A Pirâmide das RP: Os media sociais e o papel das Relações

This paper explores the relationship between social media as tools used by public relations professionals and as part of the daily lives of organizations’ stakeholders, identifying emergent practices in public relations and confronting new perspectives, both professional and academic, on public relations functions and on its role within organizational communication. Departing from the agreement shared by academics and professionals on a profound shift in public relations as a consequence of the increasingly widespread, intense and frequent use of social media, this paper intends to clarify the nature and terms of that shift. Two perspectives are confronted: one of them is focused on emergent professional practices and regards social media as tools at the disposal of the PR professional; the other is broader in scope and views social media as a contextual factor that influences both the stakeholders’ behavior patterns and PR practices, thus redefining the role of public relations within organizational communication. The paper presents results from an exploratory study whose goal was to identify a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of social media on public relations.A relevant case study was identified, presenting the solution found by TAP, the Portuguese airline company, to deal with communication crisis involving the social media and to successfully manage social media use as a complementary communication channel. TAP’s social media presence is managed through an articulation of public relations, marketing and customer support where public relations assume a pivotal role. Drawing on this case study, we propose the PR pyramid as a theoretical model that redefines the role of public relations as the orchestrator of the consistent, coherent and integrated communication that is demanded by the contemporary digital context

Mixed membership stochastic blockmodels

Observations consisting of measurements on relationships for pairs of objects arise in many settings, such as protein interaction and gene regulatory networks, collections of author-recipient email, and social networks. Analyzing such data with probabilisic models can be delicate because the simple exchangeability assumptions underlying many boilerplate models no longer hold. In this paper, we describe a latent variable model of such data called the mixed membership stochastic blockmodel. This model extends blockmodels for relational data to ones which capture mixed membership latent relational structure, thus providing an object-specific low-dimensional representation. We develop a general variational inference algorithm for fast approximate posterior inference. We explore applications to social and protein interaction networks.Comment: 46 pages, 14 figures, 3 table

Social Networks, HIV/AIDS and Risk Perceptions

Understanding the determinants of individuals’ perceptions of their risk of becoming infected with HIV and their perceptions of acceptable strategies of prevention is an essential step towards curtailing the spread of this disease. We focus in this paper on learning and decision-making about AIDS in the context of high uncertainty about the disease and appropriate behavioral responses, and we argue that social interaction is an important determinant of risk perceptions and the acceptability of behavioral change. Using longitudinal survey data from rural Kenya and Malawi, we test this hypothesis. We investigate whether social interactions—and especially the extent to which social network partners perceive themselves to be at risk –exert causal influences on respondents’ risk perceptions and on one approach to prevention, spousal communication about the threat of AIDS to the couple and their children. The study explicitly allows for the possibility that important characteristics, such as unobserved preferences or community characteristics, determine not only the outcomes of interest but also the size and composition of networks. The most important empirical result is that social networks have significant and substantial effects on risk perception and the adoption of new behaviors even after controlling for unobserved factors.health, AIDS, information, social networks, Africa

Sharing Social Network Data: Differentially Private Estimation of Exponential-Family Random Graph Models

Motivated by a real-life problem of sharing social network data that contain sensitive personal information, we propose a novel approach to release and analyze synthetic graphs in order to protect privacy of individual relationships captured by the social network while maintaining the validity of statistical results. A case study using a version of the Enron e-mail corpus dataset demonstrates the application and usefulness of the proposed techniques in solving the challenging problem of maintaining privacy \emph{and} supporting open access to network data to ensure reproducibility of existing studies and discovering new scientific insights that can be obtained by analyzing such data. We use a simple yet effective randomized response mechanism to generate synthetic networks under $\epsilon$-edge differential privacy, and then use likelihood based inference for missing data and Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to fit exponential-family random graph models to the generated synthetic networks.Comment: Updated, 39 page

Rent Appropriation in Strategic Alliances: A Study of Technical Alliances in Pharmaceutical Industry

Many existing alliance studies have investigated how embedded relations create superior value for organizations. The role of network structure in rent appropriation or pie splitting, however, has been underexplored. We propose that favorable locations in interorganizational networks provide firms with superior opportunities for appropriating more economic benefits from alliances than their partners do. Specifically, we argue that partners’ asymmetric network positions will lead to unequal brokerage positions that promote disparate levels of information gathering, monitoring, and bargaining power, which lead to differing capacities to appropriate value. This in turn results in variations in market performance. We also propose this brokerage position exacerbates existing inequalities such as commercial capital; thus, available firm resources will moderate such network effects. Evidence is presented in the form of market response to technology alliance announcements from a set of pharmaceutical firms. In general, we find that firms within central network positions and those spanning structural holes have higher returns than their partners. In addition, we show that this relationship is contingent upon available firm resources

The Dynamics of Interfirm Networks along the Industry Life Cycle: The Case of the Global Video Games Industry 1987-2007

In this paper, we study the formation of network ties between firms along the life cycle of a creative industry. We focus on three drivers of network formation: i) network endogeneity which stresses a path-dependent change originating from previous network structures, ii) five forms of proximity (e.g. geographical proximity) which ascribe tie formation to the similarity of actors' attributes; and (iii) individual characteristics which refer to the heterogeneity in actors capabilities to exploit external knowledge. The paper employs a stochastic actor-oriented model to estimate the - changing - effects of these drivers on inter-firm network formation in the global video game industry from 1987 to 2007. Our findings indicate that the effects of the drivers of network formation change with the degree of maturity of the industry. To an increasing extent, video game firms tend to partner over shorter distances and with more cognitively similar firms as the industry evolves.network dynamics, industry life cycle, proximity, creative industry, video game industry, stochastic actor-oriented model