Paper presented at the IBM Research Colloquium 2013: Living in an Instrumented World, Melbourne, 12 Nov. 2013.

1. Social Media Issue Publics
in Australia
Axel Bruns
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
a.bruns@qut.edu.au
@snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

2. SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH AT QUT
•
ARC Centre of Excellence for
Creative Industries & Innovation
(national, based at QUT)
–
Project: Media Ecologies &
Methodological Innovation
•
New methods to understand the
changing media environment
•
Role of social media, especially
Twitter
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
–
Project: Social Media in Times of Crisis
•
Focus on crisis communication
•
Partnerships with Queensland
Department of Community Safety,
Eidos Institute
http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf

3. CRISIS COMMUNICATION

4. KEY CHALLENGES IN CRISIS COMMUNICATION
• Information dissemination:
– Crisis communication strategies of emergency services /
emergency media organisations
– Evaluating effectiveness and resonance
– Maintaining public visibility of social media accounts outside of
acute crisis situations
• Information discovery:
– (Early) detection of crisis events in social media feeds
– Identification and evaluation of crisis-relevant information
– Correlation of crowdsourced information with other crisis data

5. THE QUEENSLAND FLOODS COMMUNITY
•
Self-organisation:
–
–
–
–
•
Rapid establishment of #qldfloods hashtag
Ad hoc development of community structures
Highlighting of leading accounts, vigilant against disruption
Suspension of petty squabbles (e.g. state politics)
Innovation and rapid prototyping:
–
–
–
–
Adjunct hashtags (#Mythbuster, #bakedrelief)
Sharing and gathering of online resources
Additional tools (Google Maps, Ushahidi Maps)
Emergency services rapidly adopting social media tools
(despite lack of established strategies)
 „Go where they are‟ rather than „build it and they will come‟
 See CCI Report: #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter
in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods (http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf)

6. #QLDFLOODS 2011: MOST VISIBLE USERS

7. #QLDFLOOD(S) 2013: MOST VISIBLE USERS

8. #EQNZ: VISIBILITY OF LEADING ACCOUNTS IN EACH EVENT

9. JUST THE FACTS: SELECTIVE RETWEETING

10. CRISIS EVENT COMPARISON
#qldfloods 2011
#qldfloods 2013
#eqnz 2011
#eqnz 2013

11. INFORMATION DISCOVERY

12. KEY CHALLENGES
• Identification:
– Unforeseen events: need to track more than keywords („big data‟)
– Potential to identify emerging events from overall activity patterns
• Evaluation:
– Real? Hoax? Metaphor (“the bank has collapsed”)?
– May need semantic analysis, user profiling, independent verification
• Incorporation:
– Correlation and integration with standard emergency data sources
– Timeframes: how long until crowdsourced information expires?

13. #QLDFLOODS FROM TOOWOOMBA TO BRISBANE
10 Jan 2011
11 Jan 2011
12 Jan 2011
13 Jan 2011
14 Jan 2011
15 Jan 2011

14. #EQNZ: KEY THEMES

15. #EQNZ: MENTIONS OF THE CTV BUILDING
Graph: Avijit Paul
(@cdtavijit); see
Paul & Bruns (2013)

16. SOCIAL MEDIA AND CRISIS COMMUNICATION
•
Social media research:
–
–
–
–
•
Develop better tools and metrics for evaluating social media communication
In-depth analysis of communication patterns reveals how social media are used
Real-time analytics: highlight key current issues, identify weak signals of crisis
Monitor and improve effectiveness of social media communication strategies by
emergency services
Social media uses:
– Inform, share, amplify, support, reassure, organise
– Need to track and work with user community: follow their conventions
(e.g. #eqnz hashtag)
– Two-way communication where feasible – more than broadcast messages
– Provide community with tools to self-organise for resilience

17. SOCIAL MEDIA AND / IN SOCIETY

18. UNDERSTANDING TWITTER PUBLICS
•
#hashtags:
–
–
–
–
•
Useful coordinating mechanism for core discussion
Relatively easy to capture and analyse
Fails to capture non-hashtagged tweets about the topic
Good case studies, but very little comparative work to date
National / global Twittersphere maps
–
–
–
–
Crucial contextual baseline for #hashtag case studies
Slow and laborious data gathering process, never complete
Very long-term perspective, beyond most funded projects
Indispensable for study of Twitter as a public space

19. TWITTER AND SOCIETY
•
Richard Rogers:
–
–
–
•
Needs:
–
–
–
–
•
From “studying the Internet” to “studying
society with the Internet”
Social media as a global / national / local
sensor network
Social media issue publics as indicators of
current concerns, topics, trends
More comprehensive theories of social
media communication
More flexible and powerful research
methods, beyond the Twitter hashtag
More interdisciplinary research teams and
approaches
Better research infrastructure for
accessing, processing, analysing,
visualising „big data‟
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess,
Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann,
eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter
Lang, 2014.
@twitsocbook

20. THE AUSTRALIAN TWITTERSPHERE?
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree

21. Real Estate
Property
Jobs
HR
Business
Parenting
THEMATIC CLUSTERS
Design
Web
Creative
Perth
Marketing / PR
Farming
Agriculture
IT
Tech
News
Food
Wine
Creative
Design
Social
ICTs
Fashion
Beauty
Utilities
Services
Net Culture
Opinion
News
ALP
Progressives
Craft
Arts
Beer
NGOs
Social Policy
Greens
Hardline
Conservatives
Social Media
Tech
PR
Advertising
Mums
Business
Property
Books
Literature
Publishing
Adelaide
Theatre
Film Arts
@KRuddMP
@JuliaGillard
Conservatives
Journalists
Radio
TV
Music
Triple J
Talkback
Breakfast TV
Cycling Celebrities
Dance
Hip Hop
Union
Evangelicals
NRL
Swimming
V8s
Football
Cricket
AFL
Christians
Teaching Hillsong
e-Learning
Schools
Teens
Jonas Bros.
Beliebers

22. #HASHTAG PARTICIPATION
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012) size
= indegree

23. #QLDFLOODS
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #qldfloods tweets, size = indegree

24. #EQNZ
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #eqnz tweets, size = indegree

25. #AUSPOL
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #auspol tweets, size = indegree

26. #AUSVOTES (2010)
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #ausvotes tweets, size = indegree

27. THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU URLS
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

28. ABC.NET.AU URLS
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

29. HOW GILLARD‟S MISOGYNY SPEECH WENT VIRAL
@abcnews

30. 15 mins. elapsed

31. 30 mins. elapsed
Journalists

32. 1 hour elapsed
Feminists

33. 2 hours elapsed

34. 3 hours elapsed

35. 4 hours elapsed

36. 5 hours elapsed

37. complete network (75 hours elapsed)

38. LONGITUDINAL STUDIES

39. AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS ON TWITTER
(data to June 2013)

40. @TONYABBOTTMHR‟S FAKE FOLLOWERS
(11/12 Aug. 2013)

41. BIG BIG DATA: THE FIRST MILLION TWITTER IDS
Twitter IDs 1-1,000,000 (48,000 accounts still in existence)
(see http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2013/04/08/the-first-million-ids-on-twitter/)

42. NEW ACCOUNT CREATION AROUND CRISES

43. http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
@snurb_dot_info
@jeanburgess
@dpwoodford
@timhighfield
@lena_sauter
@_StephenH
@quods
@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/