Paper Title
Social Media Facilitating The Polling Process: Innovative Research Method

Abstract
Social media has changed the approach that researchers are using to survey public opinion. In the past, surveys and interviews were the basis for collecting data to find out people’s feelings and behaviors toward a topic of interest. The authors found a newer method to gather data through Web 2.0 by concentrating on News Feed’s live conversations among individuals.This paper focuses on unstructured data in text format to perform analytic. Every individual comment on social media include recording Likes and Dislikes as people respond to the news statements from a live conversation. The data from the study is evaluated using public opinion from the social forum comments on certain topics. The emphasis of the study is to present alternative ways that data can be collected and examined. The research is derived from aggregation of synchronous and asynchronous comments that people freely provide about the topic or to comments about the topic.These opinions are written either under their own name if they choose, or an anonymous name to protect their personal identity. The researchers of the study collected a series of three data captures on various important topics as forums from political headline news since the responses were current, recent over a brief period, and involved more than one hundred respondents. Participants were asked to like or Dislike the original comment and had an option to elaborate, stating their own opinion with a written response and include positive or negative feelings toward the topic. An interpretation of the Like and Dislike choice was to decide if the participants accepted or rejected the forum comment. The data was normalized based on the meaningfulness of comments toward the topic. The results of this process are presented by charts and text. Key Terms - Human Behavior, Social Media, Web 2.0, Text Mining