Civil Society Organizations, Social Media, and Public Attention

这个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的关注。尽管每天都有成千上万的组织发布社交媒体信息，但只有一小部分“病毒式传播”，并在其核心受众之外获得广泛的社交媒体用户。为了解释这个过程，这个项目发展了一个新的理论，结合了文化社会学、社会心理学和社会网络理论的见解。为了检验这一理论，该项目开发了一种基于应用程序的创新技术。组织将被招募使用这项新技术来研究其Facebook页面的流量。该项目建立了一个综合数据库，使民间社会组织能够从同行吸引游客的成功和失败中学习。这些组织将分享他们的数据，以产生迄今为止最大的关于组织如何通过社交媒体吸引新受众的研究。这种新方法将能够安全、有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来解决调查回复率下降的问题，这也提供了公共利益。这项研究独特的研究设计将为参与研究的民间社会组织提供如何在网上吸引新受众的分析，从而使它们直接受益。该项目还将产生一个非常大的数据集，其中包含数百个组织和数亿人之间多年的互动，这将使分析与集体行为、文化社会学、社会心理学和社会网络相关的广泛变量成为可能。该研究将为研究生研究助理提供指导和专业机会和培训。

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.