26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

This contribution presents a study of recent communication in the emerging issue “bio-economy”. We introduce a topic specific analysis of social media communication during selected conferences. In recent years the emergence and rapid spread of social media has led to a paradigm shift in the way how people communicate, exchange and store information. For quite some time, the emergence of the microblogging service Twitter enables to obtain fundamentally new insights about individuals, their behaviour and their relationships. Meanwhile, the social media application rose as a popular communication medium also at conferences. In this regard, an analysis of the Twitter communications shows a great potential, where new issues like the bio-based economy could benefit from. In the absence of any previous analysis on this subject, the objective of this study was to find out what kind of information could be obtained from the Twitter communication and to what extent the data is good for displaying and understanding networks of communication. For this purpose short messages sent during three different conferences (ECO-BIO 2016, #EcoBio2016; BIO World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology, #BIOWC16 and European Biomass Conference and Exhibition 2016, #EUBCE2016) were analysed. We selected these meetings because the participants and research topics were international in scope, Twitter was widely used by, and the official conference hashtags were well promoted and are readily searchable with the Twitter search tool. Based on the mentioned conference-specific Hashtags (the language operator) all messages were downloaded before, during and after the conferences. We used methods of social network analysis, visualization of networks and cluster analysis for Twitter users, to draw semantic maps of hashtags and to identify network components of thematically different structured groups. In order to figure out more precisely types of users for each conference hubs and authorities of the network were identified. In order to examine the content shared via Twitter we performed a hashtag network analysis. The keywords exemplified different issues of bio-economy thus offering access to complex, lively discussion contributions and much more. Overall, 722 users participated in the conversations, creating 3294 connections. In the Twitter networks of each conference 3 to 5 large groups of users could be documented. Each network contained a small number of core participants. In general the community consisted of individuals and representatives of organisations that actively participated in the conferences and thus were directly related to the events, whereas outside participants did not occur. We identified companies, scientists, research organisations, editors of journals as well as conference organisers as hubs and authorities in the communication networks. Also some current and future applications and research areas in bio-based economy like biorefinery, biofuels, biodiesel, jet fuels, biochemicals, biomass production, reutilisation of waste and biofuels from microalgaes but also economic, social, ecological and political issues like ethics, circular economy, land use, emissions as well as the promotion of products like biocement could be identified. A thematic focus on basis of the microblogging data, however, was not always possible. Overall, the exchange of specific information on Twitter during the conferences was limited. Keywords: social media, conference communication, bio-based economy, microblogging