Arkaitz Zubiaga, Bahareh Heravi, Jisun An and Haewoon Kwak
Carlos Castillo, Marcelo Mendoza and Barbara Poblete
Twitter is a popular microblogging service which has proven, in recent years, its potential for propagating news and information about developing events. The purpose of this paper…
Abstract
Purpose
Twitter is a popular microblogging service which has proven, in recent years, its potential for propagating news and information about developing events. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the analysis of information credibility on Twitter. The purpose of our research is to establish if an automatic discovery process of relevant and credible news events can be achieved.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper follows a supervised learning approach for the task of automatic classification of credible news events. A first classifier decides if an information cascade corresponds to a newsworthy event. Then a second classifier decides if this cascade can be considered credible or not. The paper undertakes this effort training over a significant amount of labeled data, obtained using crowdsourcing tools. The paper validates these classifiers under two settings: the first, a sample of automatically detected Twitter “trends” in English, and second, the paper tests how well this model transfers to Twitter topics in Spanish, automatically detected during a natural disaster.
Findings
There are measurable differences in the way microblog messages propagate. The paper shows that these differences are related to the newsworthiness and credibility of the information conveyed, and describes features that are effective for classifying information automatically as credible or not credible.
Originality/value
The paper first tests the approach under normal conditions, and then the paper extends the findings to a disaster management situation, where many news and rumors arise. Additionally, by analyzing the transfer of our classifiers across languages, the paper is able to look more deeply into which topic-features are more relevant for credibility assessment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies the power of prediction of social media for information credibility, considering model transfer into time-sensitive and language-sensitive contexts.
Details
Keywords
Jeff McCarthy, Jennifer Rowley, Catherine Jane Ashworth and Elke Pioch
The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the issues and benefits associated with managing brand presence and relationships through social media. UK football clubs…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the issues and benefits associated with managing brand presence and relationships through social media. UK football clubs are big businesses, with committed communities of fans, so are an ideal context from which to develop an understanding of the issues and challenges facing organisations as they seek to protect and promote their brand online.
Design/methodology/approach
Due to the emergent nature of social media, and the criticality of the relationships between clubs and their fans, an exploratory study using a multiple case study approach was used to gather rich insights into the phenomenon.
Findings
Clubs agreed that further development of social media strategies had potential to deliver interaction and engagement, community growth and belonging, traffic flow to official web sites and commercial gain. However, in developing their social media strategies they had two key concerns. The first concern was the control of the brand presence and image in social media, and how to respond to the opportunities that social media present to fans to impact on the brand. The second concern was how to strike an appropriate balance between strategies that deliver short-term revenue, and those that build longer term brand loyalty.
Originality/value
This research is the first to offer insights into the issues facing organisations when developing their social media strategy.
Details
Keywords
Miriam Muñoz-Expósito, M. Ángeles Oviedo-García and Mario Castellanos-Verdugo
As social media are essentially different from traditional media, due to their social networking structures and egalitarian nature, conventional media metrics are not appropriate…
Abstract
Purpose
As social media are essentially different from traditional media, due to their social networking structures and egalitarian nature, conventional media metrics are not appropriate. Social media networks have nevertheless become another communications channel that companies use to achieve their marketing goals. Even though the measurement of marketing constructs in social media is elusive, a comprehensive means of measuring engagement is proposed for a successful social media site: Twitter. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
A measurement for customer engagement based on conceptual reflections is presented in the context of Twitter.
Findings
A new environment fostered by internet obliges companies to manage social media accounts and to assess engagement with company brands. To do so, companies need to analyze engagement trends by means of a metric, helping them to design an appropriate engagement strategy. The proposed metric provides much needed insight for companies to fine-tune their engagement strategy. Moreover, a means of calculating engagement from the parameters that Twitter makes available to the public is also proposed.
Research limitations/implications
The metric for engagement in Twitter that is proposed in this paper will be the starting point for future improvements through a conceptual and empirical discussion on this issue.
Originality/value
This is the first proposal specifically designed for Twitter, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, for measuring engagement.