Information & Management 52 (2015) 761763

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Information & Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/im

Guest Editorial

Novel applications of social media analytics

Social media is continuously growing in an astonishing speed

[4]. Online social media platforms, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,
Weibo, many discussion forums, have developed into a virtual
world where users and rms share contents related to their real
lives, works, and various facets of the real world. Not only the end
users are embracing the new technology, but also the rms,
corporations, state and government agencies are adopting this at a
very fast pace [8].
The explosion of social media usage have resulted in massive
user generated contents (UGCs), including media contents, user
information and their interactions and social networks, geolocations, and many other metadata values [5,6]. These UGCs have
created numerous new research opportunities and challenges.
Social media analytics (SMA) is concerned with developing and
evaluating informatics tools and frameworks to collect, monitor,
analyze, summarize, and visualize social media data to facilitate
conversations and interactions to extract useful patterns and
intelligence [7]. Social media analytics generally involve three
stage processes: capture, understand, and present [4]. Recently,
more and more research efforts have been dedicated to key issues
therein, such as analytics and learning techniques toward
understanding social media, social media analytics tools and
systems, knowledge mining from social media, as well as social
network modeling, etc.
This special issue seeks contributions reporting novel solutions,
models, theories, or systems regarding social media analytics.
Topics of interest include but not limited to:
Understanding social content and dynamics.
Understanding rm usage of social media.
Efcient learning algorithms for scalable social media analytics.
Social network modeling using social media data.
Machine learning and data mining for social media.
User interests and behavior modeling in social media.
Tagging, semantic annotation, object and event recognition on
large-scale social media collections.
 Novel data processing to remove noise and extract useful signals.
 Effective search mechanism in large-scale social media collections.
 Novel business applications and value discovery using social
media analytics.








After the call for papers was issued, we received many quality
submissions. After many rounds of review, the following 11 papers
stand out and get accepted into this special issue. They cover a
wide range of topics and use a variety of social media data sets.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2015.07.007
0378-7206/ 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Understanding News 2.0: a Framework for Explaining the

Number of Comments from Readers on Online News, by Qian Liu,
Mi Zhou, Xin Zhao, try to explain the user comment popularity
using SMA in the News 2.0 arena. They believe that the number of
comments can indicate the inuence of online news, which brings
potential social value and economic benets. They propose a
framework that involves integrating the features of news
structure, news content, and reader usage (social media recommendation) to explain the number of comments. The results of
logistic regression suggest that the proposed framework is a
powerful tool for explaining the number of comments (R2 = 47.1%).
The relative and mediating role of recommendation in social media
from readers is also explored.
Emotion Recognition and Affective Computing on Vocal Social
Media, by Weihui Dai, Dongmei Han, Yonghui Dai, Dongrong Xu,
proposes a computational method for emotion recognition and
affective computing on vocal social media to estimate the complex
emotion as well as its dynamic changes in a three dimensional PAD
(Position-Arousal-Dominance) space. They claim that vocal media
is conveying semantic information, vocal message, as well as
abundant emotional information at the same time. Vocal media
has become a popular way of communication in todays social
networks. They further analyze the propagation characteristics of
emotions on the vocal social media using a Wechat vocal dataset.
Personalized Recommendation Based on Time-Weighted
Overlapping Community Detection, by Haoyuan Feng, Jin Tian,
Harry Jiannan Wang, Minqiang Li, try to understand users interests
using SMA for personalized recommendation. They claim that
users in social media sites often belong to multiple interest
communities and their interests are constantly changing over time.
Therefore, modeling and predicting dynamic user interests poses
great challenges to personalized recommendation in social media
analytics research. They propose a novel solution to this research
problem by developing a temporal overlapping community
detection method based on time-weighted association rule
mining. They conducted experiments using MovieLens and Netix
datasets, and their experimental results show that their proposed
approach outperforms several existing methods in recommendation performance.
A Novel Social Media Competitive Analytics Framework with
Sentiment Benchmarks, by Wu He, Harris Wu, Gongjun Yan,
Vasudeva Akula, Jiancheng Shen, present a social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks that can be
used to glean industry-specic marketing intelligence. Based on
the idea of the proposed framework, new social media competitive
analytics with sentiment benchmarks can be developed to enhance

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Editorial / Information & Management 52 (2015) 761763

marketing intelligence and to identify specic actionable areas in

which businesses are leading and lagging to further improve their
customers experience using customer opinions gleaned from
social media. An innovative business-driven social media competitive analytics tool named VOZIQ is developed based on their
proposed framework. They demonstrate the usefulness of the
VOZIQ tool by analyzing tweets associated with ve large retail
sector companies.
The Deeper, the Better? Effect of Online Brand Community
Activity on Customer Purchase Frequency, by Ji Wu, Liqiang
Huang, Jianliang Leon Zhao, Zhongsheng Hua, study a problem on
how to determine customer purchase frequency based on the level
of activity in an online brand community. They believe that there is
a great need to reconcile the mixed ndings obtained so far in this
area. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, they hypothesize that
the effect of community participation may be contingent on
participators goal-pursuit focus (prevention or promotion). Their
further analysis of customer blog data in a company-sponsored
community together with transactional data of the same company
demonstrates that deep community participation among promotion-focused customers signicantly increases purchase frequency; however, deep participation has a very different effect among
prevention-focused customers.
Effectiveness of Corporate Social Media Activities to Increase
Relational Outcomes, by Marten Risius, Roman Beck, applies
social media analytics to investigate the impact of different
corporate social media activities on users word of mouth and
attitudinal loyalty. They conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately 5 million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of
28 large global companies. They empirically identify different
social media activities in terms of social media management
strategies (using social media management tools or the webfrontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or
disseminative). They also nd positive effects of social media
management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational
communication on public perception.
Why Users Contribute Knowledge to Online Communities: An
Empirical Study of an Online Social Q&A Community, by Jiahua Jin,
Yijun Li, Xiaojia Zhong, Li Zhai, studies why users continuously
contribute knowledge to online social Q&A communities based on
social capital theory, social exchange theory, and social cognitive
theory. Empirical panel count data was collected from a popular
Chinese online social Q&A community. The results from a negative
binomial regression model with user xed effects indicate that a
users self-presentation, peer recognition, and social learning have
positive impact on his/her knowledge contribution behaviors.
Their ndings can help guide the development and operation of
online social Q&A communities.
EXPRS: An Extended Pagerank Method for Product Feature
Extraction from Online Consumer Reviews, by Zhijun Yan,
Meiming Xing, Dongsong Zhang, Baizhang Ma, studies methods
to extract useful features from online reviews. They believe that
online consumer product reviews are a main source for consumers
to obtain product information and reduce product uncertainty
before making a purchase decision. However, the great volume of
product reviews makes it tedious and ineffective for consumers to
peruse individual reviews one by one and search for comments on
specic product features of their interest. Their study proposes a
novel method called EXPRS that integrates an extended PageRank
algorithm, synonym expansion, and implicit feature inference to
extract product features automatically. The empirical evaluation
using consumer reviews on three different products shows that
EXPRS is more effective than two baseline methods.
Subjective Well-being Measurement based on Chinese Grassroots Blog Text Sentiment Analysis, by Jiayin Qi, Xiangling Fu, Ge

Zhu, proposes a new method to measure the subjective well-being

(SWB) of Chinese people. Based upon the classic framework in
psychology, their model constructs a system of multiple weighted
emotions in positive and negative affect by applying text
sentiment analysis. They study SWB in the Chinese context. They
establish and supplement their model with a new lexicon, RenCECps-SWB 2.0. Their tests on a blog data set from Sina.com
demonstrate the validity of their model. They also nd some
interesting patterns of the SWB of Chinese people on a weekly and
monthly basis.
Reading Behavior on Intra-organizational Blogging Systems: A
Group-level Analysis through the Lens of Social Capital Theory, by
Naichen Li, Xunhua Guo, Guoqing Chen, Nianlong Luo, aims to
explore the factors that potentially determine the continued
reading behavior of users on intra-organizational blogging
systems. They propose a group-level model that consists of
constructs regarding structural, relational, and cognitive social
capital. The model is empirically tested using system record data
collected from a large telecommunications company. Their results
illustrate that social capital factors have signicant impacts on
continued reading behavior. However, part of their inuence is
subject to the moderation effects of workgroup characteristics.
Their study and its ndings contribute to the literature on intraorganizational social networking.
An Empirical Analysis of Users Privacy Disclosure Behaviors
on Social Network Site, by Kai Li, Zhangxi Lin, Xiaowen Wang,
examines users privacy disclosure behavior via SMA. They believe
users privacy on social network sites is one of the most important
and urgent issues in both industry and academic elds. They
investigate the effect of users demographics, social network site
experience, personal social network size, and blogging productivity on privacy disclosure behaviors by analyzing the data collected
from social network sites. Their results show that males and
females have signicantly differentiated privacy disclosure patterns in the dimensions of disclosing breadth and depth. In
addition, age has negative and signicant relationships with
disclosing breadth, disclosing depth, and high sensitive disclosure.
We hope the collection of papers in this special issue on social
media analytics will spark more interests and follow-up work in
this exciting research area.
References
[1] A.S. Abrahams, J. Jiao, G.A. Wang, W. Fan, Vehicle defect discovery from social
media, Decis. Support Syst. 54 (1), 2012, pp. 8797.
[2] A.S. Abrahams, J. Jiao, W. Fan, G.A. Wang, Z. Zhang, What is buzzing in the blizzard
of buzz: automotive component isolation in social media postings, Decis. Support
Syst. 55 (4), 2013, pp. 871882.
[3] A.S. Abrahams, W. Fan, J. Jiao, G.A. Wang, Z. Zhang, An integrated text analytic
framework for product defect discovery, Prod. Oper. Manag. 24 (6), 2015, pp.
975990.
[4] W. Fan, M.D. Gordon, The power of social media analytics, Commun. ACM 57 (6),
2014, pp. 7481.
[5] H. Lin, W. Fan, P. Chau, Determinants of users continuance of social networking
sites: a self-regulation perspective, Inf. Manag. 51 (5), 2014, pp. 595603.
[6] G.A. Wang, J. Jiao, A.S. Abrahams, W. Fan, Z. Zhang, ExpertRank: a topic-aware
expert nding algorithm for online knowledge communities, Decis. Support Syst.
54 (3), 2013, pp. 14421451.
[7] D. Zeng, H. Chen, R. Lusch, S.-H. Li, Social media analytics and intelligence, IEEE
Intell. Syst. 25 (6), 2010.
[8] Mi (Jamie) Zhou, Lijun (Gillian) Lei, Jianling Wang, Weiguo Fan, Alan G. Wang,
Social Media Adoption and Corporate Disclosure, J. Inf. Syst.: Summer 2015 29 (2),
2015, pp. 2350.

Weiguo Fan, L. Mahlon Harrell fellow, is a professor of accounting and information

systems, professor of computer science (courtesy) and director of the Center for
Business Intelligence and Analytics at Virginia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in business
administration from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in
2002, a M.Sc in computer science from the National University of Singapore in 1997,
and a B.E. in Information and Control Engineering from the Xian Jiaotong University,
P.R. China, in 1995. His research interests focus on the design and development of
novel information technologies Big data, social media analytics, information

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retrieval, data mining, text/web mining, business intelligence and analytics

techniques to support better business information management and decision
making. He has published more than 150 refereed journal and conference papers. His
research has appeared in many elite journals such as Information Systems Research,
Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and Operations Management,
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Information and Management, International Journal of Production
Research, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology,
Information Processing and Management, Decision Support Systems, ACM Transactions on
Internet Technology, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Sciences,
Journal of Informetrics. His research on product (including vehicles, and consumer
electronics) defect discovery from social media [13] has been well cited and featured
in numerous news media, including New York Times.

Technology, and a M.Sc and B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Harbin Institute of
Technology, in 1995. He has been a visiting research scholar in MIS Department at
the University of Arizona from 2008 to 2009, and 2014. His research interests
include electronic commerce, social media analytics, social network analysis, and
business intelligence. His research has appeared in many mainstream journals, such
as Journal of Informetrics, Computers in Human Behaviors, Scientometrics, Information
Systems Frontiers, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. His research has been funded by
several large Chinese NSF grants.

Xiangbin Yan, is a professor and department head of Management Science &

Engineering in the School of Management at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT),
P.R. China. He also serves as associate dean of the Institute of Economics,
Management, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Harbin Institute of Technology. He
received his Ph.D. in Management Science & Engineering from Harbin Institute of

Xiangbin Yan
Harbin Institute of Technology, PR China

Weiguo Fan
Virginia Tech, USA

Available online 17 July 2015