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Article
Publication date: 13 June 2023

Xiaoguang Wang, Yijun Gao and Zhuoyao Lu

Microblogs are communication platforms for companies and consumers that challenge companies' brand marketing strategies. This paper provides a theoretical basis for expanding…

Abstract

Purpose

Microblogs are communication platforms for companies and consumers that challenge companies' brand marketing strategies. This paper provides a theoretical basis for expanding microblog applications and a practical basis for improving the effectiveness of brand marketing.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use factor analysis to extract the factors of microblog user influence and construct a structural equation model to reveal the interaction mechanism of the influencing factors. Additionally, the authors clarify the promotion and enhancement effects of these factors.

Findings

Microblog user influence can be converted into richness, interaction and value factors. The richness factor significantly affects the latter two, whereas the interaction factor does not affect the value factor.

Research limitations/implications

First, the sample used is limited to media industry practitioners. To increase generalizability, diverse groups should be included in future studies. Second, this model's theoretical explanatory ability can be further developed by adding other meaningful factors beyond the existing ones.

Originality/value

This study analyzes the factors of microblog user influence in China and validates the relevant elements. As a result, it improves the influence research on social media users and benefits the practice of information recommendation and microblog marketing.

Details

Library Hi Tech, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0737-8831

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 July 2022

Lei Hou, Lu Guan, Yixin Zhou, Anqi Shen, Wei Wang, Ang Luo, Heng Lu and Jonathan J.H. Zhu

User-generated content (UGC) refers to semantic and behavioral traces created by users on various social media platforms. While several waves of platforms have come and gone, the…

Abstract

Purpose

User-generated content (UGC) refers to semantic and behavioral traces created by users on various social media platforms. While several waves of platforms have come and gone, the long-term sustainability of UGC activities has become a critical question that bears significance for theoretical understanding and social media practices.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on a large and lengthy dataset of both blogging and microblogging activities of the same set of users, a multistate survival analysis was applied to explore the patterns of users' staying, switching and multiplatforming behaviors, as well as the underlying driving factors.

Findings

UGC activities are generally unsustainable in the long run, and natural attrition is the primary reason, rather than competitive switching to new platforms. The availability of leisure time, expected gratification and previous experiences drive users' sustainability.

Originality/value

The authors adopted actual behavioral data from two generations of platforms instead of survey data on users' switching intentions. Four types of users are defined: loyal, switcher, multiplatformer and dropout. As measured by the transitions among the four states, the different sustainability behaviors are thereby studied via an integrated framework. These two originalities bridge gaps in the literature and offer new insights into exploring user sustainability in social media.

Article
Publication date: 23 September 2022

Miaomiao Chen, Lu An, Gang Li and Chuanming Yu

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public events.

Design/methodology/approach

This study constructed the severity assessment system of public events from the dimensions of the netizens' role, the Internet media's role, the spread of public events and the attitudes and feelings of netizens. The method of analyzing the influence tendency of the public event severity indicators was proposed. A total of 1,107,308 microblogging entries regarding four public events were investigated. The severity of public events was divided into four levels.

Findings

It is found that serious public events have higher indicator values than medium level events on the microblogging platform. A quantitative severity classification standard for public events was established and the early warning mechanism of public events was built.

Research limitations/implications

Microblogging and other social media platforms provide rich clues for the real-time study and judgment of public events. This study only investigated the Weibo platform as the data source. Other social media platforms can also be considered in future.

Originality/value

Different from the ex-post evaluation method of judging the severity of public events based on their physical loss, this study constructed a quantitative method to dynamically determine the severity of public events according to the clues reflected by social media. The results can help the emergency management departments judge the severity of public events objectively and reduce the subjective negligence and misjudgment.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 36 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 August 2022

Yiwen Zhang, Yongqiang Sun, Wuping Lei and Nan Wang

The primary objective of this research is to explore the underlying mechanisms of social ties influencing lurking behaviour in Microblog by combing role theory and social identity…

Abstract

Purpose

The primary objective of this research is to explore the underlying mechanisms of social ties influencing lurking behaviour in Microblog by combing role theory and social identity theory.

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey of 312 Microblog users in China was conducted to test the proposed research model and hypotheses. The partial least squares (PLS) approach was used to analyse the data.

Findings

The results show that social ties affect lurking behaviour on Microblog in two ways, directly and indirectly through role stress. Social ties have a negative direct impact on lurking behaviour. Based on the multiple mediation analysis, social ties positively affect lurking through role overload and negatively affect lurking via role ambiguity. Perceived heterogeneity strengthens the positive effects of social ties on role overload and conflict, and weakens the negative impact of social ties on role ambiguity. Social identification weakens the positive relationship between social ties and role overload and strengthens the negative relationship between social ties and role ambiguity.

Originality/value

This study extends the literature on the social interaction reasons behind lurking behaviour in Microblog by revealing the effects of social ties in Microblog. The theoretical mechanisms of social ties on lurking behaviour in Microblog are unveiled by discovering the direct effect of social ties, the mediating effects of multidimensional role stress, and the moderating effects of different kinds of social identity.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 75 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 14 December 2022

Lu An, Yan Shen, Yanfang Tao, Gang Li and Chuanming Yu

This study aims to profile the government microbloggers and evaluate their roles. The results can help improve the governments' response capability to public emergencies.

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to profile the government microbloggers and evaluate their roles. The results can help improve the governments' response capability to public emergencies.

Design/methodology/approach

This study proposes the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies. The indicators are designed from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, and the feature labels are identified. Three different public emergencies were investigated, including the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak and the Shandong vaccine case in China.

Findings

The results found that most government microbloggers were follower responders, short-term participants, originators, occasional participants and low influencers. The role distribution of government microbloggers was highly concentrated. However, in terms of individual profiles, the role of a government microblogger varied with events.

Social implications

The findings can provide a reference for the performance assessment of the government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies and help them improve their ability to communicate with the public and respond to public emergencies.

Originality/value

By analyzing the performance of government microbloggers from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, this paper fills the gap in existing literature on designing the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 47 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 December 2023

Xiao Meng, Chengjun Dai, Yifei Zhao and Yuan Zhou

This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the misinformation spread based on the elaboration likelihood model and the effects of four factors – emotion, topic, authority and…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the misinformation spread based on the elaboration likelihood model and the effects of four factors – emotion, topic, authority and richness – on the depth, breadth and structural virality of misinformation spread.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected 2,514 misinformation microblogs and 142,006 reposts from Weibo, used deep learning methods to identify the emotions and topics of misinformation and extracted the structural characteristics of the spreading network using the network analysis method.

Findings

Results show that misinformation has a smaller spread size and breadth than true news but has a similar spread depth and structural virality. The differential influence of emotions on the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation was found: sadness can promote the breadth of misinformation spread, anger can promote depth and disgust can promote depth and structural virality. In addition, the international topic, the number of followers, images and videos can significantly and positively influence the misinformation's spread size, depth, breadth and structural virality.

Originality/value

The influencing factors of the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation are clarified, which is helpful for the detection and management of misinformation.

Details

Library Hi Tech, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0737-8831

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 January 2023

Qingqing Zhou

With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on…

Abstract

Purpose

With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on users' expressions can provide accurate and reliable information for event processing. Hence, 2,003,814 expressions on a major malignant emergency event were mined from multiple dimensions in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper conducted finer-grained analysis on users' online expressions in an emergency event. Specifically, the authors firstly selected a major emergency event as the research object and collected the event-related user expressions that lasted nearly two years to describe the dynamic evolution trend of the event. Then, users' expression preferences were identified by detecting anomic expressions, classifying sentiment tendencies and extracting topics in expressions. Finally, the authors measured the explicit and implicit impacts of different expression preferences and obtained relations between the differential expression preferences.

Findings

Experimental results showed that users have both short- and long-term attention to emergency events. Their enthusiasm for discussing the event will be quickly dispelled and easily aroused. Meanwhile, most users prefer to make rational and normative expressions of events, and the expression topics are diversified. In addition, compared with anomic negative expressions, anomic expressions in positive sentiments are more common. In conclusion, the integration of multi-dimensional analysis results of users' expression preferences (including discussion heat, preference impacts and preference relations) is an effective means to support emergency event processing.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first research to conduct in-depth and fine-grained analysis of user expression in emergencies, so as to get in-detail and multi-dimensional characteristics of users' online expressions for supporting event processing.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 76 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 June 2022

Xiaoyue Ma, Pengzhen Xue, Mingde Li and Nada Matta

Most of the existing studies on the evolution of emergency topics in social media focused on the emergency information demand of fixed user type in emergency while ignoring the…

Abstract

Purpose

Most of the existing studies on the evolution of emergency topics in social media focused on the emergency information demand of fixed user type in emergency while ignoring the changing roles of stakeholders during the emergency. Thus in this study, a three-dimensional dynamic topic evolution model is proposed, in which fine grained division of time, dynamic identification of stakeholders in the emergency, and emergency topic evolution based on both timeline and stakeholder's type are all considered.

Design/methodology/approach

Particularly the relevance between the tweets posted and the topic of emergency, the influence on the social network, and the attention of emergency topic are as well taken into account to quantitatively calculate the weight and ranking of stakeholders at different stages of the emergency. To verify the proposed model, an experimental demonstration was carried out under an emergency event posted on social media.

Findings

The results show that (1) based on the three-dimensional dynamic topic evolution model, the composition and ranking of stakeholders have obvious differences at different stages; (2) the emergency information needs and the sharing behavior of stakeholders on emergency information also indicate different preferences where the topic concerns of stakeholders at different stages have a strong relationship with their weight ranking; (3) the emergency topic evolution considering both the dynamics of emergency stakeholders and emergency information demand could more accurately reflect the changing regularity of social media users' attention to information in emergency events.

Originality/value

This study is one of first to investigate the emergency topic evaluation on social media by considering the dynamic changes of various stakeholders in emergency. It could not only theoretically provide more accurate method to understand how users share and search emergency information in social media, but also practically signify an information recommendation way in social media for emergency tracking.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-02-2021-0098.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 47 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 August 2023

Qingqing Li, Ziming Zeng, Shouqiang Sun, Chen Cheng and Yingqi Zeng

The paper aims to construct a spatiotemporal situational awareness framework to sense the evolutionary situation of public opinion in social media, thus assisting relevant…

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to construct a spatiotemporal situational awareness framework to sense the evolutionary situation of public opinion in social media, thus assisting relevant departments in formulating public opinion control measures for specific time and space contexts.

Design/methodology/approach

The spatiotemporal situational awareness framework comprises situational element extraction, situational understanding and situational projection. In situational element extraction, the data on the COVID-19 vaccine, including spatiotemporal tags and text contents, is extracted. In situational understanding, the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – latent dirichlet allocation (BERT-LDA) and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – bidirectional long short-term memory (BERT-BiLSTM) are used to discover the topics and emotional labels hidden in opinion texts. In situational projection, the situational evolution characteristics and patterns of online public opinion are uncovered from the perspective of time and space through multiple visualisation techniques.

Findings

From the temporal perspective, the evolution of online public opinion is closely related to the developmental dynamics of offline events. In comparison, public views and attitudes are more complex and diversified during the outbreak and diffusion periods. From the spatial perspective, the netizens in hotspot areas with higher discussion volume are more rational and prefer to track the whole process of event development, while the ones in coldspot areas with less discussion volume pay more attention to the expression of personal emotions. From the perspective of intertwined spatiotemporal, there are differences in the focus of attention and emotional state of netizens in different regions and time stages, caused by the specific situations they are in.

Originality/value

The situational awareness framework can shed light on the dynamic evolution of online public opinion from a multidimensional perspective, including temporal, spatial and spatiotemporal perspectives. It enables decision-makers to grasp the psychology and behavioural patterns of the public in different regions and time stages and provide targeted public opinion guidance measures and offline event governance strategies.

Details

The Electronic Library , vol. 41 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-0473

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 21 April 2023

Sercan Ozcan and Ozcan Saritas

This study aims to develop the first Theory of Technological Response and Progress in Chaos (TRPC) and examine the case of technological development during the COVID-19 pandemic…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to develop the first Theory of Technological Response and Progress in Chaos (TRPC) and examine the case of technological development during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research objectives of this study were to: identify the key technologies that act as a response mechanism during the chaos event, specifically in the case of COVID-19; examine how technologies evolve, develop and diffuse in an immediate crisis and a chaotic environment; theorise various types and periods of technological response and progress during the emergence of chaos and the stages that unfold; and develop policy-oriented recommendations and establish technological foundations to address subsequent chaos events.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used the grounded theory as a methodology with a mixed-method approach that included quantitative and qualitative methods. The authors used the quantitative method to assist with the qualitative step to build the TRPC theory. Accordingly, this study integrated machine learning and text mining approaches to the qualitative data analysis following the steps of the grounded theory approach.

Findings

As a result of the TRPC theory development process, the authors identified three types of technologies (survival, essential and enhancement technologies) and five types of periods (stable, initial, survival-dominant, essential-dominant and enhancement-dominant periods) that are specific to chaos-technology interactions. The policy implications of this study demonstrate that a required technological base and know-how must be established before a chaotic event emerges.

Research limitations/implications

Concerning the limitations of this study, social media data has advantages over other data sources, such as the examination of dynamic areas and analyses of immediate responses to chaos. However, other researchers can examine publications and patent sources to augment the findings concerning scientific approaches and new inventions in relation to COVID-19 and other chaos-specific developments. The authors developed the TRPC theory by studying the COVID-19 pandemic, however, other researchers can utilise it to study other chaos-related conditions, such as chaotic events that are caused by natural disasters. Other scholars can investigate the technological response and progress pattern in other rapidly emerging chaotic events of an uncertain and complex nature to augment these findings.

Practical implications

Following the indications of the OECD (2021a) and considering the study conducted by the European Parliamentary Research Service (Kritikos, 2020), the authors identified the key technologies that are significant for chaos and COVID-19 response using machine learning and text intelligence approach. Accordingly, the authors mapped all technological developments using clustering approaches, and examined the technological progress within the immediate chaos period using social media data.

Social implications

The key policy implication of this study concerns the need for policymakers to develop policies that will help to establish the required technological base and know-how before chaos emerges. As a result, a rapid response can be implemented to mitigate the chaos and transform it into a competitive advantage. The authors also revealed that this recommendation overlaps with the model of dynamic capabilities in the literature (Teece and Pisano, 2003). Furthermore, this study recommends that nations and organisations establish a technological base that specifically includes technologies that bear 3A characteristics. These are the most crucial technologies for the survival- and essential-dominant stages. Moreover, the results of this study demonstrate that chaos accelerates technological progress through the rapid adoption and diffusion of technologies into different fields. Hence, nations and organisations should regard this rapid progress as an opportunity and establish the prior knowledge base and technologies before chaos emerges.

Originality/value

The authors have contributed to the chaos studies and the relationship between chaos and technological development by establishing the first theoretical foundation using the grounded theory approach, hereafter referred to as the TRPC theory. As part of the TRPC theory, the authors present three periods of technological response in the following sequence: survival technology, essential technology and enhancement technology. Moreover, this study illustrates the evolving technological importance and priorities as the periods of technological progress proceed under rapidly developing chaos.

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