger anthropological and societal discussions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Tam ◽  
Jeong-Nam Kim

Purpose In the midst of practitioners’ increasing use of social media analytics (SMA) in guiding public relations (PR) strategy, this paper aims to present the capabilities and limitations of these tools and offers suggestions on how to best use them to gain research-based insights. Design/methodology/approach This review assesses the capabilities and limitations of SMA tools based on industry reports and research articles on trends in PR and SMA. Findings The strengths of SMA tools lie in their capability to gather and aggregate a large quantity of real-time social media data, use algorithms to analyze the data and present the results in ways meaningful to organizations and understand networks of issues and publics. However, there are also challenges, including the increasing restricted access to social media data, the increased use of bots, skewing social conversations in the public sphere, the lack of capability to analyze certain types of data, such as visual data and the discrepancy between data collected on social media and through other methods. Originality/value This review suggests that PR professionals acknowledge the capabilities and limitations of SMA tools when using them to inform strategy.


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