Although there has been a great deal of interest in analyzing customer opinions and breaking news in microblogs, progress has been hampered by the lack of an effective mechanism to discover and retrieve data of interest from microblogs. To address this problem, we have developed an uncertainty-aware visual analytics approach to retrieve salient posts, users, and hashtags. We extend an existing ranking technique to compute a multifaceted retrieval result: the mutual reinforcement rank of a graph node, the uncertainty of each rank, and the propagation of uncertainty among different graph nodes. To illustrate the three facets, we have also designed a composite visualization with three visual components: a graph visualization, an uncertainty glyph, and a flow map. The graph visualization with glyphs, the flow map, and the uncertainty analysis together enable analysts to effectively find the most uncertain results and interactively refine them. We have applied our approach to several Twitter datasets. Qualitative evaluation and two real-world case studies demonstrate the promise of our approach for retrieving high-quality microblog data.

In this paper we report on a case study of rumor transmission during a nationwide scandal via China's most popular microblogging service, weibo.com. Specifically, we explore dynamics of the rumor discourse by characterizing different statement types and their evolution over time. We examine the roles that different user groups play in the rumor discussions. Through qualitative and statistical analyses, our results identify seven reaction patterns to rumors and their different development trends. We reveal a three-stage pattern of the change of leadership during the rumor discussions. By connecting social theories on rumor transmission to the large scale social platform, this paper offers insight into understanding rumor development in social media, as well as utilizing microblogging data for effectively detecting, analyzing and controlling public rumors.

Various methods have been proposed to help find answerers for a question in QA communities, but almost all work heavily depends on users' QA history. In this paper we seek to investigate the feasibility of leveraging users' non-QA social activities as a way of gaining insight into their question answering behavior. We collected data of 4,484 users on a QA community in an enterprise and examined the relationship of their QA behaviors and non-QA activities supported by other social tools. We found that the two sets of behavioral indicators are significantly correlated. The top user group for non-QA activities outperformed lower groups in both number and quality of the answers. Regression analysis showed involvement in personal blog, micro-blog and forum and replying and recommending behaviors in non-QA communities were predictive of a user's likelihood of answering questions. Online observations provided a qualitative understanding. Design implications and future work were discussed.

Previous research has revealed the following three challenges for knowledge sharing: awareness of expertise distribution, motivation for sharing, and network ties. In this case study, we examine how different generations of information and communication technologies (ICTs), ranging from e‐mail to micro‐blogging, can help address these challenges. Twenty‐one interviews with employees from a multinational company revealed that although people think social media can better address these challenges than older tools, the full potential of social media for supporting knowledge sharing has yet to be achieved. When examining the interconnections among different ICTs, we found that employees′ choice of a combination of ICTs, as affected by their functional backgrounds, could create “technological divides” among them and separate resources. This finding indicates that having more ICTs is not necessarily better. ICT integration, as well as support for easy navigation, is crucial for effective knowledge search and sharing. Adaptation to local culture is also needed to ensure worldwide participation in knowledge sharing.

In this paper, we present a case study of MoCo Blogs, a publicly accessible, corporate blogging site, which is hosted by a large telecommunication company in China. We study the design and operation of the site from two aspects: (1) how community owners/administrators guide and coordinate blogger activities to meet the company's business goals; and (2) how participants respond to management guidance and act on their own incentives. Through the analysis of three data sources: 17-month activity logs with 1,046 bloggers and 10,291 blog entries, 4-month online participatory observation, and in-depth interviews, we present two key findings. First, we describe three key operational strategies employed by the site administrative team to encourage user contributions and manage content across the organizational boundaries. Second, we examine how these strategies directly influence user participation. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on an organization's roles in corporate social communities.

In this paper we feature a set of research projects done at several IBM Research laboratories across the world. The work featured here focuses on the topic of smart social collaboration, which studies, designs, and develops social collaboration principles and technologies that can help customize and enhance existing social collaboration tools to suit specific user needs, including cultural, business, and personal needs.

We present three studies that compare adoption and appropriation between China and the United States of BlogCentral, an internal blogging tool employed by a large global enterprise. We first analyzed 23 months of usage logs for users in both countries and found that compared to the U.S., Chinese users were much less active, with less activity and sparser user interaction. We then conducted 25 interviews and surveyed 213 bloggers in both countries to understand user motivations and behaviors of corporate blogging in more detail. The results show that Chinese employees use internal blogs for organizing personal work and short term team formation, unlike U.S. users who are driven more by the goal of sharing information to a broad community. The Chinese users were seeking (and not finding) greater social interaction and felt instead a sense of alienation from the global blogging community. We further identify a gap between Chinese users' requirement for local community and the existing global aspect of enterprise blogging tools. Lastly we discuss implications from the data analysis.

Existing studies of online social communities mainly focus on communities in the United States. Since Chinese social beliefs and behaviors largely differ from that of Americans, we hypothesize that Chinese online communities also greatly differ from their U.S. counterparts. In particular, we believe that Chinese online communities must balance management control and individual autonomy to accommodate both Chinese tradition and the social nature of online societies. In this paper, we present three studies to test our hypothesis. First, we use a structured observation (Study I) to examine community governance practices of 32 Chinese and American social sites. Based on the identified community governance practices, we use a cross-cultural survey of 208 Chinese and Americans (Study II) to learn about their behavior and attitude toward these practices. Finally, we interview 38 Chinese users (Study III) to help us further understand how Chinese online communities balance the needs of management and users. Not only do the studies confirm our hypothesis, but they also help us abstract two key design implications of social software to meet the needs of Chinese.

New collaborative technologies are making modern work a highly social process in the era of Web 2.0, yet as a result, it is increasingly challenging for workers to maintain knowledge of and manage their connections. Former netWORKing studies have suggested integrating communication and information with models of social networks. To elucidate these netWORK processes and explore the viability of organizing connections at work in terms of a social network of contacts, we conducted field studies investigating patterns of people's subjective ego-centered netWORKs. Different netWORK categorizing and structuring strategies are identified and user interface design implications are proposed for connections management systems.