Microblogging (Weibo) and Environmental Nonprofit Organizations in China

2015 ◽  
pp. 94-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Ma ◽  
Zhibin Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Policy Advocacy ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
Efficient Information ◽  
Practical Implications

Environmental Nonprofit Organizations (ENPOs) in China have been actively employing microblogging (e.g., Sina Weibo) and other social media. This chapter, with a case of Wuhan FON in a nationwide campaign of “I gauge air quality for my motherland,” examines the key strategies and tactics Chinese ENPOs adopted in using social media to enhance their communicative functions and mobilizing capacities in the unique nonprofit environment of China. The case demonstrates that social media utilization can effectively help Chinese ENPOs in policy advocacy, especially through more efficient information dissemination. This chapter also identifies the major challenges faced by Chinese ENPOs in social media use and the corresponding solutions. It concludes with the discussions on the theoretical and practical implications of the case as well as several promising research avenues in this field.

The Influence of Leadership and Strategic Emphasis on Social Media Use of Regional Nonprofit Organizations

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debika Sihi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Transmission ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Customer Orientation ◽  
Executive Directors ◽  
Strategic Emphasis ◽  
Financial Investments ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
The Impact

Prior work has established the prevalence of social media as an information dissemination tool for large, national nonprofit organizations. This project adds to that literature by examining the impact of an organization's leadership (executive director background and board influence) and strategic emphasis (customer orientation and financial allocations to social media) on the use of social media for information transmission by regional nonprofit organizations. Insights are gained from leadership at 121 nonprofits and through analysis of 377 days of Facebook data for seven nonprofit organizations. The results suggest that organizations with executive directors who have more experience in the corporate sector and board members who exert greater influence are more likely to utilize social media for information transmission. Greater financial investments in social media actually result in less strategic use of social media, suggesting more investment does not always equate to more effective strategy.

scholarly journals Between hope and fear: developing social media guidelines

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaël Opgenhaffen ◽  
An-Sofie Claeys
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ policy with regard to employees’ social media use. Specifically, the authors examine the extent to which employers allow the use of social media in the workplace, what opportunities can be related to employees’ social media use and how social media guidelines are implemented within organizations. Design/methodology/approach In-depth interviews were conducted with HR and communication managers of 16 European companies from different sectors and of varying size. Findings Some organizations believe that social media should be accessible to employees while others ban them from the workplace. Most respondents believe that organizations can benefit from employees sharing work-related content with their own network. However, they encourage the sharing and retweeting of official corporate messages rather than employees developing their own messages. This fear regarding employees’ messages on social media is reflected in the broad adoption of social media guidelines. Research limitations/implications Future research should chart the nature of existing social media guidelines (restrictive vs incentive). Accordingly, the perceived sense and nonsense of social media guidelines in companies should be investigated, not only among the managers but also among employees. Practical implications Organizations should remain in dialogue with employees with regard to social media. Managers seem overly concerned with potential risks and forget the opportunities that can arise when employees operate as ambassadors. Originality/value The use of in-depth interviews allowed the authors to assess the rationale behind social media guidelines within organizations in depth and formulate suggestions to organizations and communication managers.

Communicative functions of emoji sequences on Sina Weibo

First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Ge ◽  
Susan C. Herring
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Graphical Language ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Mediated Discourse ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Further Development

The popular press is currently rife with speculation that emoji are becoming a global, digitally-mediated language. Sequences of emoji that function like verbal utterances potentially lend strong support to this claim. We employ computer-mediated discourse analysis to analyze the pragmatic meanings conveyed through emoji sequences and their rhetorical relations with accompanying text, focusing on posts by social media influencers and their followers on a popular Chinese social media platform. The findings show that the emoji sequences can function pragmatically like verbal utterances and form relations with textual propositions, although their usage differs from textual utterances in several respects. We also observed user innovations that make the sequences more language like, although there is not as yet a fixed grammar of emoji sequences. We characterize this emoji use as an emergent graphical language, with the caveats that it is not yet a fully-formed language and that the Chinese emoji language that is emerging is different from the English variety, and therefore emoji are not a universal language. In order to promote the further development of emoji language(s), we advance recommendations for emoji design grounded in linguistic principles.

scholarly journals Social Media Data-Based Sentiment Analysis of Tourists’ Air Quality Perceptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 5070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuguo Tao ◽  
Feng Zhang ◽  
Chunyun Shi ◽  
Yun Chen
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
Tourist Destinations ◽  
Media Data

Analyzing tourists’ perceptions of air quality is of great significance to the study of tourist experience satisfaction and the image construction of tourism destinations. In this study, using the web crawler technique, we collected 27,500 comments regarding the air quality of 195 of China’s Class 5A tourist destinations posted by tourists on Sina Weibo from January 2011 to December 2017; these comments were then subjected to a content analysis using the Gooseeker, ROST CM (Content Mining System) and BosonNLP (Natural Language Processing) tools. Based on an analysis of the proportions of sentences with different emotional polarities with ROST EA (Emotion Analysis), we measured the sentiment value of texts using the artificial neural network (ANN) machine learning method implemented through a Chinese social media data-oriented Boson platform based on the Python programming language. The content analysis results indicated that in the adaption stage in Sina Weibo, tourists’ perceptions of air quality were mainly positive and had poor air pollution crisis awareness. Objective emotion words exhibited a similarly high proportion as subjective emotion words, indicating that taking both objective and subjective emotion words into account simultaneously helps to comprehensively understand the emotional content of the comments. The sentiment analysis results showed that for the entire text, sentences with positive emotions accounted for 85.53% of the total comments, with a sentiment value of 0.786, which belonged to the positive medium level; the direction of the temporal “up-down-up” changes and the spatial pattern of high in the south and low in the north (while having little difference between the east and the west) were basically consistent with reality. A further exploration of the theoretical basis of the semi-supervised ANN approach or the introduction of other machine learning methods using different data sources will help to analyze this phenomenon in greater depth. The paper provides evidence for new data and methods for air quality research in tourist destinations and provides a new tool for air quality monitoring.

scholarly journals Keeping Fit in the Smog: Health, Self-Tracking and Air Pollution in Post-socialist China

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Air Pollution ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Embodied Self

This article concerns the relation between health, the embodied self-tracking subject and the environment in postsocialist China. Instead of simply expanding the framework of neoliberal subject to the question of health and the phenomenon of tracking and sharing data of “smog jog” in the Chinese context, this article addresses the following two inter-related questions: (1) how might an investigation of the practices of self-tracking “smog jog” in the context of postsocialist china afford a reconsideration of health; (2) how might an examination of the ways in which health is interpreted, performed and negotiated through practices of monitoring, measuring and recording a jog and the air quality in postsocialist China rework the conception of self-tracking. This article examines posts on Sina Weibo, which is one of the most popular social media platforms in China, in which Weibo users record and describe their jog in the smog. It argues that the configuration and performance of health and the embodied self-tracking subjects are multiple, and are informed by, negotiated with and find expressions in the environment in postsocialist China.

scholarly journals Impossible or Inevitable?: Suggestions for Future Youth - Police Communication Online

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Zettel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Community Policing ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Media Communications

A lack of provincial standardization for social media use by Ontario police officers has limited the progression and success of community policing among young populations. The abundant success of police-youth communications in-person is evident in studies from studies by Anderson et al. (2007), Hinds (2007), and Leroux & McShane (2017); these results suggests that increased social media communications between youth and officers would prove beneficial. However, the barrier between the community policing principles outlined in Ontario’s Mobilization and Engagement Model (MEM) and actual police practice echo structural issues that have plagued Ontario policing for decades. Recent literature from Hawkes (2016) and earlier literature from Leighton (1991) demonstrate the ongoing struggle to translate theory into practice. Combining a qualitative content analysis of Twitter data alongside semi-structured interviews with police officers, this study identified MEM strategies used by officers on social media, as well as additional strategies introduced by officers on an individual basis. Findings indicate that there are inconsistencies between officer perceptions of their communications with youth and that of their actual practice. The discovery of four additional strategies used to accomplish community policing on social media suggests that the MEM should be restructured to accommodate for technological advances. Officer social media use varied but a strong commonality included the fear of damaged reputation or job loss-- indicating a greater need for standardization to instill confidence in officer social media use. While provincial standardization would benefit officers, it should not be restrictive as humanistic elements such as information dissemination and personalization derived from officer freedom on social media were most often noted as beneficial to both officers and youth.

How Motivations for Social Media Usage Can Change and What It Means for E-Businesses

2013 ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Hopp ◽  
Harsha Gangadharbatla ◽  
Kim Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Pilot Study ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Media Usage ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
Social Media Advertising ◽  
Practical Implications

Available research indicates that consumers are more likely to accept social media advertising when such content appeals to their motivations for joining the site. However, this research generally assumes that the forces driving a user’s initial motivations for social media acceptance and usage remain constant through time. Given the fact this assumption may, indeed, be a faulty one, this chapter is specifically concerned with exploring the idea that user motivations may exist as evolving factors with the potential to impact the efficacy of e-business initiatives on social media sites. In support of this goal, in this chapter we: (1) define and contextually discuss social media; (2) review extant literature as it relates to motivations for media use; (3) discuss the idea of temporal motivations; (4) present the results of a pilot study that provides empirical evidence for the evolving nature of motivations; and (5) discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.

Which Audiences Engage With Advocacy Groups on Twitter? Explaining the Online Engagement of Elite, Peer, and Mass Audiences With Advocacy Groups

2020 ◽  
pp. 089976402097981
Author(s):  
Darren R. Halpin ◽  
Bert Fraussen ◽  
Robert Ackland
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Policy Advocacy ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Important Goal ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
Online Engagement ◽  
Australian Case ◽  
Social Media Tools

Gaining an audience on social media is an important goal of contemporary policy advocacy. While previous studies demonstrate that advocacy-dedicated nonprofit organizations—what we refer to as advocacy groups—use different social media tools, we still know little about what specific audiences advocacy groups set out to target on social media, and whether those audiences actually engage with these groups. This study fills this gap, deploying survey and digital trace data from Twitter over a 12-month period for the Australian case. We show that while groups target a variety of audiences online, there are differences between group types in their strategic objectives and the extent to which particular audiences engage with them. Business groups appear to target elite audiences more often compared with citizen and professional groups, whereas citizen groups receive more online engagement from mass and peer audiences.

All about that tweet: student perceptions of professors’ social media use in the classroom

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Merle ◽  
Karen Freberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Student Perceptions ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore whether public relations professors’ presence on social media and the inclusion of a social media assignment influence students’ perceptions of a course. Design/methodology/approach The experimental portion of this investigation consisted of a 2 (the presence or absence of a professor’s social media accounts) × 2 (the presence or absence of a social media assignment) factorial design resulting in four conditions. Findings The presence of a social media assignment positively influences students’ intent to register for a public relations course. Research limitations/implications The manipulation of a professor’s social media use and the inclusion of a social media assignment might have been too subtle. A more explicit scenario might elicit more reactions from the participants. Practical implications This study discussed key findings and best practices for professors who may want to use social media and the use of social media assignments in the classroom. Originality/value This experimental investigation emerged from a distinct need to understand whether university students expect their professors to engage in social media activities.

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