Social media and reputation management. Accessing social media data and detecting social bots

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a critical domain with respect to corporate reputation management. Correspondingly a number of task specific offerings are available to support firms to monitor the engagement with their products and brands online (also known as social listening). These offerings are however subject to limitations, not least the ability to achieve long term archiving of social media activity for a given brand and its products/services and the ability to integrate this social media activity with other key business intelligence being gathered by a given firm. Given these needs the FHNW School of Business at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland has developed a research project to scope out the identified research needs in anticipation of a full application for a collaborative research project via application to Innosuisse in 2020. This project seeks to understand current best practice in big data database design for historic and real time data collection and analysis (Module 1), as well as how this can be integrated with social media monitoring. Additionally, it will provide a competitive review of providers in the market for social media reputation management (Module 2), focusing on leading actors and techniques they apply. Identifying the current best practices of the leading social media reputation management providers identified (Module 3). Capturing tools, techniques and approaches that are currently available in the market and which are seen as best in class. Describe the current state of knowledge on accessing social media data and techniques for identifying social bots in support of developing a technological proof of concept for social media chat bot analysis (Module 4). These activities prepare a final project report and the initial draft of the follow-on application to Innosuisse for a larger innovation project.