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Christopher Phethean

Christopher Phethean

I'm a PhD researcher in the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre who is looking at methods to analyse social media marketing performance. I'm interested in the rise of social media, and how it is changing society around the world.

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The growth of #FLwebsci use on Twitter

A few weeks ago now, I posted about a visualisation I had made about the network of users on Twitter who were using the hashtag #FLwebsci. Today, I have made an updated visualisation to reflect the use of this tag and how it is developing: The first thing that is immediately noticeable from this is the increased size of the overall network. The use of the hashtag is clearly spreading – more and more people are tweeting with it as the MOOC progresses. Continue reading →

Analysing the Network of #FLwebsci Tweets

With the University of Southampton’s first MOOC on Web Science now coming up to its second week, work has been under way to promote and discuss the new course, and – in parallel with the MOOC’s focus on the Web – a lot of this has happened on social media. I recently ran a session with Digital Marketing MSc students at the University, who were asked to post messages promoting the MOOC to their own social networks. Continue reading →

What’s to Like About Likes?

Last summer (2012), the BBC investigated the value of 'likes' on Facebook (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18813237). It found that companies were spending money to obtain likes, when these might often not actually be real people’s accounts – or from people who actually have an interest in that company. They demonstrated this by creating a completely fake page and received over 3,000 likes in a week. Continue reading →