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.
13 pages, Agricultural fairs provide one of the last frontiers, and largest stages, for showcasing livestock agriculture to the public. However, public funding, attendance revenue, animal biosecurity, and public health concerns are all aspects worthy of conversation and increased research attention given the interaction between livestock animals and the general public in fair and festival settings. A prominent social media listening and data analytics platform was used to quantify online and social media chatter concerning agricultural fairs during a 27-mo period. A general search for online media referencing agricultural fair keywords was designed; social and online media mentions of agricultural fairs (n = 2,091,350 mentions) were further queried according to their reference to livestock, fair food, or the major agricultural product producing species of dairy and beef cattle (n = 68,900), poultry (n = 39,600), and swine (n = 31,250). Numbers of search results were found to be seasonal and Twitter was the single largest domain for all fair-related results; in contrast, the majority of livestock-related media was generated by news sources rather than from Twitter. On a weekly basis, the percentage of fair livestock mentions with species-specific reference was highly variable ranging from 0% to 86.8% for cattle, 0% to 85.7% for poultry, and 0% to 76.9% for swine. In addition to quantifying total search hits or mentions, the positivity/negativity of the search results was analyzed using natural language processing capabilities. The net sentiment quantified is the total percentage of positive posts minus the percentage of negative posts, which results in a necessarily bounded net sentiment between −100% and +100%. Overall net sentiment associated with mentions of agricultural fairs was positive; the topics garnering the highest positive sentiments were fair food and cattle (both 98% positive). Online discussion pertaining to agricultural fairs and swine was overall positive despite references to swine flu outbreaks. In conclusion, livestock and animal products had positive net sentiment over the time period studied, but there are multiple aspects of agricultural fairs worthy of further investigation and continued vigilance, including zoonotic disease risk and public perceptions of livestock industries.
4 pages, Social media use in public health and other health related research applications has seen a rapid increase in recent years. However, there has been very limited utilization of this growing digital sector in agricultural injury research. Social media offers immense potential in gathering informal data, both text and images, converting them into knowledge, which can open up avenues for research, policy, and practice. There are a number of ways social media data can be utilized in agricultural injury research. This paper touches on the adoption of these data sources in health research and discusses the use of social media as an exploratory research tool that can peer into and identify the edges of potential health and safety problems.
5 pages, via Online journal, The social media service Instagram is a popular public platform, but often underused tool to reach new demographics, reduce barriers, and perpetuate science-based information in extension. In the U.S. Intermountain West, Instagram was the top-rated platform for sharing information by predominantly new and female farmers. This article provides recommendations on key behaviors, goal setting, and quantifying impact on Instagram for extension programming. Accounts should target one niche or market, a consistent and personal voice, and regular communication (new content at least three times weekly). Unique and productive connections between extension personnel, community leaders, farmers, students, and public influencers expands programming. Tracking program accounts, including the number of followers and engagement rates, can assess program impacts and target market needs.
16 pages, Food policy increasingly attempts to accommodate a wider and more diverse range of stakeholder interests. However, the emerging influence of different communities and networks of actors with localized concerns and interests around how food should be produced and traded, can challenge attempts to achieving more open, sustainable and globally-integrated food chains. This article analyses how cultural factors internal to a developed country can disrupt the export of food to a developing country. A framing analysis is applied to examine how activists using social media to interact with the traditional news media in Australia were able to inflame public opinion and provoke outrage to disrupt the policy agenda. The paper contains a case study analysis of the media controversy in 2011 around the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs and the subsequent banning of live cattle exports to Indonesia by Australia. The analysis draws on the theory of binary cultural oppositions to examine how practices in relation to the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesia were reframed, through extensive media coverage of moral outrage into a critique of the values and cultural practices of Indonesian society.
21 pages, Florists have been adopting social media as a new marketing instrument to promote their business. However, academic research has rarely looked into the existing state of that adoption. Consequently, several fundamental problems remain unknown regarding the application of social media marketing (SMM) among florists, which may limit the development of the flower retailing business in the current social media era. In seeking to address this deficiency, this study aimed to investigate florists’ motivations, strategies, and perceived performance in relation to the application of SMM, as well as to explore the barriers faced by florists regarding the adoption of SMM. The authors implemented these objectives by interviewing 35 flower shop owners who each had established a brand page on Facebook. The qualitative data obtained from the interviews were analyzed using a grounded hermeneutic editing approach. The study’s results revealed that even though there were different motivations for florists to adopt social media marketing, including increasing brand exposure, improving customer relationship, and reducing the cost of advertising, showing expertise in floral design to attract consumers was the most common motivation stressed by the interviewees. The strategies mostly used by florists in managing their Facebook brand pages included providing high quality posts, cross-industry advertising, and switching consumers from online questions to a physical store visit. The most significant benefit perceived by florists regarding the use of a Facebook brand page was the development of new customers. Although the interviewees recognized the benefitsofadoptingSMM,someofthemfacedgreatincompatibilityinlaborsourceforthatadoption. In addition, most interviewees focused on achieving general marketing goals rather than more advanced functions, such as business intelligence, in the application of SMM. The study results implied that the interviews mostly saw Facebook brand pages as a social network platform for increasing current sales volume, rather than for reaching a long-term quality customer relationship, which has deviated from the essence of social media marketing, and thus, limiting the synergy of the application of SMM in the flower retail sector.
