Improving citizens’ online engagement via community managers: an explanatory study

The role of community manager is gaining importance as the proper usage of social media becomes a key factor for achieving more active involvement of citizens in social and political issues. Focused on Spanish local governments and in line with the literature of Excellence Theory, this paper aims to analyze whether some characteristics of the community manager function are determinant in their fostering of citizens’ online engagement via social media. In particular ‘independence’, ‘having access to the dominant coalition’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘continuous training’ and ‘culture of the organization’ are the characteristics considered in this paper. As to the main findings, this study confirms that community managers have not as yet achieved their goal of embedding the use of social media by citizens as a means of establishing more direct contact with their local governments. Moreover, in line with Excellence Theory, community managers of local governments should be aware of the importance of having direct access to key managers of the organization in order to better achieve the objectives of the organization and, more specifically, to increase citizens’ engagement. Furthermore, continuous training in issues related to social media truly helps develop the skills and potential of community managers. Likewise, an excellent communication department should rely on good professionals no matter their gender, and, in this sense, the gender of community managers is not a significant factor in their performance. However, the results of this study also reveal that in the case of public sector community managers, an authoritarian culture seems to be a determining factor for obtaining better results in enhancing citizens’ engagement.     

‘Warren Buffet is my cousin’: shaping public understanding of big data biotechnology,direct-to-consumer genomics,and 23andMe on Twitter

Scholars, educators, regulators, pundits, and other observers are advocating for regulation and oversight of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing. As a result, the technology has been subject of highly visible public and regulatory controversy. In this article, we explore the nature and the shape of the sentiment of public discourse about the DTC company, 23andMe. We conduct a quantitative content analysis and qualitative framing analysis on Tweets. We find that the discourse surrounding DTC genomics and 23andMe is largely positive. We also identify a number of frames users deploy to debate, discuss, and share their experiences with DTC genomics and 23andMe. We argue that these frames create meaning around this emerging technology for its users.     

Terms of engagement: Facebook and Twitter use among nonprofit human service organizations

This study uses Lovejoy and Saxton's (2012) hierarchy of engagement to analyze how nonprofit human service organizations use Facebook and Twitter to engage stakeholders. Their framework has not been applied to this nonprofit subgroup, and most previous scholarship on this topic focuses on just one platform. We also contribute by drawing on organizational theory to better understand variation in the modes of engagement organizations emphasize. Based on our analysis, we add new subcategories to the hierarchy of engagement. In addition, we find that compared to other nonprofit subgroups examined in previous research, the organizations in our sample placed a greater emphasis on using social media messages to ask stakeholders to take action. We report only modest variations in how organizations were using Facebook and Twitter. Finally, according to our results, resource dependence and stewardship theories help explain the modes of engagement organizations prioritize.     

“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy personae and characterological figures (Agha, 2003), by examining the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in a corpus of 15,804 tweets extracted from the timelines of 10 gay British men. I argue that the stylization of AAVE signals the development of a very specific persona—the “Sassy Queen”—which relies on an essentialized imagining of Black women as “fierce” and “sassy.” Concluding, I emphasize the value of micro‐level analyses in complementing quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in social media.     

Engaging stakeholders through Twitter: How nonprofit organizations are getting more out of 140 characters or less

While it may seem difficult to communicate in a meaningful manner with 140 characters or less, Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to engage stakeholders not only through their tweets, but also through other various communication methods. Specifically it looks into the organizations utilization of tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, public messages, retweets, and multimedia files. After analyzing 4655 tweets, the study found that the nation's largest nonprofits are not using Twitter to maximize stakeholder involvement. Instead, they continue to use social media as a one-way communication channel as less than 20% of their total tweets demonstrate conversations and roughly 16% demonstrate indirect connections to specific users.     

A transnational networked public sphere of air pollution: analysis of a Twitter network of PM2.5 from the risk society perspective

ABSTRACT

Drawing on digitaltrace data, publicly accessible government documents, and journalistic reports, this research integrates Beck’s risk society theory with digital media theories to examine the mediated process of risk definition and assessment of PM2.5 (particulate matters with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers) in a networked public sphere. Network and content analysis of a PM2.5 Twitter network shows that political and professional elite remained the most powerful producers of risk definition. Established media played a key role, yet faced challenges from a variety of actors who disseminated and filtered information. Laypersons, while peripheral, actively interacted with elite and established media. The blurring geographic boundary in the PM2.5 Twitter network revealed an emerging transnational public sphere, which, however, was segregated by language. This research advances a layered understanding of the contingent, paradoxical media impact for social changes in a risk society.     

The role of events in ICT adoption: same-sex marriage and Twitter

ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy of culture unfolds in technological change processes. Cultural sociology has shown how influential events can be for forming public opinions and facilitating collective action. This article considers the power of one event on a much smaller scale: the passage of same-sex marriage (SSM) law in New York in June 2011 was not only significant for marriage equality in the US but also for the operating logic of the news ecosystem in which the political decision was made ? the state house in Albany. For the journalists who covered this event on the ground, the SSM decision was the catalyst to fully embrace Twitter. Years later, the event still served as an exemplar for the potentials of Twitter and as a basis of legitimacy of associated tweeting practices reporters incorporated. This contribution is based on ethnographic research at the state house in Albany, analysis of tweets and legacy news coverage published during that period, and in-depth interviews with reporters.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

#iamafeminist as the “mother tag”: feminist identification and activism against misogyny on Twitter in South Korea

This article explores feminist activism via the hashtag #iamafeminist on Twitter in South Korea. This hashtag became an important platform for feminist identification and activism against misogyny following its start in 2015 as a way to resist prevailing anti-feminist sentiment in Korea. In addition to opposing stigmas regarding identifying as a feminist, #iamafeminist affords an inclusive frame that can promote feminist identification by sharing personal motives for and stories about being a feminist. Although critics dismiss the potential of hashtag activism due to its ephemeral nature, I argue that #iamafeminist—which I call the “mother tag”—was able to persist for three months by continuing to connect with real-time gender issues and by initiating activism against misogyny both online and offline.