Asta Bäck

Road‐mapping the societal transformation potential of social media

Purpose – This paper seeks to discuss the outcomes of a road‐mapping research on social media project completed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Social media refer to a combination of three elements: content, user communities, and Web 2.0 technologies.Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilizes socio‐technical road‐mapping to study the potential transformations of social media in the virtual and physical spheres.Findings – Road‐maps were constructed in three thematic areas: society, companies, and local environment. The results were crystallized into five development lines. The first development line is transparency and its increasing role in society. The second development line is the rise of a ubiquitous participatory communication model. The third development is reflexive empowerment citizens. The fourth development line is the duality of personalization/fragmentation vs mass effects/integration. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds.Originality...

Co-designing a social media service for civic participation: critical issues and challenges

User participation in social media design processes has similarities with civic participation for example in urban planning. Internet enables new virtual environments that can be planned collaboratively and be used for civic participation. In the Monimos case study we developed a social media website for immigrants and multicultural associations in a participatory design process together with the users. In this paper we present the critical issues in co-designing a social media service that aims at civic participation. We also give suggestions for how to cope with the challenges in a multicultural participation process. We claim that constant meta-level discussion about the goals and participation practices with the users is beneficial for the design process.

From design participation to civic participation – participatory design of a social media service

This paper describes a case study in which a social media service for civic participation was created together with its intended users. The purpose of the service was to support civic participation and integration of immigrants in Finland. Open participatory design approach was used throughout the process. This paper presents critical issues and lessons learnt during the process of working together with a heterogeneous user group and multiple partners. We claim that constant meta-level discussion about the goals and participation practices with the users is vital for the design process. When designing services for civic participation, more focus should be put on designing and testing concrete participation processes. Clear ownership and community management are needed during the design and use of the future service.

Experiences of semantic tagging with Tilkut

There are two main approaches for adding metadata to web content: free user-generated tags and keywords based on taxonomies or semantic ontologies. There are pros and cons in both approaches, so benefits may be gained by combining these approaches. This paper presents a solution that utilizes both freely defined tags and predefined ontologies. To study suggestionbased semantic tagging we created a social bookmarking application called Tilkut. This paper describes the system and experiences from a small scale user study. Suggestions for more intelligent tagging solutions will be given.

Social Media in Accelerating Mobile Apps

Mobile application stores have become very popular, and the two most popular, Google Play and Apple App Store, both have over a million applications apps available. Social media is extensively used for marketing products and services; but, its true potential, in service and product acceleration, has not been researched much. This paper studies the differences in actions between successful and less successful app developers and especially their social media use in accelerating applications and its impact on success. In this study, a longitudinal analysis is performed on 682 applications, from four Google Play categories, at three data points. This study concludes that almost 50% of the analyzed applications use some form of social media to promote their app, and that successful apps use social media more actively than less successful ones. The qualitative analysis of the apps sheds some light as to why some apps succeed without social media use, and why some fail while using it.