Smarter Social Media Analytics is a Tekes-funded research project that studies and develops methods to identify trends and phenomena in large social media datasets using so called weak signals.
We use the full data set of online forum Suomi24, which is opened for research purposes by Aller Oy (approximately 67 million unique messages, 2001-2016), the full data set collected and owned by Futusome Oy, covering approximately 500 million Finnish language messages from different social media services (2004-2016). As a comparative data set we use the representative survey data collected by Taloustutkimus Oy (2007-2016) and large online news media data archives.
By cross-investigating these datasets using both computational and qualitative methods, we develop and validate algorithms to identify and explain emerging trends and individual phenomena from the online conversations.
The project is a part of larger emerging trend of computational social sciences in Finland, as well as the aspiration to increase the understanding and readiness of Finnish companies to utilize social media analytics in planning their customer insights, marketing, and product development. Based on computational social sciences and big data methods our analysis is also smarter in a sense that it takes into account the ethical and economic dimensions from the perspective of ordinary users.
The project is running 1.12.2016 – 31.5.2018.
Companies involved: Aller, Arvo Partners, Atria Suomi, Futusome, Ilmarinen, Leiki, SOK, Sometrik, Taloustutkimus, TeliaSonera, Underhood.co.
Contact:
Project Coordinator & PhD Researcher
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen
salla.laaksonen (at) helsinki.fi