Journal Article

Harnessing the social web to enhance insights into people’s opinions in business, government and public administration

Baur, Aaron W.

2017

Overview

Transparency, participation, and collaboration are the core pillars of open government. For the systematic integration of citizens and other stakeholders into the policy and public value creation process, their opinions, wishes, and complaints first need to be received. In the future, including user-generated content from social media will become a main channel for the enrichment of this information base for public administrative bodies and commercial firms. However, the sheer speed of growth of this constantly updated data pool makes manual work infeasible. The automated gathering, combination, analysis, and visualization of user-generated content from various sources and multiple languages is therefore imperative. In this study, we present a design science research approach to develop a general framework (‘ MarketMiner ’) to handle large amounts of foreign-language user-generated content. As a first empirical application, we implement the framework in the automotive industry by analyzing Chinese automotive forums for the benefit of English-speaking users. At the same time, the ideas, methods, and insights are transferred to the public sector context, especially in light of the current challenges of a high number of political refugees from Arabic countries entering into the European Union. The results are promising in that MarketMiner can dramatically improve the utilization of multi-language, multi-source social media content. The modular set-up of the artifact allows an easy transfer to additional areas of application.

• Publisher: Springer US,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Analysis / Arabic language / Attitudes / Automation / Automobile industry / Automotive engineering / Automotive industry / Business and Management / Business intelligence / Channels / Chinese languages / Citizen participation / Collaboration / Complaints / Control / Creation process / Digital media / Foreign languages / Government / Governments / Information systems / Information technology / IT in Business / Languages / Management of Computing and Information Systems / Marketing / Mass media / Motor car industry / Nonprofit organizations / Open data / Operations Research/Decision Theory / Policies / Product development / Public administration / Public policy / Public sector / Refugees / Research design / Science / Social media / Social networks / Strategic management / Studies / Systems Theory / Trade / Transparency / User generated content / Value creation / Visualization