Civil Society Organizations, Social Media, and Public Attention

该项目旨在解释非营利组织、倡导团体、社会运动组织和其他民间社会组织如何通过社交媒体吸引公众关注。尽管每天都有数十万家组织发布社交媒体信息，但其中只有一小部分会像病毒一样传播开来，并触及核心受众以外的广大社交媒体用户。为了解释这一过程，该项目开发了一种新的理论，结合了文化社会学、社会心理学和社会网络理论的见解。该项目开发了一种基于APP的创新技术，以检验这一理论。组织将被招募使用这项新技术来研究其Facebook页面的流量。该项目制作了一个综合数据库，使民间社会组织能够学习其同行在吸引访问者方面的成功和失败。这些组织将分享他们的数据，以产生迄今为止关于组织如何通过社交媒体接触新受众的最大规模的研究。这种新的方法将能够安全、高效地传输大量高质量的社会科学数据，并提供一种具有成本效益的机制，以解决调查回复率下降的问题，同时也提供了一种公共产品。这项研究的独特研究设计将为参与研究的民间社会组织提供关于如何接触到在线新受众的分析，从而直接受益。该项目还将产生数百个组织和数亿人之间多年互动的非常大的数据集，这将使人们能够分析与集体行为、文化社会学、社会心理学和社会网络有关的广泛变量。这项研究将为研究生研究助理提供指导、职业机会和培训。

This project aims to explain how non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, social movement organizations and other civil society organizations attract public attention via social media. Though hundreds of thousands of organizations produce social media messages each day, only a small fraction of these "go viral" and reach broad segments of social media users beyond their core audience. To explain this process, this project develops a novel theory that combines insights from cultural sociology, social psychology, and social network theory. The project develops an innovative app-based technology in order to examine this theory. Organizations will be recruited to use this new technology to study traffic to their Facebook pages. This project produces an aggregate database that enables civil society organizations to learn from the successes and failures of their peers in attracting visitors. The organizations will share their data in order to produce what will be the largest study of how organizations reach new audiences via social media to date. This new methodology will enable, safe, efficient transmission of very large amounts of high quality social science data and provides a cost effective mechanism to address declining survey response rates that also provides a public good.The study's unique research design will directly benefit civil society organizations that participate by providing them with analysis of how they might reach new audiences online. The project will also produce a very large dataset of multiple years of interaction between hundreds of organizations and hundreds of millions of people that will enable analysis of a broad range of variables related to collective behavior, cultural sociology, social psychology, and social networks. And the study will provide mentorship and professional opportunities and training for graduate student research assistants.