Social media are now an integral part of professional sports – but as many a sports star has found out the hard way, not everybody has the gift of presenting an authentic self on Twitter or Facebook, which get use to promote businesses and believe they work, this page will tell you more about it. Yet still …
Continue reading “The Beautiful Social Media Game: A-League Winners and Losers on Twitter”
[cross-posted at Medium] Twitter’s demise has been announced so many times over its lifetime that it’s hard to keep track of all the premature eulogies (and this one from a year ago is actually pretty insightful), but there seems to be a new intensity in the circulation of decline narratives at the moment. A couple …
Continue reading “Twitter (probably) isn’t dying, but is it becoming less sociable?”
I’m pleased to be one of the contributors to a new book called Hashtag Publics, edited by Nathan Rambukkana and forthcoming from Peter Lang. This post is a digital appendix for one of my chapters in the book, co-authored with Anne Galloway and Theresa Sauter. The chapter is “Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of …
Continue reading “Hashtag as hybrid forum: digital appendix”
I’m posting this from the University of Amsterdam, where we are now well into the final day of a fantastic three-day conference called Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space. We have quite a gang of participants here from the QUT Social Media Research Group, and we’ll collect all our papers up and post …
Continue reading “Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of #agchatoz”
If you’ve been wondering about the lack of news on this site – yes, we’re still here, and if we haven’t posted since the start of the year it’s because behind the scenes we’ve been busy preparing for a number of major new research projects that are about to start, as well as crunching some …
Now that the AFL and NRL Grand Finals are over, Australia turns its attention again towards real football: the A-League season 2013/14 starts this Friday. That’s a good enough reason to review how the game has used Twitter to build its support base over the past couple of seasons. A-League clubs have been active on …
Continue reading “Tweeting the A-League: The Success Story So Far”
Last weekend provided an opportunity to compare the three currently running Australian reality television series, and their social media presence, with Big Brother Showdown on Saturday night, and both X-Factor and Masterchef airing on Sunday. For current purposes, analysis uses the official hashtag of each show, which will exclude a number of tweets using #bigbrother …
Continue reading “Australian Reality TV on Twitter: A Two Horse Race”
With my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, we have recently been tracking the development and use of Vine through our existing Twitter tools. More on accessing and tracking Vine will be forthcoming in future posts, but below we will discuss the first month of our Vine data, from 18 February to 18 March. It remains unclear …
Continue reading “A Month of Vines: An early look at Vine through Twitter”
In a previous blog post, I discussed the re-awakening of the @pontifex Twitter account, which had been sede vacante after Pope Benedict XVI stepped down and a new Pope had not yet been elected. Only minutes after Jorge Mario Bergolio stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to present himself as the new …
Continue reading “An honest mistake: how to recover from a mistweet”
The new Pope’s first tweet was published shortly after Jorge Mario Bergolio stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to make his first public appearance, taking on (one of) his new role(s) as celebrity figurehead of the Catholic Church. ‘HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM’, it symbolically yelled in all capital letters. The message was retweeted …
