Tag: Expo 2015

Modeling and Analyzing Engagement in Social Network Challenges

by Marco Brambilla, posted in social network, social network analysis

Within a completely new line of research, we are exploring the power of modeling for human behaviour analysis, especially within social networks and/or in occasion of large scale live events. Participation to challenges within social networks is a very effective instrument for promoting a brand or event and therefore it is regarded as an excellent marketing tool.
Our first reasearch has been published in November 2016 at WISE Conference, covering the analysis of user engagement within social network challenges.
In this paper, we take the challenge organizer’s perspective, and we study how to raise the
engagement of players in challenges where the players are stimulated to
create and evaluate content, thereby indirectly raising the awareness about the brand or event itself. Slides are available on slideshare:

We illustrate a comprehensive model of the actions and strategies that can be exploited for progressively boosting the social engagement during the challenge evolution. The model studies the organizer-driven management of interactions among players, and evaluates
the effectiveness of each action in light of several other factors (time, repetition, third party actions, interplay between different social networks, and so on).
We evaluate the model through a set of experiment upon a real case, the YourExpo2015 challenge. Overall, our experiments lasted 9 weeks and engaged around 800,000  users on two different social platforms; our quantitative analysis assesses the validity of the model.

The paper is published by Springer here.

cross-platform_pdf

 

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My interview on Social Media and Society: what I said (and what I didn’t)

by Marco Brambilla, posted in social network, social network analysis

My recent interview on the evolution of social media and its role in modern society is available on YouTube (in Italian only, sorry about that).

While the 3+ minutes of speech necessarily had to be a general overview on the role and recent changes of social media, I wish to summarise here the some technical aspects of it.

As I mentioned in the presentation:

  • social media changed a lot since their early days, from being consumed on PCs to mobile devices, from general purpose social networks connecting friends to digital stages where we “sell” our life to the entire world, from places where to share personal information to platforms where to publish also objective information coming from the real world experience.
  • social media are nowadays a valuable source of information for companies, who look for (and find) their customers through social media marketing and advertising, and public institutions and researchers, that can leverage on a large amount of data for providing benefits to our everyday life
YourExpo2015 - the Instagram Photo Challenge of Expo2015 MilanoWhat I didn’t say is how you can do that. Well, it’s pretty simple.
The ingredients of the recipe:
  • A lot of users sharing their profile
  • A lot of content (photos, statuses, geotags, descriptions) shared by people
  • (which makes up a VERY big data problem)
  • crawlers capturing this (or stream capturing systems) and storage as needed
  • MODELS of the context, the problem and the solution
  • and DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS for studying the data and extracting meaningful information
To me, the most valuable points are MODELS and ANALYSIS TOOLS. We are doing a lot of experiments on mixing model-driven techniques with semantic analysis, NLP, and social media monitoring. One example of our experiments is the YourExpo2015 Instagram Photo Challenge.
Have a look and participate if you like. More on this coming soon!

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