Communication of new energy forms: Ways to detect topics and stakeholders

This paper addresses professional communication experts who develop communication concepts for companies and the introduction of new technologies, e.g., in the energy sector. It presents an approach exploiting social media applications (Facebook®, blogs) as an information resource for the communication of technologies by detecting information on relevant topics and stakeholders. For the topic and stakeholder detection, text mining-methods are applied. As an application example, new energy forms serve. The results show exemplarily that social media applications, such as blogs provide a wealth of information on relevant topics in public discourse, while social networking sites such as Facebook® are particularly useful for the detection of stakeholder profiles. The proposed approach can help communication experts to retrieve and gain information, for instance, as input for communication concepts and strategies.