Using Social Media Monitoring Data to Forecast Online Word-of-Mouth Valence: A Network Autoregressive Approach

Managers increasingly use social media for marketing research, particularly to monitor what consumers think about brands. Although social media monitoring can provide rich insights into consumer attitudes, marketers typically use it in a backward-looking manner — that is, to measure past online word-of-mouth (WOM) valence (i.e., sentiment). This article proposes a novel method for using social media monitoring in a forward-looking manner to forecast brands’ future online WOM valence. The approach takes into account information on related brands based on the premise that consumers’ attitudes toward one brand are likely relative to — and therefore associated with — attitudes toward other brands. The method infers associative relations between brands from social media monitoring data by observing which brands are mentioned at the same time in the same social media sources, thus enabling construction of time-varying brand “networks” for representing interdependencies between brands. The authors test six possible methods for capturing brand interdependencies (Jaccard, Dice, anti-Dice, correlation, normalized correlation, and Euclidean distance) and examine the relative performance of each alternative method with a view to identifying the best approach

A Tale of Self-Monitoring, Social Capital, and Social Media

We examined whether individual self-monitoring differences predict what type of relationships people have on Facebook. In the offline world, high self-monitors have large heterogeneous social networks made up of weak emotional ties, whereas low self-monitors have small homogenous social networks made up of strong emotional ties. In our study, we defined online relationships in terms of bridging and bonding social capital. Bridging social capital refers to large heterogeneous social networks made up of weak emotional ties. People maintain these relationships for social benefits. Bonding social capital refers to small homogeneous social networks made up of strong emotional ties. People maintain these relationships for emotional benefits. We predicted high self-monitors will have more bridging than bonding social capital on Facebook; low self-monitors will have more bonding than bridging social capital on Facebook. We believed attitudes about using Facebook would moderate these relationships. We used Snyder‟s Self-Monitoring Scale, Williams‟ Online Social Capital Scales, and Facebook Intensity Scale to assess our variables of interest. We found support for our hypotheses. For high self-monitors, greater importance placed on Facebook usage predicted increases in bridging social capital on Facebook; for low self-monitors, greater importance placed on Facebook usage predicted increases in bonding social capital on Facebook. Keywords: self-monitoring, social capital, social media, Faceboo

Efficiency Analysis of Russian Regional Authorities on Social Networks

Nowadays it is hardly possible to overestimate the role of digital technologies in the work of Russian politicians. One of the effective means that gives new opportunities for modern politicians is social media. The phenomenon of social media has no longer been just entertainment, it has become a powerful tool of influencing public opinion. If used properly social media can help both shape the image of a politician and increase the electorate trust and loyalty. Social networks appear to be the most accessible and popular type of social media for politicians. This article covers the topic of maintaining social network profiles by the heads of several Russian regions, moreover, the authors assess the impact on perception of politicians by the politically active population. To achieve this goal we conducted an analysis of the politician activity on the popular Russian social network VKontakte over a certain period using a special technical tool — a social media multi-factor monitoring and analyzing system developed by Russian company “Kribrum”. It contains various analysis methods, as well as linguo-semantic and psychological behavioral models. It was found that maintaining accounts on social networks contributes to the increase of public confidence in the authorities. However, the potential of this tool is not exploited to the full scale: in some cases, the heads of regions do not pay sufficient attention to maintaining their own pages on the Internet. They cannot cope with technical tools or ignore them, do not work with citizens through social networks, which eventually leads to the lack of credibility. In the modern conditions, with the federal government recognizing the importance of social media and taking into account transparency and public acknowledgement of regional authorities, the tendency towards intensifying work with citizens on virtual networks is likely to increase. Keywords: digitalization, social networks, credibility of authorities, key performance indicators (KPI

Public Concern About Monitoring Twitter Users and Their Conversations to Recruit for Clinical Trials: Survey Study

Background: Social networks such as Twitter offer the clinical research community a novel opportunity for engaging potential study participants based on user activity data. However, the availability of public social media data has led to new ethical challenges about respecting user privacy and the appropriateness of monitoring social media for clinical trial recruitment. Researchers have voiced the need for involving users’ perspectives in the development of ethical norms and regulations. Objective: This study examined the attitudes and level of concern among Twitter users and nonusers about using Twitter for monitoring social media users and their conversations to recruit potential clinical trial participants. Methods: We used two online methods for recruiting study participants: the open survey was (1) advertised on Twitter between May 23 and June 8, 2017, and (2) deployed on TurkPrime, a crowdsourcing data acquisition platform, between May 23 and June 8, 2017. Eligible participants were adults, 18 years of age or older, who lived in the United States. People with and without Twitter accounts were included in the study. Results: While nearly half the respondents—on Twitter (94/603, 15.6%) and on TurkPrime (509/603, 84.4%)—indicated agreement that social media monitoring constitutes a form of eavesdropping that invades their privacy, over one-third disagreed and nearly 1 in 5 had no opinion. A chi-square test revealed a positive relationship between respondents’ general privacy concern and their average concern about Internet research (PP=.001) and whether they consider Twitter monitoring for clinical trial recruitment as eavesdropping (PP=.003). As Twitter literacy increased, so did people’s concerns about researchers monitoring Twitter activity. Our data support the previously suggested use of the nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media in research, insofar as social media-based recruitment does not need to be considered exceptional and, for most, it is considered preferable to traditional in-person interventions at physical clinics. The expressed attitudes were highly contextual, depending on factors such as the type of disease or health topic (eg, HIV/AIDS vs obesity vs smoking), the entity or person monitoring users on Twitter, and the monitored information. Conclusions: The data and findings from this study contribute to the critical dialogue with the public about the use of social media in clinical research. The findings suggest that most users do not think that monitoring Twitter for clinical trial recruitment constitutes inappropriate surveillance or a violation of privacy. However, researchers should remain mindful that some participants might find social media monitoring problematic when connected with certain conditions or health topics. Further research should isolate factors that influence the level of concern among social media users across platforms and populations and inform the development of more clear and consistent guidelines

MONITORING POTENTIAL DRUG INTERACTIONS AND REACTIONS VIA NETWORK ANALYSIS OF INSTAGRAM USER TIMELINES

Much recent research aims to identify evidence for Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) and Adverse Drug reactions (ADR) from the biomedical scientific literature. In addition to this "Bibliome", the universe of social media provides a very promising source of large-scale data that can help identify DDI and ADR in ways that have not been hitherto possible. Given the large number of users, analysis of social media data may be useful to identify under-reported, population-level pathology associated with DDI, thus further contributing to improvements in population health. Moreover, tapping into this data allows us to infer drug interactions with natural products-including cannabis-which constitute an array of DDI very poorly explored by biomedical research thus far. Our goal is to determine the potential of Instagram for public health monitoring and surveillance for DDI, ADR, and behavioral pathology at large. Most social media analysis focuses on Twitter and Facebook, but Instagram is an increasingly important platform, especially among teens, with unrestricted access of public posts, high availability of posts with geolocation coordinates, and images to supplement textual analysis. Using drug, symptom, and natural product dictionaries for identification of the various types of DDI and ADR evidence, we have collected close to 7000 user timelines spanning from October 2010 to June 2015.We report on 1) the development of a monitoring tool to easily observe user-level timelines associated with drug and symptom terms of interest, and 2) population-level behavior via the analysis of co-occurrence networks computed from user timelines at three different scales: monthly, weekly, and daily occurrences. Analysis of these networks further reveals 3) drug and symptom direct and indirect associations with greater support in user timelines, as well as 4) clusters of symptoms and drugs revealed by the collective behavior of the observed population. This demonstrates that Instagram contains much drug- and pathology specific data for public health monitoring of DDI and ADR, and that complex network analysis provides an important toolbox to extract health-related associations and their support from large-scale social media data

HETEROGENEOUS DATA AND PROBABILISTIC SYSTEM MODEL ANALYSES FOR ENHANCED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND RESILIENCE OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS

The protection and resilience of critical infrastructure systems (CIS) are essential for public safety in daily operations and times of crisis and for community preparedness to hazard events. Increasing situational awareness and resilience of CIS includes both comprehensive monitoring of CIS and their surroundings, as well as evaluating CIS behaviors in changing conditions and with different system configurations. Two frameworks for increasing the monitoring capabilities of CIS are presented. The proposed frameworks are (1) a process for classifying social media big data for monitoring CIS and hazard events and (2) a framework for integrating heterogeneous data sources, including social media, using Bayesian inference to update prior probabilities of event occurrence. Applications of both frameworks are presented, including building and evaluating text-based machine learning classifiers for identifying CIS damages and integrating disparate data sources to estimate hazards and CIS damages. Probabilistic analyses of CIS vulnerabilities with varying system parameters and topologies are also presented. In a water network, the impact of varying parameters on component performance is evaluated. In multiple, small-size water networks, the impacts of system topology are assessed to identify characteristics of more resilient networks. This body of work contributes insights and methods for monitoring CIS and assessing their performance. Integrating heterogeneous data sources increases situational awareness of CIS, especially during or after failure events, and evaluating the sensitivity of CIS outcomes to changes in the network facilitates decisions for CIS investments and emergency response.Ph.D

Normalising Medical Concepts in Social Media Texts by Learning Semantic Representation

Automatically recognising medical con- cepts mentioned in social media messages (e.g. tweets) enables several applications for enhancing health quality of people in a community, e.g. real-time monitoring of infectious diseases in population. How- ever, the discrepancy between the type of language used in social media and med- ical ontologies poses a major challenge. Existing studies deal with this challenge by employing techniques, such as lexi- cal term matching and statistical machine translation. In this work, we handle the medical concept normalisation at the se- mantic level. We investigate the use of neural networks to learn the transition be- tween layman’s language used in social media messages and formal medical lan- guage used in the descriptions of medi- cal concepts in a standard ontology. We evaluate our approaches using three differ- ent datasets, where social media texts are extracted from Twitter messages and blog posts. Our experimental results show that our proposed approaches significantly and consistently outperform existing effective baselines, which achieved state-of-the-art performance on several medical concept normalisation tasks, by up to 44%

The Role of African American Social Networks in Adolescent Sex Education and Parental Monitoring

Background: Parental sex communication and parental monitoring are associated with reduced adverse adolescent sexual health outcomes. Little is known about cultural nuances of these parenting skills within the African American community. Also, few studies have examined how non-parent adults function as sex educators and monitors of adolescent activity. Objective: To examine the process, barriers, and facilitators of sex education and monitoring by adults within African American adolescents' social networks as part of a larger study to develop a parent-targeted intervention to improve these parenting skills. Methods: We conducted 21 focus groups between December 2007- March 2008 with African American parents from Allegheny County Pennsylvania and their adolescents aged 15-17. Participants were recruited through community organizations, health centers and media advertisements. We used a directed approach to content analysis. Results: Parents felt community monitoring of children occurs less than when they were children. Parents expressed the need for more communication between parents and members of their children's social networks regarding the monitoring of their adolescents. Mothers often act as confidants for their children's friends but struggle over whether to disclose information revealed during these discussions to another child's parents. Fathers advise and role model expected social and sexual behaviors to their children and their friends informally as the children are hanging out. Parents work together using "parent networks" to monitor youth in thecommunity. Conclusions: African American parents feel their communities and social networks could play a greater role in monitoring children's social and sexual development. Parent-targeted interventions should be tailored to address the different styles mothers and fathers use to communicate with and monitor their children. Public Health Significance: Further understanding of how non-parent adults within the African American community influence adolescent sexual behavior will enable public health professionals to appropriately incorporate non-parent adults into intervention design, therefore increasing the likelihood of decreasing adverse sexual health outcomes among African American adolescents

Social media in the workplace: Legal challenges for employers and employees

Social media has become prevalent through platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and has essentially changed the way people communicate. At first, social media networks were used for private purposes; however, businesses have started using social media as a way to improve and advertise their products online. Therefore, social media presents many benefits such as lower costs for advertising and convenience for customers to view and share products online. However, the advent of social media in the business environment also creates challenges within the workplace that can have a negative effect on the employer–employee relationship. This is especially significant when social media is used inappropriately within and beyond the workplace. Therefore, the aim of this research is to address the legal challenges created by social media in the workplace, and whether employers have a contractual right to control and/or manage employees using social media beyond the workplace. The use of social media in the workplace complicates the employment relationship because of the various legal issues it creates. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to highlight these legal issues within the workplace environment and how the use of social media affects the employment relationship when used within and beyond the workplace. Hence, this thesis will determine the meaning of a ‘workplace’ and how this may present legal issues relating to the use of social media outside of working hours. This discussion is coupled with the duties within an employment contract and whether social media has any impact on these duties within the employment relationship when determining the use of social media outside of working hours. Moreover, this thesis will examine the key legal issues arising out of the use of social media in the workplace, which include privacy and defamation as well as cyberbullying. These are key issues in relation to the ubiquitous nature of social media in the workplace. Focusing on these legal issues, this thesis will address the means by which employers can control and monitor the use of social media by employees within and outside the workplace through existing workplace surveillance legislation and workplace policies. However, the implementation of social media workplace policies to regulate off-duty conduct of employees may create some concern in relation to a breach of privacy. Therefore, this thesis considers the impact of privacy principles within workplace surveillance and to what extent an employer can regulate the use of social media by an employee beyond the workplace. This thesis concludes with key recommendations on the possible control and monitoring of social media within and beyond the workplace. The concluding remarks find that by introducing the integration of employment contracts and social media workplace policies, together with the implied duties under the contract, it is acceptable for employers to manage social media beyond the workplace. Secondly, this thesis found that educating and training employees on the possible risks social media in the workplace can have and keeping the workplace policies up to date, may reduce the legal challenges of social media beyond the workplace. Lastly, this thesis proposed that existing workplace surveillance legislation be amended to include specific control and monitoring of social media within and beyond the workplace