Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

2008, Fieseler, Christian, Fleck, Matthes, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

In this paper we utilize social network analysis to examine the interaction patterns between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in such a virtual community, we show the potentials of online platforms for engagement with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware customer base. It is furthermore demonstrated that consumer involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for communications and brand management and opens new horizons for communicating corporate social responsibility issues to key constituencies online.

2007, Fleck, Matthes, Kirchhoff, Lars, Meckel, Miriam, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

Recently, blogs have gained a lot of attention as an instrument within corporate communication. There are numerous discussions and research projects in various academic disciplines about blogs creating a diffuse body of knowledge with different concepts, notions, and ideas. This paper summarises typologies from these different disciplines and tries to integrate them into a multidimensional model in which all relevant aspects and applications of blogs are considered. The results are summarised in the St. Galler blog cube.

, Ebermann, Jana, Fleck, Matthes, Meckel, Miriam, Plotkowiak, Thomas, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

Partizipative Internettechnologien und der damit einhergehende Gedanke von einer vernetzten Leserschaft, sorgen für ein verändertes Aufgabenprofil und Rollenbild von Journalisten. Im neuen medialen Öksosystem des Internets erhalten Journalisten Hinweise und Anregungen von einer vernetzten Leserschaft, die darüber hinaus auch eine Kontrollfunktion wahrnimmt. Besonders in Krisensituationen oder bei politischen Konflikten, wenn professionelle Journalisten in ihrer Arbeit eingeschränkt werden, können Informationen, welche über die sozialen Plattformen des Webs verbreitet werden, wichtige Quellen journalistischer Arbeit sein. Innerhalb dieser Plattformen hat der Microblogging-Dienst Twitter in jüngster Vergangenheit grosse Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. Die Studie untersucht daher im Rahmen einer Fallstudie die Beziehungen des New York Times Journalisten Robert Mackey auf Twitter, um Erkenntnisse über dessen Rolle in einem komplexen sozialen System, bestehend aus vernetzter Leserschaft und professionellen Medienproduzenten, zu erlangen. Kontext der Untersuchung sind die politischen Unruhen nach den Wahlen im Iran, in deren Verlauf professionelle Journalisten auf Berichte von Augenzeugen, verbreitet über Blogs, Youtube und Twitter, angewiesen waren. Im Rahmen der Fallstudie werden Techniken der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse und sozialwissenschaftlichen Inhaltsanalyse genutzt, um ein möglichst komplexes Bild der Interaktionen auf Twitter zu zeichnen. Theoretisch orientiert sich die Studie an den Arbeiten zum Two-Step Flow of communication und dessen Adaption im Kontext sozialer Systeme. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zeigen, dass Twitter nicht nur ein weiterer Kanal zur Verbreitung der eigenen Inhalte ist, sondern auch zum Aufspüren von Quellen, zur Moderation von Themen und zur Vernetzung mit dem eigenen Publikum geeignet ist.

2008, Fieseler, Christian, Fleck, Matthes, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

2007, Fleck, Matthes, Kirchhoff, Lars, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina

Past studies on weblogs and the blogosphere have indicated that reputation building is one of the most important motivation for individual bloggers. In our research we argue that corporations should include weblogs in their communication matrix for the use of reputation building. Therefore we propose the use of special interest topics in weblogs as an effective way to create suitable and remarkable attention. The central research question is which types of special interest weblogs can be identified in that context to be successful. Furthermore it is of special interest in which relation the content of those blogs is associated to the core business of the company.

2008, Kirchhoff, Lars, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina, Nicolai, Thomas, Fleck, Matthes

It is an ongoing trend that people increasingly reveal very personal information on social network sites in particular and in the World Wide Web in general. As this information becomes more and more publicly available from these various social network sites and the web in general, the social relationships between people can be identified. This in turn enables the automatic extraction of social networks. This trend is furthermore driven and enforced by recent initiatives such as facebook's connect, MySpace's data availability and Google?s FriendConnect by making their social network data available to anyone. Furthermore the current development of the World Wide Web, termed as "Web 2.0" by O'Reilly, enables increasingly more people to publish information without profound technical knowledge. Blogs for example have gained a lot of attention in recent years. The whole blogosphere including more than 70 million blogs forms a reasonable body of information and knowledge. Additionally, hypertext links made between blogs have been described as conversation, affiliation, or readership, implying a form of implicit social structure. That means that the publicly available information is increasingly annotated with author information which allows the extraction of social networks, too. These recent developments described above, together with increasing computing power and an increased amount of freely available scientific publication data in diverse databases, has led to a dramatic growth in interest for social network analysis (SNA) and in network analysis in general. However, there is little attention about the application of SNA for use in information retrieval systems. Recent studies suggest that the social network of a person has a significant impact on his/her information acquisition. Additionally SNA offers methods that enable the identification of important persons within social networks, who could have a significant influence on the importance of certain information. Therefore the paper proposes the application of available social network data in the context of information retrieval systems. An outline of the research design for the exploration of meaningful sources for social network extraction and the impact of meaningful SNA methods and measures in the context of information retrieval systems is presented. An evaluation of these methods and measures is conducted on ScientificCommons.org, a search platform for open access publications with more than 21 million publications and 8.5 million extracted authors and their co-authorship network. The contribution of this paper is based on an analysis of online information sources in terms of their usability for the extraction of social networks and a research framework for the analysis and application of social network methods to information retrieval systems. The research framework was applied to the co-authorship network of scientific publications. The co-authorship network was used to compute different centrality measures of the authors, which then in turn have been used to refine the relevance ranking of publications within information retrieval systems. The performance of the different rankings based on the different centrality measures has been evaluated by the measurement of the click-through performance in the search results.

2007, Fleck, Matthes, Kirchhoff, Lars, Meckel, Miriam, Stanoevska-Slabeva, Katarina, Große-Leege, Dirk, Bauer, Hans, Rösger, Jürgen

Weblogs haben sich in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem wertvollen und wichtigen Instrument innerhalb der Unternehmenskommunikation entwickelt. Eine Vielzahl wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen und zahllose Praktiker setzen sich mit Weblogs auseinander und haben dabei einen verwirrenden und schwer übersichtlichen Rahmen an Begrifflichkeiten und Bezeichnungen geschaffen. Der Beitrag trägt Typologien verschiedener Forschungsrichtungen zusammen und integriert diese anschließend in ein mehrdimensionales Modell, das relevante Perspektiven in der Auseinandersetzung und Anwendung von Blogs thematisiert. Zusammengefasst sind die Ergebnisse im St. Galler Blog-Würfel.