Social networking and transnational capitalism

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have become a key component of users’ experience of the internet. Whilst much has been made of the social dynamics of online SNS, the influence of the structures and operations of these sites – and the business models behind them – on users is rarely accounted for. This paper argues that behind the social behaviours sup- ported by SNS, there is a growing shift towards viewing online communities as commodities, and SNS as an extension of mainstream capitalist ideologies fostered by existing patterns of commercialization and consumption. Using the works of Gramsci, Gill and Hardt & Negri to provide a critical grounding, this paper explores the popular SNS site ‘Facebook’ and suggests that SNS may feel to the users to be free, social, personal, but in fact SNS are business as usual

Determining citizens’ opinions about stories in the news media: analysing Google, Facebook and Twitter

We describe a method whereby a governmental policy maker can discover citizens’ reaction to news stories. This is particularly relevant in the political world, where governments’ policy statements are reported by the news media and discussed by citizens. The work here addresses two main questions: whereabouts are citizens discussing a news story, and what are they saying? Our strategy to answer the first question is to find news articles pertaining to the policy statements, then perform internet searches for references to the news articles’ headlines and URLs. We have created a software tool that schedules repeating Google searches for the news articles and collects the results in a database, enabling the user to aggregate and analyse them to produce ranked tables of sites that reference the news articles. Using data mining techniques we can analyse data so that resultant ranking reflects an overall aggregate score, taking into account multiple datasets, and this shows the most relevant places on the internet where the story is discussed. To answer the second question, we introduce the WeGov toolbox as a tool for analysing citizens’ comments and behaviour pertaining to news stories. We first use the tool for identifying social network discussions, using different strategies for Facebook and Twitter. We apply different analysis components to analyse the data to distil the essence of the social network users’ comments, to determine influential users and identify important comments

Consumer engagement with a brand on Facebook

Social media and in particular social Networking Sites have grown in importance and have each day more users. This fact has increased the number of brands on these social networking sites (SNS) trying to engage with their consumers. The purpose of this research is to determine the main motivations for consumers to engage with a brand through Facebook and to study if brand love influences consumer engagement and how these factors (brand love, and consumer engagement) impact brand equity. For this we performed an online survey with 233 valid responses. Correlations analyses were performed in other to study these relations. The results indicate that the principal motivations to engage with a brand through the consumption of content are entertainment, social influence, search for information and trust. The main motivations to interact and participate in a SNS brand page are social influence and personal identity Brand love also influences consumer engagement and these two factors influence brand equity. Theoretical and managerial findings are discussed and directions for further research are given

Mining social networking sites for digital evidence

OnLine Social Networking sites (SNS) hold a vast amount of information that individuals and organisations post about themselves. Investigations include SNS as sources of evidence and the challenge is to have effective tools to extract the evidence. In this exploratory research we apply the latest version of a proprietary tool to identify potential evidence from five SNS using three different browsers. We found that each web browser influenced the scope of the evidence extracted. In previous research we have shown that different open source and proprietary tools influence the scope of evidence obtained. In this research we asked, What variation in the scope of evidence extraction can be expected between different browsers? The implications of this exploratory research is for precaution. The choice of a web browser used to investigate a SNS directly influences the scope of digital evidence obtained