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This study employs bibliometric analysis to map the research landscape of social media trending topics during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors aim to offer a comprehensive review of the predominant research organisations and countries, key themes and favoured research methodologies pertinent to this subject.

The authors extracted data on social media trending topics from the Web of Science Core Collection database, spanning from 2009 to 2022. A total of 1,504 publications were subjected to bibliometric analysis, utilising the VOSviewer tool. The study analytical process encompassed co-occurrence, co-authorship, citation analysis, field mapping, bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis.

Interest in social media research, particularly on trending topics during the COVID-19 pandemic, remains high despite signs of the pandemic stabilising globally. The study predominantly addresses misinformation and public health communication, with notable focus on interactions between governments and the public. Recent studies have concentrated on analysing Twitter user data through text mining, sentiment analysis and topic modelling. The authors also identify key leading organisations, countries and journals that are central to this research area.

Diverging from the narrow focus of previous literature reviews on social media, which are often confined to particular fields or sectors, this study offers a broad view of social media's role, emphasising trending topics. The authors demonstrate a significant link between social media trends and public events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper discusses research priorities that emerged during the pandemic and outlines potential methodologies for future studies, advocating for a greater emphasis on qualitative approaches.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2023-0194.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a global trend involving corporations, states, international organizations and civil society organizations. It is far from clear what CSR stands for, what the trend really is, where it comes from, where it is heading and who the leading actors are. If one views it as a social movement, one must ask: a movement of what and for whom? The purpose of this paper is to examine the CSR trend in all its complexity and draw conclusions regarding its development and potential impact.

Analysis of central documents and publications on CSR is combined with interviews with driving corporate actors.

This article portrays the CSR trend in three ways: as a regulatory framework that places new demands on corporations; as a mobilization of corporate actors to assist the development aid of states; and as a management trend. Each of these portraits suggests certain actors, relations, driving forces and interests as being central. An analysis shows that no one of these views seems to be more accurate than the others: rather the movement comprises a collection of diverse interests, actors, origins and trajectories. These multiple identities may partially describe the trend's success, but could equally well describe its contestation, fragility and fluidity.

The conceptual distinction shows the likely development and potential impact of a corporate social development. Moreover, the discussions help us reflect on the formation of management trends and how certain models come to flow rapidly and extensively around the globe, following and adding to institutional change – especially to changes in the roles, relations and boundaries between and among states, business corporations and civil society organizations.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the value of using social media to capture fashion trends, including the popularity of specific features of clothing, in order to improve the speed and accuracy of supply chain response in the era of fast fashion.

This study examines the role that text mining can play to improve trend recognition in the fashion industry. Researchers used n-gram analysis to design a social media trend detection tool referred to here as the Twitter Trend Tool (3Ts). This tool was applied to a Twitter dataset to identify trends whose validity was then checked against Google Trends.

The results suggest that Twitter data are trend representative and can be used to identify the apparel features that are most in demand in near real time.

The 3Ts introduced in this research contributes to the field of fashion analytics by offering a novel method for employing big data from social media to identify consumer preferences in fashion elements and analyzes consumer preferences to improve demand planning.

The 3Ts improves forecasting models and helps inform marketing campaigns in the apparel retail industry, especially in fast fashion.

An ever-growing body of knowledge demonstrates the correlation among real-world phenomena and search query data issued on Google, as showed in the literature survey introduced in the following. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pipeline, implemented as a web service, which, starting with recent Google Trends, allows a decision maker to monitor Twitter’s sentiment regarding these trends, enabling users to choose geographic areas for their monitors. In addition to the positive/negative sentiments about Google Trends, the pipeline offers the ability to view, on the same dashboard, the emotions that Google Trends triggers in the Twitter population. Such a set of tools, allows, as a whole, monitoring real-time on Twitter the feelings about Google Trends that would otherwise only fall into search statistics, even if useful. As a whole, the pipeline has no claim of prediction over the trends it tracks. Instead, it aims to provide a user with guidance about Google Trends, which, as the scientific literature demonstrates, is related to many real-world phenomena (e.g. epidemiology, economy, political science).

The proposed experimental framework allows the integration of Google search query data and Twitter social data. As new trends emerge in Google searches, the pipeline interrogates Twitter to track, also geographically, the feelings and emotions of Twitter users about new trends. The core of the pipeline is represented by a sentiment analysis framework that make use of a Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural language processing modules to assign emotions and sentiment orientations to a collection of tweets geolocalized on the microblogging platform. The pipeline is accessible as a web service for any user authorized with credentials.

The employment of the pipeline for three different monitoring task (i.e. consumer electronics, healthcare, and politics) shows the plausibility of the proposed approach in order to measure social media sentiments and emotions concerning the trends emerged on Google searches.

The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap among Google search query data and sentiments that emerge on Twitter about these trends.

A decade ago, the AIDS pandemic was driven by determinants such as poverty, deprivation, migrancy, patriarchy and gender-based violence. Today, however, the socio-economic and structural drivers of HIV infections have assumed or added other dimensions, including social and electronic media and reality television. These new dimensions saw further expression with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards. To consign both HIV and the COVID-19 pandemics to history’s museum of pandemics, strategists must employ greater infiltration and mastery of social and electronic media and reality TV. In the case of HIV, these created social clouds or bubbles where unprotected sex, transactional sex and multiple concurrent sexual partnerships are manufactured and proliferated globally. The same was the case with the COVID-19 pandemic, in which case these social clouds or bubbles created an alternative narrative about the source of the pandemic, who and how people get infected, and both the requisite remedies and preventions in this regard. With reality television gaining popularity on low-cost paid channels and free-to-air television; with smartphone penetration widening and costs of access to data falling, a social cloud has been created, enabling the cultural majority (those who control the media and capital) to set trends for everyone, including those with less means. These trends in turn become a standard many aspire to live by. The ontological density of the poor and lower middle-class women is lost through the universalisation of social and cultural trends set by middle elites who control the production and reproduction of knowledge and shape international and national imagination. It is these discourses, and their shaping of imagination as a consequence, that this chapter deals with. It looks at both the implications and consequences which, in the case of pandemics such as these, can be dire.

This paper aims to review relevant literature to identify trends affecting social media to help managers and researchers better understand social media; this paper also provides the implications of these trends for mangers and researchers. Social media is viewed as a credible source of information from consumers who have experienced travel products. The user-generated content these consumers post on social media Web sites influences those who read their posts or view aggregate ratings of multiple reviews about a product. It can move the reader to either purchase or not purchase the products. Social media is an important source of consumer information and can create new customers.

The paper reviewed both academic and trade literature to provide an overview of social trends that are relevant to practitioners.

The author identified four trends: millennials replacing baby boomers as the major business travel segment, increased use of mobile devices, dynamic pricing and marketing dollars shifting to social media. The implications of each of the trends are discussed. The findings provided valuable insights for practitioners and researchers.

Social media is emerging as an important marketing tool for the travel industry. It is transforming the way companies allocate their marketing budget. The identification of trends that are affecting social media and will continue to affect social media in the future will provide immediate benefits to practitioners and researchers with a stream of research ideas.

Since the social revolution of the 1960's, marketers have increasingly accepted the idea that an understanding of changing social values is as important to successful marketing as the traditional study of demographic forecasts and economic outlook. The move to the “marketing approach,” a widespread policy shift which began in the 1950's, meant that it was not sufficient to understand consumer needs, attitudes, and behavior in the specific product category being marketed. Rather, the marketing approach demands knowledge of and sensitivity to the consumers as a total entity: who they are, how much money they can spend, and increasingly, their life goals, concerns, beliefs, taboos, that is, their social agendas. The 1960's initiated an era of profound social values changes, more notable than the economic and demographic changes. It is not surprising, therefore, that marketers began to focus more and more on the shifting social climate in their efforts to understand the consumer.

The COVID-19 pandemic has a massive impact on people’s lives, the wealth of nations, tourism cities, economic and social media. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to challenges and innovations to deal with multiple direct and indirect impacts. This research aims to explore the development of social media research in the tourism city context to highlight emerging research themes, methodological approaches.

This study searched and filtered on the Scopus Web and Web of Science to collect databases and applied hybrid methods. The VOSviewer algorithm was used in the paper to generate maps from bibliographic and text data. Furthermore, a polynomial trend line was used to depict the data fluctuations of papers in the relationship between documents and years. Besides, other mathematical and statistical tools to measure the inter-relationships and impacts of social media publications within the tourism city research area, identify valuable insights and determine a framework for social media research trends.

The study outcomes expressed the development in social media research trends from 2005 to 2021 in the tourism city context of topics (social media, social networking (online)), methodology (sentiment analysis), publication outputs with most extensive collaborations and some other contents to form a framework of social media research trends in tourism cities.

Research data is mainly from reviews of articles that may not account for all trends in reality.

This research is original that will apply to future social media researchers and institutions.

Policy makers could base on the research trends to examine their future tourism development orientation.

This research assists social media scholars in understanding trends and themes in tourism city contexts that they could apply in their business area. Moreover, there is a desire to comprehend an overview of the related literature of social media science in tourism city contexts. The outcomes showed the limitations of lacking journals and volume of social media research. The results contribute to meaningful insights by having a more holistic understanding of social media through aggregated data sources.

Although writings in the fashion forecasting field often mention the connections between industry and culture, it still requires further clarifications in a context of uncertainty, fast pace changes and a high volume of information. This paper aims to explore fashion as a material culture to discuss forecasting roles in different stages of dialogue between culture and industry.

This paper explores the cultural aspects of fashion to discuss multiple roles of forecasting and its implications in the fashion system from a multidimensional perspective that interlaces culture and industry in contemporary contexts through a literature review in fashion forecasting and material culture. Recent nonacademic articles were also reviewed in order to highlight fresh perspectives in the field.

The literature review demonstrates that there are two main lines of reasoning in trend forecasting. First, trend forecasting as a cultural and predictive practice focused on understanding emerging shifts in the culture and translating them to the industry. The second approach considers trend forecasting as a strategic and curatorial practice that not merely predicts consumer's behaviors and preferences but intentionally acts as a filter of all the available possibilities curating and narrowing them down to organize the market around assertive information reducing financial losses risk. This article proposes an integration between the two perspectives – from culture to industry – in a contemporary context where consumers' tastes and preferences have become increasingly diverse, and early diffusion theories can no longer explain fashion spread.

Further investigations of contemporary and potential future trend forecasting roles and aspects could benefit from in-depth interviews and focus groups with industry experts, consumers and academics.

The paper intends to approximate theoretical reflections of fashion as a material culture to the current industry context.

It contributes to the studies of fashion forecasting, providing an overview of its development, roles and objectives, both from the industrial and material culture perspectives, which culminates in a framework that summarizes its intricate mechanisms.