Social Media and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction. Global conversations, especially among Generation Y, were born circa 2004. Beginning 1995 until then, the internet had hosted static, one-way websites. These were places to visit passively, retrieve information from, and perhaps post comments about by electronic mail. Sixteen years later, Web 2.0 enables many-to-many connections in numerous domains of interest and practice, powered by the increasing use of blogs, image and video sharing, mashups, podcasts, ratings, Really Simple Syndication, social bookmarking, tweets, widgets, and wikis, among others. Today, people expect the internet to be user-centric

Automatic Full Text Analysis in Public Social Media – Adoption of a Software Prototype to Investigate Political Communication

AbstractThe relevance of web 2.0 and social networks has increased rapidly in the last years. As people use different networks for different purposes, communication is a common goal. Activities in virtual social networks result in a massive amount of information. User-generated content is clustered respect to platform, way of communication as well as quality and richness of content. Often the subject of information exchange deals with personal issues concerning events and individuals. Until now this information is not considered by means of classic information retrieval. Identifying distinct subjects, gathering and analyzing information and putting them into relationship at once are open scientific challenges. This contribution describes an approach to partial aspects of this problem by providing a prototype for full text analysis in social networks. Furthermore, based on a test scenario of analyzing postings in the field of political communication, potentials and limitations of the prototype are discussed

Technology in the 21st Century: New Challenges and Opportunities

Although big data, big data analytics (BDA) and business intelligence have attracted growing attention of both academics and practitioners, a lack of clarity persists about how BDA has been applied in business and management domains. In reflecting on Professor Ayre's contributions, we want to extend his ideas on technological change by incorporating the discourses around big data, BDA and business intelligence. With this in mind, we integrate the burgeoning but disjointed streams of research on big data, BDA and business intelligence to develop unified frameworks. Our review takes on both technical and managerial perspectives to explore the complex nature of big data, techniques in big data analytics and utilisation of big data in business and management community. The advanced analytics techniques appear pivotal in bridging big data and business intelligence. The study of advanced analytics techniques and their applications in big data analytics led to identification of promising avenues for future research

ERP 2.0, what for and how?

International audienceThe poor level of adoption of ERP systems is often considered as linked to a loss of social interactions between users of the ERP, together with the poor adaptability of these huge systems to local needs. Web 2.0 tools (including among others social networks, wikis, mashups and tags) aim at allowing a better interaction between a user and an Internet site, or between communities of users by means of a Web site. Using these tools in an industrial context appears now as a possible solution for addressing some of the problems of present information systems, and especially ERPs. Examples of such integration of Web 2.0 technologies in industrial practices are analysed and the empiricism with which these experiences are usually conducted is underlined. In order to address this problem, we suggest a step-by-step method allowing to identify on which business processes performed by an ERP the Web 2.0 tools could be of interest, and investigate how to integrate the two worlds. This approach is illustrated on the SAP product Business By Design, which new version includes a set of configurable Web 2.0 tools

Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better

This report was produced through a joint research project of the Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center. The research included an extensive literature review on collaboration in philanthropy, detailed analysis of trends from a recent Foundation Center survey of the largest U.S. foundations, interviews with 37 leading philanthropy professionals and technology experts, and a review of over 170 online tools.The report is a story about how new tools are changing the way funders collaborate. It includes three primary sections: an introduction to emerging technologies and the changing context for philanthropic collaboration; an overview of collaborative needs and tools; and recommendations for improving the collaborative technology landscapeA "Key Findings" executive summary serves as a companion piece to this full report

Sentiment Analysis and Classifying Hashtags in Social Media Using Data Mining Techniques

Big data is one of the important topics which is still open for a wide range of applications for extracting useful information and knowledge for supporting organizations by planning and decision-making. Social media as a technology is an important resource of data, especially because it has been widely used in the last years. A Hashtag is recently one of the most popular features provided by Social media and is used by most social media users to express, share, and retrieve opinions and feelings regarding a specific theme. Hashtag features in social media are used more and more in recent years to discuss and debate important current events by public audience. This paper sheds light on how business can use such sources of information and how needed technical processes can be implemented accordingly. The paper demonstrates sentiment analysis as a scenario for such implementation. The main innovation in this paper is not limited to the technical method used, but rather to focus on the idea of using hashtags as information source in business, which is still rarely addressed in science. This paper will provide a novel model based on text mining techniques to provide a sentiment analysis for classifying business-related Hashtags posted on social media from the customers. The results will be presented and verified through samples of positive, and negative classified comments extracted from the Hashtags for supporting the organization by planning and decision making for generating completive advantages

The role of groups as local context in large Enterprise Social Networks: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia

Enterprise Social Networking, the application of popular social networking techniques to the workplaces of organisations, is an increasingly common phenomenon. But its nature, benefits and proliferation are not yet fully understood. In this study we investigate ESN communication at the micro-level. We focus on the role of the group feature in structuring and providing context for communication in large ESNs. Our case study is Yammer at Deloitte. In contrast to previous studies we carry out an analysis of communication at the thread (conversation) level, rather than at the level of single messages. This allows us to provide a more contextual understanding of the group aspects of communication. We find that information sharing underpins the majority of communication threads, which speaks to the usefulness of ESN, in particular in the context of knowledge-intensive work. We further uncover differences between network-wide and group-centred communication and derive a framework of four group archetypes, based on different group communication patterns. Our findings are useful for decision-makers in providing a better understanding of the role of groups in providing local contexts for users in large ESNs

New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations

Marketers and public relations professionals today are confronted with an astounding array of new communications channels. Internet-based social media tools like blogs, podcasts, online video and social networks are giving voice to the opinions of millions of consumers. While mainstream media continues to play a vital role in the dissemination of information, even these traditional channels are increasingly being influenced by online conversations. The "new influencers" are beginning to tear at the fabric of marketing as it has existed for 100 years, giving rise to a new style of marketing that is characterized by conversation and community. Marketers are responding to these forces with a mixture of excitement, fear and fascination. They're alarmed at the prospect of ceding control of their messages to a community of unknowns. Yet at the same time they're excited about the prospect of leveraging theese same tools to speak directly to their constituents without the involvement of media intermediaries.The Society for New Communications Research set out to conduct an examination of how influence patterns are changing and how communications professionals are addressing those changes by adopting social media. The goals were to discover how organizations:Define new influencers;Communicate and create relationships with them;Use social media to create influence; andMeasure the effects of these efforts.Another goal of the study was to use these discoveries to offer a set of recommendations to professional communicators