conservative‖ in their voting after the Twitter interaction began, Gu
found. That was an across
theboard impact.
―What was really interesting is that the shift can be almost entirely
explained by members of congress changing their votes to be closer to
the position of voters if there was a mismatch,‖ he adds. ―Before
engaging constituents through Twitter, there were often gaps between
political leanings of constituents and the congressional members‘
votes. After the social media engagement, we see the congressional
representative comes closer to the voters‘ positions.‖
Validating buzz about buzz: Coming back to marketing
Gu also has looked at social media from a marketing perspective, and
he‘s uncovered findings marketers should note. For instance, one of
his studies,
with W. P. Carey information systems professor Ben Shao and
doctoral student, Chunxiao Li, showed there‘s good reason for
understanding the difference between firmgenerated buzz and
consumergenerated buzz.
―Social media performs two functions. One is information
dissemination and the other is socializing,‖ he says. ―Different social
media sites serve different pu