Characterizing Spontaneous Ideation Contest on Social Media: Case Study on the Name Change of Facebook to Meta

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media's role in spontaneous idea generation during Facebook's rebranding to Meta, revealing diverse ideas, network influence on preferences, and interaction's impact on idea diversity.

Contribution

It characterizes social media-based spontaneous ideation contests, highlighting the diversity of ideas and the influence of social network positions and interactions.

Findings

Social media users generate a wider range of ideas than mainstream media.

User network position correlates with preferred ideas.

Higher user interaction increases idea diversity.

Abstract

Collecting good ideas is vital for organizations, especially companies, to retain their competitiveness. Social media is gathering attention as a place to extract ideas efficiently; however, the characteristics of ideas and the posters of ideas on social media are underexamined. Thus, this study aims to characterize spontaneous ideation contests among social media users by taking an event of Facebook's name change to Meta as a case study. As a dataset, we comprehensively collect tweets containing new acronyms of Big Tech companies, which we treat as an "idea" in this work. In the analysis, we especially focus on the diversity of ideas, which would be the main reason for enlisting social media for idea generation. As the main results, we discovered that social media users offered a wider range of ideas than those in mainstream media. The follow-follower network of the users suggested that the users' position on the network is related to the preferred ideas. Additionally, we discovered a link between the amount of user interaction on social media and the diversity of ideas. This study would promote the use of social media as a part of open innovation and co-creation processes in the industry.