Journal of Global Information Management

Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Review of Discussions on
Internet of Things (IoT):
Insights from Twitter Analytics
Nimish Joseph, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
Arpan Kumar Kar, Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
Shankar Ganesh, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India

ABSTRACT

User generated content in the social media platforms are being considered as an important source for
information about consumers and other emerging trends by the businesses. Using Twitter analytics,
the paper presents insights on trends and discussions about the Internet of Things (IoT). Using
relevant hashtags, 40,387 tweets were collected in early 2016. The analysis had followed three major
approaches: descriptive analysis, content analysis and network analysis. The tools R and NodeXL were
used for the analysis. The findings showed major themes like business concerns, scope of applications,
security, emerging smart technologies and manufacturing. The sentiments of emotions and polarity
differed across these themes. The top individual and industrial influencers were identified. The
analysis also detected the highly-associated words and hashtags, and different user communities and
how they are connected. Business implications of the findings and limitations are also elaborated.

Keywords
Community, Content Analysis, Descriptive Analysis, Emotion, Hashtag, Information Management, Internet of
Things, Network Analysis, NodeXL, Sentiment, Social Media Analytics, Twitter Analytics

INTERNET OF THINGS, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND BUSINESS

The term, Internet of Things (IoT) is no more an exclusive term among the technological elite circles,
but have started appearing in the popular media mediums. As the usage of Internet is exploding in
all possible devices including every day ones, almost all technological businesses are investing to
develop products based on IoT and its services. A Consortia have been formed to define the framework
and standards for all things related to IoT (Wortmann & Flüchter, 2015). IoT broadly refers to the
networked interconnection of day to day objects that are often equipped with ubiquitous intelligence
(Xia et al., 2015). It is a network of tangible objects – devices, wearables, vehicles, etc. with sensors,
software and network connectivity, which facilitate the collection and exchange of data between the

DOI: 10.4018/JGIM.2017040103

Copyright © 2017, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

38
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

objects via the internet or wireless communication systems. It has the capability to integrate day-to-
day operations of people in the Internet, resulting in future possibilities of numerous cutting edge
technological capabilities.
IoT is going to play a very serious role in the days to come. Among many impressive estimates
(Greenough, 2014; Research and Markets Ltd, 2014) in 2019 IoT is expected to be ‘more than double
the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and the wearable market combined’ and ‘will
result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy’ (Greenough, 2014). Another estimate
(Bauer et al., 2014) projects that 26-30 billion objects shall be connected to the IoT in 2020. IoT
technologies will find wide applicability in many productive sectors including, e.g., environmental
monitoring, health-care, inventory and product management, workplace and home support, security
and surveillance (Miorandi et al., 2012) and may act as the institutional drivers for business information
management. It is expected to hit the majority of the population by provisioning for a multitude of
intelligent services like crowd sensing, identification, surveillance, monitoring, and location tracking
with a very high revenue opportunity for service providers.
The interconnection of billions of devices and applications through IoT in the future is expected
to throw many challenges at the practitioners. For example, the very large quantum of data resulting
from the interconnections will offer tremendous insights to the businesses, if managed, apart from
throwing up challenges to the practitioners. It is therefore important for the people, who are directly
involved with this technology, to gain consumer, market and research insights by understanding the
recent challenges, developments and trends in IoT.
Social Media (SM) platforms enable two-way interaction between users through electronic means
and of predominantly user generated content. The content can be of different forms. For instance,
YouTube is only for videos and Instagram is for images. They are being used by both ruling or industry
elites and common people to share, learn, question and discuss various things happening around. As
more and more number of users are moving towards SM platforms, businesses find it imperative to
include them in the growth strategies.
Almost all businesses now invest in SM management and consider the user generated content as
one of the important ways to gain insights regarding their products, services and brand perceptions.
Its common to see businesses using of SM platforms like Twitter and Facebook to promote their
products and also for other activities including the identification of potential customers, grievance
redressals and many more.
As the IoT is growing exponentially, businesses are keen to exploit this emerging opportunity.
Apart from discussing among themselves, practitioners are looking forward for insights emerging
from discussions in the public space. These discussions would offer insights on the trajectories of the
domain, concerns of the people and expectations in terms of product offerings, among many things. The
extant research towards this direction appears to be scant. The present paper attempts to fill the gap.

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

Businesses use SM analytics to gain insights that help them in strategic planning and decision making
(Arias et al., 2013; Inauen et al., 2014; Hughes et al., 2009). SM analytics helps them to promote the
products and to establish the market space (Zeng et al., 2010). It also helps them to learn the strengths
and weaknesses of their products and services apart from gathering information and feedback (Kaplan
et al., 2010; Rathore et al., 2016). The explosive growth in the number of SM users highlights a need
of integration of any information available online with SM (Kar, 2015). Therefore, SM analytics play a

39
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

very important role for designing the growth strategy of any modern day businesses by understanding
the nature of these discussions through approaches highlighted in Figure 1.
Broadly, the various SM analytic techniques being used include descriptive analysis, content
analysis and network analysis (Stieglitz et al., 2013). Figure 1 briefly describes about the various
types of analysis. Chae (2015) introduces descriptive analysis as a mechanism to gather the nature
of both SM users and the user generated content. For Twitter data, other analyses include number of
tweets, number of followers and active users etc. (Naaman, 2010). Visibility of users, total tweets,
retweets, unique hashtags, and unique users are some of the metrics used in this domain (Bruns, 2014).
Content analysis can be used to infer linguistic and semantic meaning from the text data
(Krippendorff, 2004). The tweets are cleaned and then can be used for the content analysis. Techniques
like word analysis, thematic clustering, hashtag analysis and sentiment analysis (Bruns, 2014; Lakhiwal
& Kar, 2016) help to make thematic meaning out of tweets. Hashtags helps twitter users to follow
real time feeds and thus it helps in uniting people doing discussions related to a topic like a keyword
(Bruns, 2014; Miller et al., 2014). Sentiment analysis (Pang & Lee, 2008) is used to perform automatic
or manual classification of tweets into positive and negative groups, based on their emotionality. The
word analysis is used to develop an insight into the actual content. For example, word clouds can
portray the human mental activity related to a group or an individual (Hearst et al., 2008); word and
hashtag association matrixes can be used to establish word semantic relationship (Wang et al., 2014)
Network analysis gives an overview of the communities, influencers, interest groups and
organizations, who take part in the discussions (Stieglitz et al., 2013). For example, Kwak et al. (2010)
describes the relevance of topological analysis while doing this on Twitter data in dimension reduction
for unstructured and noisy data. Topological analysis may highlight scope like learning dominant
topics from the user generated content and interaction networks (Whyburn, 2015). Community analysis
and centrality analysis (Ediger et al., 2010) are also associated with the network analysis whereby,
the community detection is done using the textual information on the graph generated (Ding, 2011).
Such community detection helps to identify the structure of the user groups who interact over the
open platforms on specific themes, thereby making it feasible to identify influencers in a domain.

Figure 1. Broad overview of analysis possible in social media analytics

40
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

METHOD

The study uses the user generated content in Twitter which are available in the public domain, called
as tweets. Twitter is one of the top ten platforms in the world and is a popular SM platform used
by businesses for interacting with their stakeholders. Twitter is also said to provide better customer
engagement (Malhotra et al., 2012). Tweets are extracted using the Twitter APIs and analyzed using
the computational tools like R and NodeXL. The authors collected 40,387 relevant tweets related to
IoT over a period of two months (mid-February 2016 to mid-April 2016), after eliminating/cleaning
tweets which were not usable due to garbage content or being created in a non-English language.
The tweets queried included the one with hashtags “#IoT” and any combination of “internet”,
“of” and “thing(s)” in a sequence, including “#InternetOfThings” and “#internetofthing”. This task
was performed repetitively every week because of the seven day extraction limit of tweets, using
APIs. The extracted tweets were initially converted to lowercase text, post to which the hashtags
and hyperlinks used as part of this study were removed. The process of cleaning involved removal
of punctuations, numbers, white spaces, retweet entities, “@user” values, html links, special and
unknown characters, and all other noise. The cleaning of the tweets is very important from the
analysis standpoint, as content analysis should involve only relevant words and parameters, to make
the results more effective.
The three different kinds of approaches discussed earlier, i.e. descriptive analysis, content analysis
and network analysis, were then implemented on this cleaned twitter data. Each of these broad analysis
can be further explained with different statistics which were further computed as illustrated in Figure
1. The topic modelling was also done to identify the various themes associated with IoT. This was
further used to classify the tweets into different clusters related to a discussion topic and was then
used to perform cluster specific analysis.

FINDINGS

Descriptive Analysis
The descriptive analysis gives a broad idea regarding the type of tweets, users’ nature and content
being shared (Chae, 2015).
Tweet Statistics: Among 40,387 tweets, the study identified 5,685 unique hashtags, ranging
from popular IoT hashtags like “#bigdata”, “#technology” to others, such as “#api”, “#innovation”
and “#5g”. More than 11,992 tweets (approx. 30% of the total tweets) contained multiple hashtags,
indicating that a substantial percentage of tweets intersect multiple areas of interest. This includes
tweets containing two hashtags “#iot” and “#wearables” representing a relationship of interest.
User Analysis: The authors found 8,914 unique users in the dataset who contributed to the user
generated content surrounding IoT. This means each users send out, on an average, 4.5 tweets: 2.3
original tweets, 2.1 retweets and 0.1 @replies per user. Active users are inferred on the basis of the
total number of tweets (original tweets + retweets +@replies). The visibility of the users can be
inferred from the number of retweets received. For example, the user with the screen-name (username)
iotsecurity2 with 468 total tweets is the most active user on the network, while the user with the
username billsoftnet is the most visible user on the network with 1956 retweets received. These users
are the influencers in the domain of IoT in Twitter.
The following plot in Figure 2 shows the activity vs visibility statistics of top 10 active and
visible users. It is clearly visible that the most active users need not be the most visible users, and
vice versa. However, some of the users with the screen-names TheIoT and OpeniotvaultT have a
good ratio of activity to visibility and highlight that users who only discuss about a narrow theme
have greater reach than users who tweet about the theme and also about other topics of interest to
the individual or organization.

41
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Figure 2. Activity vs visibility statistics of the top active and visible users

Web link / URL Analysis: The analysis revealed that almost 91% (36,474) of the tweets had URLs
of which 25,556 were unique URLs. The popular domains in the URLs were: iotbusinessnews.com,
alltheinternetofthings.com, ezm2m.com and various other URLs from open platforms like Linkedin,
and scoop.it. For example, Microsoft, a leading IT product company, markets their activities and
updates on IoT products through iotbusinessnews.com. The content in this domain linked from
the tweets explain how changes are introduced using IoT and attempts to establish business on IoT
related products. ‘All the IoT’ is a private comprehensive source of IoT news and they publish this
information through ‘alltheinternetofthings.com’ and in twitter through the user TheIoT. This clearly
indicates that Twitter is used not only for spreading information regarding IoT but also is being used
by the businesses to market IoT related products and services (eg: ezm2m.com, liveapps.center). In
general, the analysis of tweets with links highlights that the tweets could be majorly categorized into
two groups: promotional and informative tweets.

Content Analysis
Content Analysis is performed to understand what the tweet content is all about. It includes the high
level text mining of available data to transform the unstructured content to a meaningful data (Wang
et al., 2011; Chau et al., 2012). The researchers performed content analysis on the tweets collected
as a whole and also separately based on the different themes identified and the details are described.

Analysis on the Aggregation of Tweets

Word Analysis: Most popular words in the tweets excluding the hashtags were internet (freq. 20,059),
technology (1906), data (1811), smart (1636), bigdata (1554), security (1527), business (1290), cloud
(1259), analytics (1246) and AI (1141), among others. Users discuss more about going smart and data
related issues when the discussions are surrounding the internet. For example, the user Smart_Summit
tweets, “IoT is not about radios; it’s all about data” (Series, 2016). People often talk about analytics
and data together, “IoT creates new world of data. Knowing what to do with all the data creates value.
Value accelerates transformation” (Hogan, 2016). Users also express their concerns about security
and how it could be handled in IoT products. A tweet says, “#IoT security & privacy vulnerabilities

42
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

are very real threat” (Jeffries, 2016). Studies in IoT related areas also express the similar safety and
security concerns (Chauhan et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2014).
Hashtag Analysis: 5,685 unique hashtags were found in the tweets, and they appear 64,931 times.
On average, there were 1.62 hashtags per tweet. The analysis shows that the hashtags, (other than
“#iot” and “#internetofthings”) “#bigdata”, “#technology” (or “#tech”), “#wearables”, “#ioe” and
“#m2m” are the most popular in tweets related to IoT. The presence of #wearables highlight it as a
more popular consumer focused technology which is drawing a lot of attention in the SM.
Figure 3 indicates the associations of the popular words and hashtags. Associations of the most
frequent words and hashtags are plotted on a network graph using the Fruchterman-Reingold layout.
The adjacency of the terms and hashtags can be derived from this, and the same can be plotted on a
network graph (Smith et al., 2009). Table 1 and Table 2 denotes the adjacency matrix with leading
diagonals showing the frequency of the words or hashtags.
The association matrices highlight that the word “internet” is associated with “smart” and “data”,
“future” with “internet” and cloud”. Jin et al. (2014) explains how IoT can be used for creation of a
smart city, adds value to the authors findings. Chang et al. (2011) associates IoT and cloud computing

Figure 3. Association of the frequent words and hashtags

Table 1. Term adjacency matrix for topic identification

Term
Adjacency Analytics Bigdata Business Cloud Data Future Internet Security Smart Technology
Matrix

Analytics 767 0 14 25 110 4 444 3 9 3

Bigdata 0 20 0 1 0 6 11 0 9 0

Business 14 0 593 3 61 14 195 6 60 4

Cloud 25 1 3 778 13 176 482 49 8 1

Data 110 0 61 13 1406 7 680 102 92 2

Future 4 6 14 176 7 1107 404 2 38 22

Internet 444 11 195 482 680 404 17974 525 623 170

Security 3 0 6 49 102 2 525 1041 35 4

Smart 9 9 60 8 92 38 623 35 1402 22

Technology 3 0 4 1 2 22 170 4 22 519

43
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Table 2. Hashtag adjacency matrix for topic identification

Hashtag
Adjacency #bigdata #business #iiot #internetofthings #ioe #iot #m2m #tech #technology #wearables
Matrix

#bigdata 2132 9 131 151 9 1633 279 68 28 2

#business 9 810 70 598 526 634 2 22 600 0

#iiot 131 70 808 242 162 608 280 26 77 0

#internetofthings 151 598 242 2374 876 1908 167 106 850 19

#ioe 9 526 162 876 937 929 18 21 530 5

#iot 1633 634 608 1908 929 18034 790 806 1220 911

#m2m 279 2 280 167 18 790 822 110 7 4

#tech 68 22 26 106 21 806 110 1213 234 50

#technology 28 600 77 850 530 1220 7 234 1396 37

#wearables 2 0 0 19 5 911 4 50 37 945

as an area of future research. This indicates that the people concerned about IoT, also relate their
interest on cloud, and probably see the future prospective associated with developments in both the
domains. Similarly, Table 2 gives an indication of the association of “#bigdata” with “#IoT”. Hashem
et al. (2015), discusses the rise of big data due to the factors like SM, Internet of Things and many
other forms of unstructured data which indicates that the relationship achieved through adjacency
matrix as a real valid one. The relevance of #m2m hashtags with #iot explains how the machine to
machine interactions are now being focused with the help of IoT. Similarly, the relevance of business
and its association with IoT related products is also a wide area of discussion these days.
Word Cloud and Sentiment Analysis: A word cloud can be explained as a special visualization of
text in which it effectively highlights the words with more frequency by occupying more prominence
in the representation (McNaught et al., 2012) Giving a limit of 200 words, word clouds were generated
for this study to visually depict the frequent words.

Figure 4. Word clouds based on polarity and emotions

44
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Mapping a text with the associated levels of sentiment is performed using the sentiment analysis
techniques (Liu, 2012). In our study, Naïve Bayes algorithm, available in the sentiment package for
R have been used and is then used to classify the IoT related tweets based on different polarities as
positive, negative or neutral and also to classify based on emotions like joy, surprise, anger, sadness,
disgust or fear. Figure 4 depicts the word clouds generated base on polarity and emotion.
The word cloud clearly highlights that most of the tweets represented have an unknown polarity or
rather stood to be neutral. However, there are positive sentiments running on IoT when people discuss
about the internet, big data and technology. This means that the users are responding positively when
they say about it. However, there are some negative sentiments running when ‘cloud’, ‘designing’
and ‘emotional’ aspects like ‘healthcare’ are related to the IoT. The developments in the field of IoT
is bringing surprise to many when they lean about the ‘transformation’, ‘commerce’ and other ‘news’
related to IoT. For example, a user Dimension Data tweets “Could the #IoT transform how we protect
endangered animals?” (Data, 2016).
There is a sad emotion surrounding the people while discussing about ‘internet’ and ‘delay’ -
koivimik tweets, “This IoT is going to become a nightmare since no one cares about security. #infosec
#iot” (Koivisto, 2016). This may be because of some service related issues or anticipated fear with
respect to security. There is an indication of fear in the mind of users when IoT is discussed in relation
to personal matters like ‘love’ and ‘life’. This can therefore be an alert message for the businesses
providing IoT services to work on mechanisms for eliminating the fear factor when IoT is related to
personal aspects. The researchers also found that there is anger when IoT is discussed together with
‘fat loss’, ‘muscles’, ‘wearables’, etc. This clearly indicates that some IoT services are not providing
the expected results or people are looking for better solutions on these domains from the IoT. When
sentiments of the entire tweets were mapped, it was understood that the recent developments in the
field, has resulted in the overall sentiments as largely positive for IoT. This indicates that there is a
high expectation from the users for IoT products and its services.

Analysis on the Identified Themes

The tweets were clustered into 10 prevalent themes, using string handling functions, and were fetched
for further content analysis. The identified themes are – AI, Business, Challenges, Future, Humanity,
Intel, Manufacturing, Security, Threat and Wearables.
From Figure 5, it is very clear that there is a highly positive sentiment when the discussion is
about Manufacturing, Security or Challenges. A more negative sentiment is sometimes observed

Figure 5. Sentiment Analysis on the various themes identified

45
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

for tweets related to Wearables, Intel and the Future of IoT, while Humanity and Threats are neutral
themes in discussion.

Network Analysis
Network Analysis is performed to learn the behavior of the social media content with respect to the
concepts of network mechanism. This includes studies based on nodes, edges, degree, centrality,
betweenness, closeness, cliques, weights and many more (Smith et al., 2009)
Topological Analysis: Using the tweets collected, a network was created that was having 1576
nodes and 2745 edges. Nodes represent the users who sent out tweets or received a reply, and edges
are the relationship between those users. The average path length is 4.75, which indicates that everyone
is about 5 nodes away from each other. So the community of users discussing about IoT in Twitter
are not very closely interacting with each other. The network diameter, viz. the longest distance
between any two nodes in the network, is found to be 14. The topology shows a sparse network, with
the presence of many small groups, and a few large groups. The node-size in the network graph in
Figure 6 is based on its betweenness centrality.
Centrality Analysis (node-level metrics): Among the node-level centrality metrics (Smith et al.,
2009), in-degree indicates the number of links to a user (node). Hence, it is a reflection of the popularity
of a user. Also, a high degree value indicates that the user/node is a key hub in its community of
nodes. Table 3 lists the top 10 high in-degree users in the network.
Twitter user billsoftnet, an IoT consultant and recruiter leads multiple discussions in Twitter related
to the IoT - IoT and healthcare, how it is related to smart cities, the security concerns, data privacy,
logistics and many more. His tweets influence the potential IoT users to read his blogs and connect
to him. However, Evan Kirstel (user id: evankirstel) has lot many followers (82.3 K as of Sept. 12,

Figure 6. Network generated for Topological Analysis based on the tweets related to IoT

46
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Table 3. Centrality Analysis

User In-degree Out-degree Degree

Billsoftnet 124 1 125
evankirstel 45 1 46
Wtvox 35 1 36
Ibm 35 1 36
ericsson 23 1 24
ibmanalytics 22 1 23
theiot 18 1 19
andi_staub 18 1 19
frenchweb 17 1 18
abunchofdata 16 1 17

2016) and discusses over a wide variety of aspects related to technology. He is an influencer for many
of the IoT related decision making questions. Most of their discussions related to IoT are surrounded
on how it can influence the society in terms of healthcare, smart cities, wearables, transportation, etc.
Community analysis (network-level metrics): The community analysis shows a graph density
of 0.0004, which indicates that the “#iot” network is quite sparsely distributed. “Group by Cluster”
method that make use of the Clauset-Newman-Moore (Ding, 2011) clustering algorithm and is
embedded in NodeXL have been used, to reveal over 800 communities in the network. There are 7 large
communities. The following cluster network in Figure 7 indicates the 7 large communities (clusters),
with a high betweenness centrality node and top 12 users based on betweenness centrality, indicating
key “influencers”. billsoftnet, walesbuzz, iotsecurity2 and evankirstel are the top four influencers and
this network helps us to identify the bridges between different communities. It can also be used by
the business to sell their ideas across communities like IBM’s connection lines in Figure 7.

CONCLUSION

On the basis of Twitter analytics, the paper shared the insights emerging from tweets related to IoT.
These findings are helpful to the firms operating in the IoT space to know what people are discussing
about, the network structure of the participants and themes, and the feelings in the dominant topics
being discussed. The identification of themes, URL and user analysis gave a broad view on identifying
various topics and areas relevant to IoT, in addition to the people who are influencers. The network
analysis and the various other steps performed along with that gives an idea on who and what are
the key influencers in the field of IoT. IoT related firms can use these individuals or communities
who controls the social media to influence the users. This study points out that twitter accounts like
IBM’s ibm, ibmanalytics; Ericsson’s ericsson and Microsoft’s Azure as key industrial influencers.
They may consider following or approaching the independent key influencers discussed, to promote
(retweeting) their views, which may increase the businesses visibility level as well. This may increase
the customer interest on the potential of IoT firms.
The negative emotions identified in specific themes and its background reasons may be something
of interest for IoT firms to address. The fashion magazine (and fashion blog) WT VOX, with user
id wtvox is one the leading Twitter player in terms of discussions related to fashion and digitization.
They bring out the general emotions related to wearables, health, fashion and digitization. For
businesses working on IoT and these related areas, it would be a good idea to come up with articles
and advertisements in these kind of influencing media.

47
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Figure 7. Results of community analysis of profiles related to IoT tweets

The authors acknowledge that the data are of highly specialized focus and only limited number
of tweets could be captured for the analysis. Future research may be conducted, when the popularity
of the domain may grow even more, and the adopted data analysis may report newer information of
interest. Future research may also try to validate the findings of the dominant topics emerging in this
study and connect its focus with that of published academic literature.

48
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

REFERENCES

Arias, M., Arratia, A., & Xuriguera, R. (2013). Forecasting with twitter data.[TIST]. ACM Transactions on
Intelligent Systems and Technology, 5(1), 8. doi:10.1145/2542182.2542190
Bauer, H., Patel, M., & Veira, J. (2014, December). The Internet of Things: Sizing up the opportunity. Retrieved
from http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-sizing-up-the-opportunity
Bruns, A., & Stieglitz, S. (2013). Towards more systematic Twitter analysis: Metrics for tweeting activities.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(2), 91–108. doi:10.1080/13645579.2012.756095
Chae, B. K. (2015). Insights from hashtag# supplychain and Twitter analytics: Considering Twitter and Twitter
data for supply chain practice and research. International Journal of Production Economics, 165, 247–259.
doi:10.1016/j.ijpe.2014.12.037
Chang, K. D., Chen, C. Y., Chen, J. L., & Chao, H. C. (2011). Internet of things and cloud computing for future
internet. In Security-Enriched Urban Computing and Smart Grid (pp. 1–10). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23948-9_1
Chau, M., & Xu, J. (2012). Business intelligence in blogs: Understanding consumer interactions and communities.
Management Information Systems Quarterly, 36(4), 1189–1216.
Chauhan, S., Agarwal, N., & Kar, A. K. (2016). Addressing Big Data Challenges in Smart Cities: A Systematic
Literature Review. info, 18(4).
Data, D. (2016, September 01). Could the #IoT transform how we protect endangered animals? https://t.co/
WEmKYiGUFE #ConnectedConservationpic.twitter.com/yA4qox0LFx
Ding, Y. (2011). Community detection: Topological vs. topical. Journal of Informetrics, 5(4), 498–514.
doi:10.1016/j.joi.2011.02.006
Ediger, D., Jiang, K., Riedy, J., Bader, D. A., & Corley, C. (2010, September). Massive social network analysis:
Mining twitter for social good. Proceedings of the 2010 39th International Conference on Parallel Processing
(pp. 583-593). IEEE.
Greenough, J. (2014). The ‘Internet of Things’ will be the world’s most massive device market and save
companies billions of dollars. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.in/The-Internet-
of-Things-Will-Be-The-Worlds-Most-Massive-Device-Market-And-Save-Companies-Billions-Of-Dollars/
articleshow/44766662.cms
Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of big
data on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information Systems, 47, 98–115. doi:10.1016/j.
is.2014.07.006
Hearst, M. A., & Rosner, D. (2008, January). Tag clouds: Data analysis tool or social signaller? Proceedings of
the 41st AnnualHawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 160-160). IEEE.
Hogan, S. (2016, September 16). IoT creates new world of data. Knowing what to do with all the data creates
value. Value accelerates transformation. [REMOVED HYPERLINK FIELD]Retrieved from https://twitter.com/
sandyhogan/status/776719855584178176
Hughes, A. L., & Palen, L. (2009). Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events.
International Journal of Emergency Management, 6(3-4), 248–260. doi:10.1504/IJEM.2009.031564
Inauen, S., & Schoeneborn, D. (2014). Twitter and its usage for dialogic stakeholder communication by MNCs and
NGOs. Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility: Perspectives and Practice. In Corporate Responsibility,
Governance and Sustainability (Vol. 6, pp. 283–310 ). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Jeffries, R. K. (2016, September 14). #IoT security & privacy vulnerabilities are very real threat. This path may
help. Or not. @MikyDe @lasersailor. Retrieved from https://t.co/6Bn0qdeu8o
Jin, J., Gubbi, J., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2014). An information framework for creating a smart city
through internet of things. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 1(2), 112–121. doi:10.1109/JIOT.2013.2296516

49
Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social
Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003
Kar, A. K. (2015). Integrating websites with social media–An approach for group decision support. Journal of
Decision Systems, 24(3), 339–353. doi:10.1080/12460125.2015.969585
Koivisto, M. (2016, August 01). This IoT is going to become a nightmare since no one cares about security.
#infosec #iot. Retrieved from https://t.co/rTmkUd1DbM
Krippendorff, K. (2004). Reliability in content analysis. Human Communication Research, 30(3), 411–433.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010, April). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?Proceedings
of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591-600). ACM. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772751
Lakhiwal, A., & Kar, A. K. (2016, September). Insights from Twitter Analytics: Modeling Social Media
Personality Dimensions and Impact of Breakthrough Events. Proceedings of the Conference on e-Business,
e-Services and e-Society (pp. 533-544). Springer International Publishing.
Liu, B. (2012). Sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Synthesis lectures on human language technologies,
5(1), 1-167.
Malhotra, A., Malhotra, C. K., & See, A. (2012). How to get your messages retweeted. MIT Sloan Management
Review, 53(2), 61.
McNaught, C., & Lam, P. (2010). Using Wordle as a supplementary research tool. Qualitative Report, 15(3), 630.
Miller, Z., Dickinson, B., Deitrick, W., Hu, W., & Wang, A. H. (2014). Twitter spammer detection using data
stream clustering. Information Sciences, 260, 64–73. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2013.11.016
Miorandi, D., Sicari, S., De Pellegrini, F., & Chlamtac, I. (2012). Internet of things: Vision, applications and
research challenges. Ad Hoc Networks, 10(7), 1497–1516. doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2012.02.016
Naaman, M., Boase, J., & Lai, C. H. (2010, February). Is it really about me?: message content in social awareness
streams.Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 189-192).
ACM. doi:10.1145/1718918.1718953
Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and trends in information
retrieval, 2(1-2), 1-135.
Rathore, A. K., Ilavarasan, P. V., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2016). Social media content and product co-creation: An
emerging paradigm. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, 29(1), 7–18. doi:10.1108/JEIM-06-2015-
0047
Research and Markets Ltd. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/3512765/the-
internet-of-things-iot-how-real-is-it
Series, S. S. (2016, September 15). IoT is not about radios; it’s all about data via @NetworkWorld #IoT #Data.
Retrieved from https://t.co/TIGClxPnCl
Smith, M. A., Shneiderman, B., Milic-Frayling, N., Mendes Rodrigues, E., Barash, V., Dunne, C., & Gleave,
E. et al. (2009, June). Analyzing (social media) networks with NodeXL.Proceedings of the fourth international
conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 255-264). ACM. doi:10.1145/1556460.1556497
Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Social media and political communication: A social media analytics
framework. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 3(4), 1277–1291. doi:10.1007/s13278-012-0079-3
Wang, X., Wei, F., Liu, X., Zhou, M., & Zhang, M. (2011, October). Topic sentiment analysis in twitter: a
graph-based hashtag sentiment classification approach.Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference
on Information and knowledge management (pp. 1031-1040). ACM. doi:10.1145/2063576.2063726
Wang, Y., Liu, J., Qu, J., Huang, Y., Chen, J., & Feng, X. (2014, December). Hashtag graph based topic model
for tweet mining. Proceedings of the2014 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (pp. 1025-1030).
IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICDM.2014.60
Whyburn, G. T. (2015). Topological analysis. Princeton University Press.

50
 Journal of Global Information Management
Volume 25 • Issue 2 • April-June 2017

Wortmann, F., & Flüchter, K. (2015). Internet of things. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 57(3),
221–224. doi:10.1007/s12599-015-0383-3
Xia, F., Yang, L. T., Wang, L., & Vinel, A. (2012). Internet of things. International Journal of Communication
Systems, 25(9), 1101–1102. doi:10.1002/dac.2417
Zeng, D., Chen, H., Lusch, R., & Li, S. H. (2010). Social media analytics and intelligence. IEEE Intelligent
Systems, 25(6), 13–16. doi:10.1109/MIS.2010.151
Zhang, Z. K., Cho, M. C. Y., Wang, C. W., Hsu, C. W., Chen, C. K., & Shieh, S. (2014, November). IoT security:
ongoing challenges and research opportunities. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 7th International Conference on
Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (pp. 230-234). IEEE. doi:10.1109/SOCA.2014.58

Nimish Joseph is a Research Scholar at the Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi. Prior to joining IIT Delhi,
he was working as a Software Developer at Oracle India Private Ltd. He completed his graduation from College of
Engineering Munnar and Post-Graduation from NIT Calicut. He is currently interested in areas like Social Media
Analytics, Intelligent systems and other AI techniques.

Arpan Kumar Kar is Assistant Professor in Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, he was
Assistant Professor in IIM Rohtak. He has published over 60 articles in Elsevier, Springer, Emerald, Taylor and
Francis, IEEE, AIS, Inderscience, etc. and presented his research in leading international conferences like HICSS,
IFIP, etc. He is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards and recognitions for his research. He also has prior
industry experience with IBM – India Research Laboratory and Cognizant Business Consulting, besides having
completed a number of prestigious projects for multiple leading organizations (e.g. EU, GoI, etc.).

P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan (IIT Kanpur) is Associate Professor at the Department of Management Studies, Indian
Institute of Technology Delhi. He researches and teaches about production and consumption of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) with a special focus on India. His specific research interests are Information
and Communication Technologies & Development (ICTD); Indian IT industry; and Social Media. Presently he
is teaching Management Information Systems, E-Commerce, Social Media and Market Research Methods. Dr.
Ilavarasan is a recipient of the Outstanding Young Faculty Fellowship Award at IIT Delhi and Prof. M.N. Srinivas
Memorial Prize of the Indian Sociological Society. He is also recipient of research grants from IDRC (Canada),
Govt. of India, Oxford Analytica (UK), IPTS (European Commission) and IdeaCorp. (Philippines). Earlier he had
taught at Pondicherry Central University and Indian Institute of Management Rohtak. Dr. Ilavarasan is an active
contributor in the international journals and conferences of repute. His publications and other details are available
at: http://web.iitd.ac.in/~vignes

Shankar Ganesh is an MBA graduate from IIT Delhi with keen interest in the IT sector. Shankar is presently
working with Hewlett-Packard Inc. as an Enterprise Account Manager, and has previously worked with Accenture
as an SAP BI Analyst.

51