Audience measurement on mobile and social media

I liked Barthel and Shearer's (2015) Pew article on Twitter. How Americans use Twitter for news is discussed but the in-depth exploration into how people use twitter, what they are talking about, who they follow, etc. can be applied to many other disciplines. For example, I took an in-depth look into the topics of conversation through data mining of tweets in a emergency health communication context. I would also like to do textual analysis of tweets in an advertising context in the future because I believe a study of consumer behavior is important. Studying consumer behavior has been limited and rather abstract in the past but advancements in technology allow us to actually observe and learn from real data.

The article mentioned a disappointing aspect of their twitter examination. The sample size yielded was too small. This is a challenge I encountered when I first started poking around with data mining. If there is not a controversy or crisis that is a top topic of discussion, it is unlikely that researchers will find enough data around a specific topic. If a researcher is interested in a particular aspect of advertising, let's say privacy, he/she will not find thousands of comments being generated about audience's privacy rights because it is a general problem and not a current hot topic. On the other hand, researchers can expect to get a lot of data around events such as the Ebola outbreak. Therefore, I agree with Barthel and Shearer that Twitter analysis can be disappointing and limiting. However, compared to the days prior to social media, Twitter allows researchers to observe consumer behavior in real-time which is valuable and extremely useful if used in the right way.

Fun Reading about Social Media

I enjoyed reading the four items, as they present interesting findings regarding the use of Facebook and Twitter. While I already knew that less than a quarter of adult Internet users in the US use Twitter compared with more than 70% who use Facebook, I was somewhat surprised to see that Twitter users are also less active than Facebook users. Only 38% of Twitter users use it daily, compared with 70% of Facebook users. Also, 40% of Twitter users do not even use it once a week. As for the other Pew's report: It was interesting to see that among Twitter users who tweeted about news, less than 20% focused on government and politics news. However, given the small sample used for this study, I would treat the findings with caution. The sampling error may be very high. I like the typology offered by Bruns and Stieglitz (2012), but in addition to thematic and contextual factors that influence the usage of different communicative tools on Twitter, I would like to see how different types of users are associated with the usage of these tools. For example: it is plausible that journalists, politicians, and "ordinary" citizens use these tools differently even if the topics and events are identical. Finally, as for the experiment pertaining to Facebook: while the number of likes did not influence the way in which users evaluated a news story, I am curious to see if the new "dislike" button will have an impact. Also, soon we may be able to examine the influence of new emoji buttons on Facebook. Check out this.  

Twitter, huh

I think the biggest thing that stood out this week was how not only is Facebook and Twitter use plateauing, but how only 23% of adults say they are on Twitter! It was a good reminder that you can't just generalize based on experience because i would not have guessed that few people were using Twitter. It also got me wondering why so much interest seems to be focused on the service when it doesn't have as much of a user base as ANY of the other services surveyed. Possibly because of how open it is? It's a lot easier to scrape data from Twitter than any other social network where users can close down their data. I like what Krishnan brought up about the actual content of the news tweets, as many of them could possibly just be tweeting the same story over and over during the day to drum up interest (and Twitter users are encouraged to do this).

Finally a guide to study Twitter!

I really appreciated Bruns & Stieglitz's "how to" guide in studying Twitter. I often struggle to think of Twitter as a text or a space I want to study, b/c I'm not sure where to begin my research questions. However, this piece was exactly what I needed! Ok now for more scholarly notes.

1.) It was really interesting to see how few people within the Pew study were on Twitter, and even a smaller percentage were active on Twitter. Additionally I found it very interesting that, "tweets from news media make up a significant portion of a user's feed." I'm curious to know if this deluge of content in the form of story promotion, retweeting stories, up cycling old content from news organizations devalues their social currency with audiences. In a democratized space such as Twitter at what point do audiences see the news as noise?

2.) Finally, if you haven't all read the New York Time's 12 page memo, Our Path Forward, I suggest you take a look. They've hit 1 million paying digital subscribers and are sharing their plan forward. This line stuck out to me and I believe it is very relevant to our class: "Young readers were the first to shift to mobile and the first to embrace social platforms, and they have become reliable first indicators of major trends that ultimately affect our entire audience."

Interactive nature of social networking site (SNS)

I found Winter et al.’s study quite interesting. As the authors stated, the design of Facebook and similar SNS put a large emphasis on user reactions, fostering a convergence of and high interaction between mass and interpersonal communication. Then, does this mean that we are having a larger number of opinion leaders than the past since more people have more access and means to post and share their opinions online? Would opinion leaders be discouraged if their opinions posted online are severely opposed by other users’ comments or low numbers of likes (negative peer reactions)? Can we still set the same standard of opinion leaders? Revisiting the theoretical concept of opinion leaders, which date back to the study by Katz and his colleagues, in a new media sphere would be interesting to study.

Google Trends

Thought this was interesting: Searches for University of Texas football, off to a pretty horrible start, is currently at 95, second only to when they won the Rose Bowl in January 2006. The annual peaks in September can be expected as that's when college football season kicks off, but I thought it was interesting to see how heavily it's being currently talked about. PAST that, look at what happens when you strip out international audiences and focus only on the U.S.

The role of big data in the research process

The end of theory? http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory 

How big data make a difference in these two processes?  

A reminder from "Overcoming physics envy":
"The analysis of empirical data can be valuable even in the absence of a grand theoretical model."

"Social scientists can no longer do research on their own" (Gonzales-Bailon, 2013).