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This paper aims to examine what type of messaging on Twitter is most effective for helping move social marketing beyond focusing on personal changes to find out what messages help turn members of the public into vocal advocates for these organizations’ social changes. Social marketing scholarship has regularly focused on how organizations can effectively influence changes in awareness and behaviors among their targeted audience. Communication scholarship, however, has repeatedly shown that the most influential form of persuasion happens interpersonally. As such, it is imperative that organizations learn how to engage audiences and facilitate the discussion about organizational messages between individuals. Social media provide platforms for such conversations, as organizational messaging can be shared and discussed by individuals with others in their networks.

Through a content analysis of 3,415 Twitter updates from 50 nonprofit organizations, this study identifies specific types of messages that are more likely to get stakeholders retweeting, archiving and discussing the organizations’ messaging through regression analysis.

Messages focusing on calls-to-action and community building generated the most retweets and Twitter conversation; however, they were also the least used strategies by nonprofit organizations.

Research has regularly examined the types of messages sent out by nonprofit organizations on Twitter, but they have not tested those messages against measures of engagement. This study pushes the understanding of social media communication to the next level by analyzing those message categories against metrics provided by Twitter for each tweet in the sample.

This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.

A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.

The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.

These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.

The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.

The vast majority of political scandals reported in the news center around male politicians. Yet, when women are involved, the nature of the scandals and coverage are sometimes different. Whereas powerful men are rarely, if ever, accused of “sleeping their way to the top,” powerful women frequently are. What happens when women politicians are involved in a scandal that blurs the lines between corruption – i.e., abuse of public authority for private gain – and a simple moral transgression? We designed an original survey experiment to assess participants’ responses to a Congresswoman having an extramarital affair with someone who has the power to advance her career. We find that participants are less likely to suggest they will punish Congresswomen at the polls for involvement in a simple “morality” scandal than for the scandal that blurred the line between a sex and corruption scandal. Moreover, we observe that political conservatives are more likely than liberals to punish the hypothetical Congresswoman, indicating that some voters' negative reactions to women politicians are motivated by concerns about sexual morality, and not necessarily by a perceived abuse of power for professional gain.

Blundell, Spence Appointments. Five appointments have been made to the board of Blundell, Spence Ltd. They are F. R. EDEN, W. H. HULME, C. C. MELL, A. L. SMITH and K. T. SAXTON. Mr. Saxton will be located at Slough and will have overall responsibility for the Industrial Division.

Purpose: The insurance business is confronted with coordination difficulties that necessitate a high level of mobility, flexibility, and the capacity to analyse heterogeneous, location-dependent data from different sources and qualities. Recent innovations in emerging technologies have given the insurance industry new organisational options. When coupled with data analytics, crowdsourcing in the insurance industry facilitates solving complex issues with the wisdom of crowds. The notion of incorporating crowdsourcing and big data into the mainstream activities of insurance management is developed in this article, as are the ramifications and gains of collective intelligence achieved by Crowdsourcing and the added value of crowdsourcing insurance activities.

Design/methodology/approach: This chapter is a conceptual work that builds on relevant literature.

Findings: This chapter analyses what insurance industry managers should consider when coordinating crowdsourced activities and how they may benefit from collective intelligence combined with data analytics in terms of efficient and real-time response management for the insurance industry. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how they may use crowdsourcing to exploit information and benefit from invoking additional resources and eliminating the institutional voids present in the industry.

Practical implications: Exemplary applications that take advantage of crowdsourcing and data analytics would help the insurance sector respond flexibly, efficiently, and effectively in real time.

Originality/value: This chapter offers new collaborative ways to enhance the decision-making of insurance industry managers. The relevance of overcoming institutional voids is expanded, and repercussions from the given framework are suggested using data analytics.

The Professors of the Imperial College of Science and Technology have addressed to Lord Crewe, the Chairman of the Governors of the College, a memorial urging the necessity of the encouragement of science and of research. In commenting upon this document the Journal of Chemical Technology observes that “a satisfactory feature of the memorial is the recognition on the part of the signatories that scientific education should be on broad lines.” “We have always contended that an indispensable preliminary to a professional career should be a thoroughly sound general education. Whether or not the study of science is the best kind of study may be a debatable point, but it is certain that exclusive attention to science is thoroughly bad. A man's mind is narrow when he is unable to recognise the importance of things outside his own particular sphere of action, and it is precisely this state of mind that the exclusive study of science tends to produce. It is, therefore, the more necessary, in seeking to secure greater attention to scientific studies in the reform of our educational system, to take care that nothing be done which may curtail the period required for the acquisition of general knowledge. It is far better to delay than to hasten specialisation. A step in the right direction has been made when scientific men themselves state that they do not believe that “an education which includes good teaching of science need be a narrow education,” but we wish that this opinion had been positively rather than negatively expressed. The memorial refers to the “lethargy, misconception, and ignorance” of the public regarding national education. It is pertinent here to remark that when anything goes wrong and no particular individual or individuals can be held to be, or will acknowledge themselves to be, responsible, the “public” is blamed; the public being everybody with the exception of the denunciator and his friends. In the present instance the fault is not, even for the greater part, with the people. They are, naturally enough, interested in education only in so far as it is expressed in terms of school and college accounts and of wage‐earning capacity. Of the bearing that improvement in education and the advancement of physical science has on the welfare of the community the average man knows little and cares less. He has to be educated in the value of education. He is not, and probably never will be, interested in education as an abstract good. What interest he has in it is purely utilitarian. If he sees that the knowledge which he himself does not possess carries with it but doubtful prospects for the future, poor remuneration in the present and a social position little better than his own, he is unlikely to be impressed with the value of education. The fact is that there is a lamentable want of opportunity for the intellectual classes in this country and until this state of things is remedied the public will continue to display—and with every justification — “lethargy, misconception, and ignorance” in respect to national education.

This chapter attempts to highlight the economic perspective behind the rising incidence of terrorism across the world that has impinged a serious threat to the sustainability of mankind. Based on the sample of 123 countries all over the world, it has sought to analyze the relationship between the intensity of terrorism faced by a country and the level of its economic development. Moreover, classifying terrorist activities as externally sponsored and internal militancy triggered by extremist outfits, this chapter seeks to identify which type of terrorism is more pronounced in a country and the underlying economic considerations. Besides, in this study, an attempt has been made to examine the extent to which a country’s military expenditure is attributable to the degree of terrorism it is exposed to.