Understanding Social Media Monitoring

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It is widely accepted that social media permeate more and more of our daily lives. So do social media data: personalized online advertisements such as those seen on Facebook, journalism which is increasingly dependent on and driven by data, and the rise of systems which measure our digital reputations, such as Klout and PeerIndex, are just some examples of current uses of social media data. A number of recent high profile cases have sparked public interest in what happens to social media data once it has been shared, such as the US college student whose Christian parents became aware of his homosexuality when his association with a gay choir appeared on his Facebook timeline (Wolford 2012). Alongside the analysis and manipulation of data by social media mega-platforms like Facebook, intermediary companies which monitor, interpret and analyse social media data are emerging across the globe, offering a broad range of social media 'intelligence' services, including monitoring the social media activities of audiences and 'influencers' in order to gauge and respond to public opinion. Such analysis involves the deployment of specific methods, such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, social network analysis, machine learning and natural language processing. These social media monitoring methods, like methods of all kinds, 'are shaped by the social world in which they are located [and] in turn help to shape that social world' (Law 2010: 2). Given these phenomena - the spread of social media data analysis, the growth of public concern about what happens to social media data, and the role played by methods in the shaping of the social world - it is vital that empirical research into social media monitoring (SMM) is carried out, to ask questions about how social media data are gathered and constructed, what they can be taken to mean, to what ends they are deployed, who gets access to them and how their analysis is regulated (boyd and Crawford 2011). My research does this through a focus on the intermediary SMM industries. It approaches SMM from a number of perspectives, in order to paint a more complete picture than exists to date of the SMM industries and their social and economic significance. These include:> the perspectives of people working in these industries (How do people working in social media monitoring think about and work with/around core issues such as privacy and surveillance?); > users' perspectives (What do social media users think about the monitoring of their social media activity?); > a regulation perspective (How could and should the social media monitoring industries be governed?); > and the perspective of the data itself (What happens to social media data? How does it get used? What impact, if any, does it have?). Drawing together textual analysis of company websites and other related documents, interviews and focus group discussions with social media users, social media monitoring professionals and key regulation actors, the research will be published as a monograph entitled Social Media Monitoring: social media data analysis and the production of social life. Within the proposed project, international dialogues about the importance of social media data analysis as an object of investigation for media studies will be initiated, through a series of visits, an international conference and a special issue of a journal. The research also has broader, transformative potential beyond media studies, because the critical approach that it adopts, which moves beyond and counterbalances celebratory accounts of the democratic possibilities of social media, is relevant to other disciplines impacted by the ubiquity of social media. As social media monitoring also matters to non-academic audiences, the research findings will be discussed outside of academia, through talks and online dissemination, to two key audiences: the social media monitoring industries themselves and social media users.