Role of social media for civic participation, drawing on Swedish volunteer initiatives that emerged in the context of the migration crisis in 2015 as a case study.
10 pages, Enormous quantities of data are generated through social and online media in the era of Web 2.0. Understanding consumer perceptions or demand efficiently and cost effectively remains a focus for economists, retailer/consumer sciences, and production industries. Most of the efforts to understand demand for food products rely on reports of past market performance along with survey data. Given the movement of content-generation online to lay users via social media, the potential to capture market-influencing shifts in sentiment exists in online data. This analysis presents a novel approach to studying consumer perceptions of production system attributes using eggs and laying hen housing, which have received significant attention in recent years. The housing systems cage-free and free-range had the greatest number of online hits in the searches conducted, compared with the other laying hen housing types. Less online discussion surrounded enriched cages, which were found by other methods/researchers to meet many key consumer preferences. These results, in conjunction with insights into net sentiment and words associated with different laying hen housing in online and social media, exemplify how social media listening may complement traditional methods to inform decision-makers regarding agribusiness marketing, food systems, management, and regulation. Employing web-derived data for decision-making within agrifood firms offers the opportunity for actionable insights tailored to individual businesses or products.
4 pages, via Online journal, Since late Mar. 2020, many universities halted normal operations due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Although extension uses many different techniques to educate consumers, it has been slow to grasp the power of social media. Faced with a dilemma of using digital methods instead of in-person field days, short courses, and workshops, Twitter was a viable alternative, especially for broad audience engagement. Tweet threads were posted on Twitter every Monday morning from 6 Apr. to 8 June 2020. Each thread consisted of 10 tweets. A hashtag #YardFruits was used to start the thread and for later reference. For the first nine threads only one fruit species was discussed per thread. The final thread consisted of single tweets of several species. Engagement percentage did not differ over time but did differ among the crop species. Tweets that did not include a photo received less engagement (2.7%) than those that did include a photo (4.7%). My Twitter account saw a 6.5% increase in followers during the series. Grape (Vitis sp.), passion fruit (Passiflora sp.), fig (Ficus carica), and pear (Pyrus communis) threads had the least engagement and were different from the Other Fruits thread. All other threads were similar. Extension educators can grow their influence by using well-targeted, focused tweets and tweet threads, especially those that use hashtags and photos.
6 pages., Online via Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)., Author analyzed case studies of corruption reported in 24/7 "convergent" media and concluded: "As the mainstream media is failing in exposing the enormous corruption in the government, there is a need to use the 'convergence' and 'blogging' to expose the corruption from the people side."
