ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a scoping study in which unsolicited user feedback of the Seattle Central Library was gathered from selected social media and user-review websites to determine the viability of utilising social media as a novel and unconventional approach to post-occupancy evaluation (POE).1 Fourteen social media/ review websites were surveyed and all available review data were extracted. This resulted in a rich dataset of almost 500 reviews, which were subject to further analyses of temporal and geographic patterns, numerical ratings, and the semantic content of the reviews. The study’s results suggest building users are quite willing to share, without solicitation, their experiences. The results showed: a high proportion of local reviewers (40 per cent); highly regular, temporal patterns of posting, suggesting a sustained interest in reviewing over a period of seven years; numerical ratings suggesting that comments were not dominated by highly opinionated, extreme reviewers but represented a broad range of views; and geographic differences in the semantic content of the reviews. The chapter suggests that highly valuable information is currently available from peer-topeer networks and that this forms a new class of POE data which is radically different to current POE paradigms. It concludes that this data might be most valuable through augmenting, and not supplanting, traditional POE.
