An Investigation of the Utility of Microblogging in a Virtual Organisation

Virtualisation is one possible business strategy of an organisation. The nature of virtual organisations is that individuals or teams are distributed over different work sites. This leads to barriers in communication,coordination and collaboration between these entities due to dispersed expertise, time zones, languages, cultures, etc. To address these issues, virtual organisations have invested in ICT for supporting collaboration between cross-site colleagues. One very new collaborative technology is microblogging. Microblogging supports asynchronous communication between multiple persons. Microblogging is based upon transmission of short messages that can be sent from Web-based microblogging systems, instant messaging tools, email or mobile phones. Microblogging has some relevant features like simplicity, immediacy, accessibility and presence. This paper describes our investigation of the utility of microblogging, particularly the Twitter tool, for collaboration support in a virtual organisation. Since microblogging is very new and was introduced only recently, no work has been done on this exact topic. The investigation involved conducting an online survey to collect participants’ opinions about the utility of Twitter in the workplace after using Twitter over a three-week period. The study yielded quantitative and qualitative results regarding participants’ experience of Twitter. It was found that microblogging could be adapted to virtual organisations quickly due to ease of use in terms of taking less time and effort for creating microblogs. Twitter could be used in virtual organisations for collaboration support because it is believed that the use of Twitter could somewhat improve communication between cross-site co-workers. However, to be well accepted by virtual organisations, Twitter needs improvement and addition to its existing functionality

BRAND MANAGEMENT USING SOCIAL MEDIA

The phenomenon of social media is having a massive impact on the ways brands are perceived, and the way consumers interact with them. Consumers now desire brands that are engaging, relevant, and authentic. In turn, companies are increasingly looking to social media channels to increase their brand?s visibility and influence. This paper addresses the impact social media has on branding. Companies need to have a clear social media strategy included in their overall communications strategy before undertaking a social media campaign. Once a carefully considered strategy is in play, the rewards in terms of customer loyalty and engagement are potentially great

Business Value of Enterprise Micro-Blogs: Empirical Study from weibo.com in Sina

The increasing use of micro-blogs as marketing tools has increased the research attention on the usage and performance of enterprise micro-blogs. Based on research on information system (IS) usage and the resource-based view (RBV) theory, this study develops a model to measure the business value of enterprise micro-blogs. The model consists of metrics on micro-blog usage, micro-blog operational performance, firm capability, and performance. Questionnaires were distributed to firms that use micro-blogs. This study collects 317 valid responses for empirical analysis. The result suggests that the extent of micro-blog usage improves the operational performance of enterprise micro-blogs directly and indirectly by increasing firm capability. The operational performance of enterprise micro-blogs significantly affects firm performance. This study reveals the mechanism of business value generation of enterprise micro-blogs and extends the stream of research that combines IS usage and the RBV theory

An Information Diffusion-Based Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging

Micro-blogging is increasingly evolving from a daily chatting tool into a critical platform for individuals and organizations to seek and share real-time news updates during emergencies. However, seeking and extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of a large body of irrelevant personal messages and spam. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework to overcome this problem. By analyzing information diffusion patterns among a large set of micro-blogs that play the role of emergency news providers, our approach selects a small subset as recommended emergency news feeds for regular users. We evaluate our diffusion-based recommendation framework on Twitter during the early outbreak of H1N1 Flu. The evaluation results show that our method results in more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches

Social Media under Social Control: Regulating Social Media and the Future of Socialization

The process of socialization for new and future journalists will look dramatically different from the process undergone by previous generations of journalists, due to economic realities and changes in the nature of news production. The rise of social media and its role in the establishment of a successful career will also affect the integration of these rising professionals into their employing organizations. These changes in the socialization process will require alterations both in the day-to-day management of these individuals and in the theoretical approaches to studying their work, particularly with regard to the impact of social media on the profession. This paper demonstrates a wide range of concerns that media managers and researchers must consider as the journalism profession incorporates these new professionals into its ranks

Search engine For Twitter sentiment analysis

textThe purpose of sentiment analysis is to determine the attitude of a writer or a speaker with respect to some topic or his feeling in a document. Thanks to the rise of social media, nowadays there are numerous data generated by users. Mining and categorizing these data will not only bring profits for companies, but also benefit the nation. Sentiment analysis not only enables business decision makers to better understand customers' behaviors, but also allows customers to know how the public feel about a product before purchasing. On the other hand, the aggregation of emotions will effectively measure the public response toward an event or news. For example, the level of distress and sadness will increase significantly after terror attacks or natural disaster. In our project, we are going to build a search engine that allows users to check the sentiment of his query. Some of previous researches on classifying sentiment of messages on micro-blogging services like Twitter have tried to solve this problem but they have ignored neutral tweets, which will result in problematic results (12). Our sentiment analysis will also be based on tweets collected from twitter, since twitter can offer sufficient and real-time corpora for analysis. We will preprocess each tweet in the training set and label it as positive, negative or neutral. As we use words in the tweet as the feature for our model, different features will be used. We will show that accuracy achieved by different machine learning algorithms (Naïve Bayes, Maximum Entropy) can be improved with a feature vector obtained by using bigrams (5). In our practice, we find that Naive Bayes has better performance than Maximum Entropy.Statistic

An Assessment of the University Usage of Social Media Platforms: Case from Lebanon—Theoretical Foundations—Part 1

This paper, part of two, aims to assess how a selection of Lebanese Universities utilizes social media platforms to attract potential student candidates. Social Media is considered a significant recruitment tool universities use to attract high school graduates from the millennium digital generation. Different universities have dealt differently with social media, so capturing recorded activity is essential to assess such efforts and pinpoint gaps to justify student recruitment investments by universities. This study uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. A descriptive comparative analysis is carried out based on collected data from the different university social media platforms to help categorize selected universities in their efforts, successes, and gaps. However, this paper, the first part of two, represents the theoretical foundations needed for the study. Paper part two (2) will follow to illustrate the numerical and graphical analysis. Results show a lack of motivation schemes to attract potential candidates and encourage them to interact with such platforms. Moreover, universities lack specialized digital marketing staff to produce the appropriate content and design marketing strategies that are attractive, interactive, and with high response rates to inquiries