Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics

The Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics is a three volume work from Sage that explores the rise of social media effects on politics in the United States and around the world. 

Edited by Kerric Harvey of George Washington University, the work carries over 600 essays that fall in general topic areas: Celebrities and Pioneers in Social Media; Congressional Social Media Usage, Measuring Social Media's Impact; Misuse of Social Media in the Political Arena; Social Media, Candidates and Campaigns; Social Media, Politics and Culture; Social Media and Networking Web Sites; Social Media and Political Unrest, Social Media and Social Activism; Social Media Concepts and Theories; Social Media Regulation, Public Policy and Actual Practice; and Social Media Types, Innovation and Technology.  

Volume III includes not only a good resource guide of related books, journals and websites but  a detailed appendix tracking social media usage by U.S. Senators and Congressmen--what platforms they use, and the number and frequency of their posts.

These volumes are a good place for beginners and more seasoned researchers to start their investigation of this rapidly transforming area of two interlocking fields, communication and political science.  Available in the Reference section of the Annenberg Library.

Pew's Social Media Update 2013

The Pew Internet and American Life Project closed out the year with an 18 page report updating past social media trackings, Social Media Update 2013.

Abstract

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

We'll be hearing more from this project later in the month from of an upcoming conference in Washington DC on social media and health communication. 

Facebook Lit Review from New Media & Society

Need help in rounding up the scholarship on Facebook?  Belgian scholars Ralf Caers, Tim De Feyter, Marijke De Couck, Talia Stough, Claudia Vigna, and Cind Du Bois team up in the latest New Media & Society with a 6 year literature review on the subjects.

Facebook: A literature review
New Media & Society September 2013 vol. 15 no. 6 982-1002 


ABSTRACT

This article provides a critical review of scientific, peer reviewed, articles on Facebook between 2006 and 2012. The review shows that while there are yet numerous articles on various aspects of the social network site, there are still many gaps to be filled. Also, due to the limited scope of many articles (in sample sizes as well as in the number of countries included in the studies) and frequent changes to Facebook’s design and features, it is not only necessary to revisit many of these articles but also to integrate their research findings. The review ends with a critical discussion and directions for future research. 

Analysis of 2012 Candidate FB Pages in Online Information Review

You've heard a lot about the impact of social media on political campaigns--only a matter of time before someone did a content analysis of Obama/Romney camp Facebook posts.  Online Information Review (Volume 37, Issue 2, 2013) features research that compares the 2012 candidate's Facebook pages by analyzing 513 posts in the three months leading up to election day. 

Like me!: Analyzing the 2012 presidential candidates' Facebook pages
Jenny Bronstein

ABSTRACT

Purpose. The present study reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the Facebook pages of the two presidential candidates in the 2012 US presidential election.

Design/methodology/approach - Design. The sample contained 513 posts collected during the last three months of the 2012 US presidential election. The analysis of the candidates’ pages consisted of three phases: (1) the identification of the different elements of the Aristotelian language of persuasion, (2) the identification of the subjects that appear on the posts, (3) the identification of additional roles that the Facebook pages play in the campaigns.

Findings - Findings. Findings show that both candidates used an emotional and motivational appeal to create a social capital and to present a personal image that revealed very little of their personal lives. Statistical analysis show the numbers of comments and likes given to the posts were influenced by the element of persuasion used on the posts. Results show that campaigns wanted to retain control of the message displayed on the pages by posting information on a small number of non-controversial subjects. Finally, the content analysis revealed that the Facebook pages were used for fund-raising purposes, and for the mobilization of supporters. The Facebook pages of both candidates present an alternative way to do politics called fandom politics that is based not on logic or reason but on the affective sensibility of the audiences, discouraging dissent and encouraging affective allegiances between the candidate and his supporters.

Originality/value - Value of the study. This study presents an innovative way of analyzing the use of social media sites as a tool for the dissemination of political information and reveals utilization of these media for the creation of social and economic capital by politicians.

Blogging About Bitly

That's right, this post is about Bitly Enterprise, a company that advises about half of the Fortune 500 and over 75% of the world's largest media companies on how to get the most out of social media. Luckily for the resource environment there is the bitly Blog that sometimes does these great data posts.  The latest points to  breakdown of traffic from social networks by country  where nifty interactive world map illustrates how the proportion of a country's traffic from the social network you select (out of 16 so far, including Weibo, vk, etc.) compares to the proportion for the world as a whole. On a lighter note, last month prior to the Oscars, the bitly science team decided to mine their data for best picture and nominee popularity in social media.  There is also the Bitly Enterprise Blog that is more focused on social media news, including a Bitly Brief each week of important stories around the web. Mind you, these blogs are mainly for marketers, but they know and we know that includes the broader rubric, "content sellers," which pretty much speaks to us all.

Search & Social Media Survey Report

Greenlight, a digital marketing agency based in London, has created some buzz with its Search & Social Media Survey 2011/2012.  You can read the report from the survey at the link below.

From the Foreword:

Our annual Search & Social Media Survey 2011/2012, is based on questions we posed to 500 people from all over the world – students, law enforcement professionals, medical staff, accountants, lawyers, the unemployed, and everyone in between. We wanted to hear directly from them about how they engage with online advertising, search engines, and social networks, in the hope that we could gain some insight into how people engage with us as marketers today, and also help us formulate some views on what the future might hold.

For instance, our research found that, of 500 respondents, 5% would ‘definitely’ use a future Facebook search engine if the firm were to launch one to rival Google’s . The other extreme, those categorically saying that they simply would not use a future Facebook search engine, totalled 26% of all respondents. Those responding in the ‘definitely’ and ‘probably’ camps totalled 17%. Those responding ‘no’ and ‘probably not’, totalled 48%.

These stats therefore suggest that Facebook could capture around 22% of the global search market by simply launching its own search engine tomorrow morning (the ‘definitely’, ‘probably’, and half of the ‘don’t know’ respondents combined). It wouldn’t need to be a spectacular engine either, just well integrated into the Facebook experience and generally competent. This 22% market share would make Facebook the second most utilised search engine in every major market except for China, Japan, and Russia, where it would occupy an uncontested third place.

 Direct link to document (PDF; 2.5 MB)

Facebook: A Profile of Friends

A snapshot of Facebook users, Facebook: A Profile of its 'Friends, is composed of data highlights from  the last few years of research done at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  "The project has been surveying people who use social media to explore how they use it and what they get out of it. Highlights from the surveys paint a portrait of what kind of people use sites such as Facebook, who they connect to and how they manage their privacy." As you read down through the featured points (such as "80% of Facebook user requests are accepted") you can click on the link to the rest of the report. There appear to be five "feeder" reports to this profile. 

News Cities/Informed Citizens; Navigating News Online

The Aspen Institute's Communication and Society Program has issued it's 2010 report, News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities, available at their site for purchase or free download.

From the abstract:

The report includes a description of the continuing difficulties, yet encouraging advances in local journalism, and a series of recommendations to strengthen public media, increase government transparency, encourage public engagement, promote digital and media literacy, and provide universal broadband access.

And while we're talking news, I probably don't need to direct folks to Pew as much as I do but their reports are so useful and data-rich I can't resist. Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get there and What Lures Them Away, by Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel looks at online news consumption traffic of the top 25 news sites according to Nielsen data. Actually, they point out, their data set includes only 21 of the top 25 sites. The Wall Street Journal, BBC.com, Bing News, and Reuters are structured in a way that prevents Nielsen from capturing this data. The Report delivers graphs and pie charts of traffic to and from Facebook, influence of Drudge Report on top news sites, Twitter traffic to and from news sites, and news site preferences by gender, and much more.

Social Media Stats From Ragan's

Ragan's RR Daily has rounded up a list of 18 resources for the best social media stats of 2011 (so far). You'll have to cherry pick through this data but you might find just the gem you're looking for.

January CommQuote

Our quote this first month in the New Year is from Zadie Smith's meditation on Facebook via The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto in The New York Review of Books (November 25, 2010).

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued¹), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget...Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation...We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible...

Lanier wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are “locked in.” Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn’t limited?

...Software may reduce humans, but there are degrees. Fiction reduces humans, too, but bad fiction does it more than good fiction, and we have the option to read good fiction. Jaron Lanier’s point is that Web 2.0 “lock-in” happens soon; is happening; has to some degree already happened. And what has been “locked in”? It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)