HELPING PEOPLE'S

Zhao, Tianzhang  is a student in the  Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. Social media helped to generate energy and mobilize a community of support in the U.S. presidential election in 2008, which helped Barack Obama to achieve popularity (Jue, et al., 2010). According to Jue and his colleagues (2010), this fervor of political influence would be of particular value to any community activist, no matter their political beliefs or organizational affiliation. If this were true what would this mean for organisational management? Most organisations seek to engage employees, clients, customers, suppliers and partners in an effort to achieve brand loyalty to their products and services. However, in today’s world political and business leaders cope with increasingly difficult circumstances in achieving these objectives (Jue, et al., 2010). What to do? Well, social media is a useful platform for leaders to construct and share their strategic goals in a relatively effici...

Abdullah Anees   is a student in the  Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. Two things I am very fond of are social media and sports, and what better way to relate the two in modern day then a reflective blog on how one influences the other. As we all know, social media platforms have allowed people to voice their opinions with others worldwide. The difference in a message being shared from any individual to the larger audience has developed at a furious pace since the development of Web 2.0. We now see people, such as athletic celebrities, who we were once accustomed to only seeing on the TV, now becoming vocal on social media platforms. It seems stars are taking their views more public rather than leaving that up to their publicists. Twitter, Facebook and various other social media platforms have allowed athletes to more readily reach out to their fans to establish a common connection. This common connection is the will to express their opinions and views; they n...

In 2011 then Census Director Robert Groves  wrote  on the Census Director’s Blog about the burgeoning volume of “organic data”—data that, as opposed to “designed data,” have no meaning until they are used (surveys are a primary example of the latter). He noted that finding ways to combine these two types of data to increase the “information-to-data ratio” was a challenge, but also represented the future of surveys. Using terms identified as “big data descriptors” in Groves’ piece, as well as a few other terms I think qualify, I put together the graph below to show the number of AAPOR presentation titles between 2010 and 2013 that contain a big data descriptor. 1,2 One take away is the increased interest researchers have shown in big data over the past few years. An equally important lesson is that almost all of the attention big data has received from AAPOR members—at least measured by the number of presentations they’ve done—has been on social networking sites (SNS). I f...

Last week we shared a post with links to a report based on an analysis of NSMNSS network members' perspectives and questions, and a review of some prominent ethics guides (See the NSMNSS blog post from 27 February).  Discussions of ethical principles and guidance related to social media research are plenty, and thrilling! But what do you think? What questions do you have about your own research or about the studies your students propose? What do you hope to find in the ethics guildelines you consult? How can we, as an emerging field, strengthen the ethical basis of social media scholarship to improve overall credibility?  You can join us for a Tweetchat on these very questions and related issues by following #NSMNSS on Tuesday 11 March 2014 at 7:00pm (London time) or 3:00pm in New York time. (See www.timeanddate.com for your time zone.) Remember to include #NSMNSS in all your posts to help us capture all of the discussion. We will provide a transcript of the Tweetchat on our...