Tag Archives: social media

Social Media and Public Opinion – Full Thesis Published.

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I have finally found the time to fully publish my thesis about Social Media and Public Opinion on this site. You can download the thesis here, click on “Thesis.” in the main menu above or simply click on the cover image underneath.

The Cover Page of the Printed Thesis

The Cover Page of the Printed Thesis

This thesis was written and defended as the final assignment (memoria de máster) of the Màster en Interculturalitat i Polítiques Comunicatives en la Societat de la Informació (Master in Interculturality and Communication Policies in the Information Society) at the Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació at Universitat de València and was rewarded with a grade of 95%.

It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (More information @ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US).

 

Social Media = 90% Marketing?

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A reason why I started this blog is that discussions about social media topics mainly treat the marketing aspect of it.

The upcoming Social Media Week is a another example of this trend. The SMW is a congress taking place in 14 cities around the globe from September 24 – 28. I personally will attend a couple of presentations on the 28th in Barcelona.

Going through the agenda I was disappointed to encounter, that almost 90% of the presentations and workshops taking place in Barcelona are in some way connected to selling, marketing, business, or advertisement. Although these events are organized through various panels which suggest that it is not only about marketing (“Society and Environment”, “Education and Learning”, and “Politics and Government”) they are still dominated by the business aspect. For instance the panel “Culture and Lifestyle” with its round table about “Debate about the Industry of Computer Games” or the presentation of “Consumption of TV and Social Networks: 1+1=3″ or the panel “Education and Learning” with its workshop about “Social Media Marketing”.

Still, I will be going, just for a day, in order to take a look at this event and eventually connect to some of the Barcelonian Social Media cluster. Further reports coming up …

Thoughts on Social Media and Small Talk.

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Again a very interesting podcast episode (again in German, sorry) has left me thinking about the topic of social media’s effects on small talk:

I think everybody who uses Twitter or Facebook recently has experienced a similar situation as the following. Saturday night you go out with your friend and you tell her how your week was.

You say: “Wow … crazy, on Tuesday I have found a 50 Euro bill in the street.”
Your friend: “Yeah I know, I have read it”

Of course she knows the story because you have twittered about it immediately.

In retrospect you might realize that the intention about the 50 Euro story was not to share this experience, but it is rather a tool for the initiation of more profound conversation, hence small talk (this must not be the only intention though, it could also be a tool to strengthen the relationship, but lets stick with the example).

Well, what has happened? Continue reading →

Social Bot Design Strategies.

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At the time of writing social bots have still been barley examined. Only few academic research can be found on this topic and it is only possible to identify few design approaches of sophisticated social media bots. The few documented approaches have been published by researchers. It is to assume that there are other social bots that have not been identified yet.

We can identify social bots of three types: Continue reading →

Social Media Product Design
affects Communication.

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The result of social media communication depends greatly on the design of the social media product one uses. Just comparing the two most popular social media services Facebook and Twitter we immediately understand how different communication can become. Not only has the underlying social network a different typology and is based on different relationships but the way we post comments is highly different.

Comments on Twitter are limited to a length of 140 characters. This limitation has historical reasons and derives from the character limitation of SMS. In the beginning Twitter was very focused on providing their service via SMS. Still, nowadays this limitation has remained to be very Continue reading →

Social Media as a Mind Set.

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A couple of days ago I have retweeted an announcement about the podcast “One Click Society” from WeEarth Global Radio Network.

The latest episode from August 25, 2011 is an interview with social media expert and blogger Erik Deckers. Most of the interview is based on the use of social media in corporate communication, a topic which is interesting, but certainly not the one I like to focus on.

But what caught my attention were little ideas that popped up between the lines on the conversation and especially one kept me thinking: Continue reading →

Classification of Social Media.

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During my research on the very basics of Social Media I have encountered various approaches, solutions, and problems.

Certainly most of the information found on this topic online is very unprofessional, but still there are some researchers who have succeeded in providing academic frameworks to identify what SM is. One of these works come from Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) who have provided not only a good definition of SM, but have also also successfully classified different SM types. Continue reading →

Introduction to social bots.

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Bots, also known as Web Robots or Internet Bots, are software that is used to do simple and repetetive tasks to substitute human labor. The most widespread use of bots is in web site spidering or web site crawling where these programs crawl and index web sites to create a map of the internet.

Bots are part of the internet since the very beginning. There is a growing number of bot types that can be encounter nowadays. Apart from web crawlers, bots have been widely used as spambots to distribute spam emails or as chatterbots (also called talk bots, chatterboxes or artificial conversational entitities), bots that simulate human conversation, mainly in a chat room or instant messaging environment, and intent to fool human users into thinking that the program is a human being. Continue reading →

Social Bots.

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These days I spent a some time investigation social bots. That are computer bots, software programs, that are designed to participate in human compunication via social media.

The idea of bots as helpers or administrators is nothing new to information technology. Lots of them are in use as chat bots observing the behavior chat room users, for instance. But these modern social bots are more.

Social bots are different to classic bots as they try to trick other human users into believing that they are human. Another speciallity is that they cannot only participate in communication, but they also activlely form the typology of their proper social network by creating connections to other users (friending/following).

The quality of such bots is still very inconsistens and many bots can easily be identified as such though engaging them into a profound conversation.

If you have some programming knowledge you can easily create your own sophisticated bot using the real boy (http://ca.olin.edu/2008/realboy/), but there is also a simpler way to maintain your proper twitter bot through the website botize.com (http://www.botize.com/index.php?ln=en).

Experiment.

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Thinking about the actual amount of news that reach me everyday I decided to make a little self-experiment.

I had a vivid conversation about Facebook with a friend of mine. We had both the same opinion about the ambivalent relationship we have with this social network site. Besides the usual privacy discussion (which I do not want to treat in this post) we were lamenting about the news we receive from our friends. One thing that was left stuck in my mind from this conversation was the statement “What I like about FB is that news reach me, which I otherwise would not have heart of”. Continue reading →