Socially distributing public relations: Twitter, Haiti, and interactivity in social media
We all use social media
to interact with friends, unknowns or a target public. But when special
occasions or events occur its fascinating how people use these subjects to
connect with others or even benefit of it. In this study they took Haiti as
example. A state where a 7.0 earthquake hit the Haitian capital Port-Au-Prince
in January, 2010.
Only moments after the
incident, people were already posting and dialoguing about what exactly
happened and immediately supported the victims. Here also participating
organizations were founded. By using Twitters categorization tools like
keywords, hashtags and the follow option, people with the same vision could
easily find each other. Twitter was also used to motivate and encourage people
to help or donate some money, clothes, etc. The retweet function of Twitter made
it easier to reach a wider public. Also the follow button led to a great
success. Twitter users gave more money when more users began to follow them. This
can also be a good way of marketing. When a company donates more money as a
result of more followers, there are two positive things. First by having more
followers and more people gets to know what your company stands for. And
secondly its ethically correct for a company to support victims who have to
deal with such awful things.
A result of the study is that people are more interested in dealing with an
issue and belonging to a community than telling personal things.
This paper teaches us
that social media can also assemble people with same ideas or same views. This
can lead to a greater commitment, which can give a boost to things like
charity. It seems like social media is a never-ending story.
Brian Rollier
Source: Brian G. Smith
; University of Houston, 1119 Compass Cove Circle, Spring, TX 77379, United
states ; Socially distributing public relations: Twitter, Haiti, and
interactivity in social media
Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment
Could we predict the results of elections? It doesn't sound too democratic but that is what was being researched in this paper. By analysing 100.000 politically related tweets, the researchers wanted to find out if Twitter was in fact a mirror of the political feeling of, in this case, the german population.
The results backed this hypothesis, saying that the party that is most mentioned in those 100.000 is also the party that wins the elections. You can look at these results as an alternative for all the polls that are held in the traditional media. Furthermore, if we look at the contents of these tweets, the research showed that what was being said closely corresponded with the programs of the party the tweeter was rooting for. This means Twitter is also a very handy tool to have if you want to make your program known to a large number of people, a concept that gave Barack Obama a big advantage in his race to presidency in 2008. Lastly we could also see that coalitions in politics are reflected in the tweets of the followers of the cooperating parties.
Of course this research had it flaws, for example the fact that it only followed one election, or that only tweets with names of parties or important politicians were used. But we might have found a valid alternative for the election polls in mainstream media.
Boris Lauwers
Source: A. Tumasjan,T.O. Sprenger, P.G. Sandner, I.M. Welpe, 2010, Predicting elections with twitter, wath 140 characters reveal about political sentiment., Technische Universität München, for the 4th international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.
Twittering the news.The emergence of ambient journalism
Journalism is in a state of transition. If we look at the 'old' ways of practicing journalism, we see that journalists tend to only accept facts that are quoted by official sources as real information. But with the rise of micro-blogging sites like Twitter, it seems that also information coming from 'unofficial' micro-bloggers is becoming more and more important.
When asked about micro-blogging sites, journalists often said it was garbage(Stelter, 2009). Mostly due to the lack of research in that area of journalism and also due to the established norms and values that are still reigning in modern journalism. However we can see some signs that the use of Twitter and the likes in mainstream news coverage is becoming more and more accepted. For examples we can look to the coverage of the rebellion after the presidential elections in Iran (2009) or the bombings in Mumbai (2008).
What's more: this paper suggests that micro-blogging sites should be used as awareness systems. By using these micro-blogs, people can be made aware of new information quickly but it can also work the other way around. Journalists can be made of new items they can investigate and report on, thus creating 'ambient journalism'. In the future, ways to efficiently track down and filter these items could become a great area of research.
Boris Lauwers
source: Alfred Hermida, 2009, Twittering the news.The emergence of ambient journalism, Journalism Practice, 297-308
Dialogic communication in 140 characters or less: How Fortune 500 companies engage stakeholders using Twitter
As students of economics its
interesting to see how the top companies handle with this new technology of
social media. So in this article they investigated how these companies
communicate with their stakeholders. Each company is trying to maximize the
effect of social network sites by fostering dialogue with their public.
Kent and Taylor, two outliners of a
dialogic public relations theory, found out that there were five principles to
build a dialogic relationship with companys stakeholders. These were easily
divided in two clusters. The first cluster contains usefulness of information
and the other one was to assure that visitors would return to their sites or
Twitter/Facebook page.
By following 93 of Fortune 500 companies on Twitter theyve learned that
creating a dialogue between the company and their stakeholders leads to a
strong connection between them. Posing questions induced this kind of dialogue.
Which assures that they would revisit the site or page.
The most frequently occurring features on their pages were from top to bottom:
link to their own website, biography of the company and who is tweeting in the
name of the company. Which are also the most useful links of information about
the company towards the public.
We can conclude that social network
sites are communication tools of which the popularity is still increasing. Not
only for the general public, but also companies are more reliant on the use of
these sites to communicate with their stakeholders.
Like a saw and a screwdriver are tools for building a house, is a social
network site an easy way to communicate. But you have to find someone who is
capable of using it in an efficient way
Brian Rollier
Source: Svetlana
Rybalko, Trent Seltzer ; College of Mass Communications, Texas
Tech University, United States ; Department of Public Relations, College
of Mass Communications, Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX 79409, United States
; Dialogic communication in 140 characters or less: How Fortune 500
companies engage stakeholders using Twitter
