Analyzing firm-specific social media and market: A stakeholder-based event analysis framework

Discussion content in firm-specific social media helps managers understand stakeholders' concerns and make informed decisions. Despite such benefits, the over-abundance of information online makes it difficult to identify and focus on the most important stakeholder groups. In this study, we propose a novel stakeholder-based event analysis framework that uses online stylometric analysis to segment the forum participants by stakeholder groups, and partitions their messages into different time periods of major firm events to examine how important stakeholders evolve over time. With this approach, we identified stakeholder groups from a sample of six companies in the petrochemical and banking industries, using more than 500,000 online message postings. To evaluate the proposed system, we conducted market prediction within the identified groups, and compared the prediction performance with traditional approaches that did not account for stakeholder groups or events. Results showed that some stakeholder groups identified by our system had stronger relationships with firms' market performance, compared to the entire set of web forum participants. Incorporating event-induced temporal dynamics further improved the prediction performance.