Putting social networks to practical use: improving last-mile dissemination systems for climate and market information services in developing countries

Understanding how to improve the accessibility and timely dissemination of weather and market information can help farmers adapt their management to climate change impacts. Our objective is to use Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a tool to identify potential opportunities for improving weather and market advisory dissemination to rural communities and to explore the relationship between farmers' access to information and yield and selling price. As a case study, we applied SNA to 313 farmers in Bangladesh to analyze weather and market information networks and farmers' friendship networks as a potential proxy for information exchange. Farmer access to information, dominant sources of information and potential speed of information transfer were key criteria for our analysis. Our results indicate that weather and market information networks in coastal Bangladesh depended on certain key sources of information, while the friendship network was decentralized and interconnected, with few isolated farmers. We showed that farmers networks are significantly correlated with several socio-agro-economic variables; however, there was little indication of a relationship between information access and yield and selling price. We conclude that a mixed approach of targeting central actors and broadcasting information to farmers may be a suitable strategy to reach a maximum number of farmers as well as the most isolated farmers. Our study highlights that SNA can be a promising tool to reveal hidden structures of information flows in farmer communities and provide valuable insights for developing information dissemination strategies that reach even the most remote and underserved farmers

The Influence of Opinion Leaders towards the Purchase Intentions of Consumers in the Virtual Communities of Consumption

Tohoku University大滝精一課

Addressing the Loopholes of Female Education: A Study on the SSC and HSC Level Students of Rural Bangladesh

Holistic development of a country requires diligent participation from every section of people regardless of race, class or gender. In this respect, female education is considered as a dynamic ladder for human resource development in the truest sense. This study aimed at revealing the loopholes of female education among the secondary and higher secondary level female students in rural Bangladesh. This qualitative research followed a semi-structured way of interviewing the participants who were basically the female students of SSC and HSC level and some other persons associated to their education. The participants were primarily chosen from Shariatpur district and Madaripur district of central Bangladesh as the representatives of rural areas. The findings of the research revealed a number of barriers faced by female students including familial inclination to female education, lack of social awareness, financial insufficiency, misinterpretation of religious values, sometimes the psychological ignorance of the students themselves as well. This research also shed some light on the reduction of the obstacles. It recommended some crucial moves like the initiation of educational workers, enough financial assistance, ensuring moral and religious support etc. to smoothen the way to female enrichment through education. Keywords: Secondary and Higher Secondary Level of Education, Female Education, Dropout, Rural Banglades

Hot Topic Propagation Model and Opinion Leader Identifying Model in Microblog Network

As the network technique is fast developing, the microblog has been a significant carrier representing the social public opinions. Therefore, it is important to investigate the propagation characteristics of the topics and to unearth the opinion leaders in Micro-blog network. The propagation status of the hot topics in the Micro-blog is influenced by the authority of the participating individuals. We build a time-varying model with the variational external field strength to simulate the topic propagation process. This model also fits for the multimodal events. The opinion leaders are important individuals who remarkably influence the topic discussions in its propagation process. They can help to guide the healthy development of public opinion. We build an AHP model based on the influence, the support, and the activity of a node, as well as a microblog-rank algorithm based on the weighted undirected network, to unearth and analyze the opinion leaders’ characteristics. The experiments in the data, collected from the Sina Micro-blog from October 2012 to November 2012 and from January 2013 to February 2013, show that our models predict the trend of hot topic efficiently and the opinion leaders we found are reasonable

A Study on Online-Shopping Opinion Leaders Based on Massive Data

The online communities are important channels for consumers to distribute, transmit and access word-of-mouth information. However, the influence power of the users has a significant difference. This article selects about 200 Online Communities (taobao wangwang group), based on more than one million taobao real transaction data provided by nearly fifty thousand members of the communities, from the perspective of social network to build weighted and directed graph of online shopping interpersonal influence relations and users’ influences model, mining online shopping opinion leaders and exploring the community online communication, spread and effect regularities to provide theoretical basis and practice guidance for word-of-mouth marketing

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS − A UNIFYING DEFINITION, COMPREHENSIVE FRAMEWORK, AND ASSESSMENT OF ALGORITHMS FOR IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Given its relative infancy, there is a dearth of research on a comprehensive view of business social media analytics (SMA). This dissertation first examines current literature related to SMA and develops an integrated, unifying definition of business SMA, providing a nuanced starting point for future business SMA research. This dissertation identifies several benefits of business SMA, and elaborates on some of them, while presenting recent empirical evidence in support of foregoing observations. The dissertation also describes several challenges facing business SMA today, along with supporting evidence from the literature, some of which also offer mitigating solutions in particular contexts. The second part of this dissertation studies one SMA implication focusing on identifying social influencer. Growing social media usage, accompanied by explosive growth in SMA, has resulted in increasing interest in finding automated ways of discovering influencers in online social interactions. Beginning 2008, many variants of multiple basic approaches have been proposed. Yet, there is no comprehensive study investigating the relative efficacy of these methods in specific settings. This dissertation investigates and reports on the relative performance of multiple methods on Twitter datasets containing between them tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tweets. Accordingly, the second part of the dissertation helps further an understanding of business SMA and its many aspects, grounded in recent empirical work, and is a basis for further research and development. This dissertation provides a relatively comprehensive understanding of SMA and the implementation SMA in influencer identification

Accounting for the Impact of Sustainable Agriculture: The Role of Community Based Organization and Local Governance Structures in Promoting Sustainable Agriculture

This chapter explores the role of community-based organizations (CBOs) in promoting and sustaining an organic/sustainable food production system. The chapter argues that CBOs offer a unique platform for this purpose considering their potential to promote collective impact and overcome our ancestral tendencies that tend to discourage sustainable behavior. The chapter discusses the role of local governance in creating the institutional support that drives collective systemic impacts. The chapter uses data collected via a telephone survey of a census of Community Action Agencies (CAAs) to assess the level of support for sustainable agriculture, organic methods of production, and the responsibility of citizens in supporting locally produced food. The results show that CBOs believe in organic/sustainable and community-based food production system. CAAs support for a sustainable food production system speaks to their potential to serve as a linchpin in their communities for promoting sustainable agricultural production systems and ensuring collective impact