[Air-L] Trouble convincing reviewers social media is legitimate?

[Karissa McKelvey]

More tweets, More votes: Social media as a quantitative indicator of
political behavior
New work by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen and Fabio Rojas.

We hope this paper can convince your reviewers that social media
aren't just spam-infested pools of emoticons. We show that random
samples are significant predictors of vote margin in house elections.

No sentiment needed -- only raw counts of the names of the candidates.
We do it by measuring simply the number of times a candidate was
mentioned by full name (first last). Handles and hashtags don't work
as well. There will be another paper later about that.

The working paper (short!) is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2235423

We'd appreciate your comments

--
Karissa McKelvey
rissarae.net