Fashion Conversation Data on Instagram

The fashion industry is establishing its presence on a number of visual-centric social media like Instagram. This creates an interesting clash as fashion brands that have traditionally practiced highly creative and editorialized image marketing now have to engage with people on the platform that epitomizes impromptu, realtime conversation. What kinds of fashion images do brands and individuals share and what are the types of visual features that attract likes and comments? In this research, we take both quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer these questions. We analyze visual features of fashion posts first via manual tagging and then via training on convolutional neural networks. The classified images were examined across four types of fashion brands: mega couture, small couture, designers, and high street. We find that while product-only images make up the majority of fashion conversation in terms of volume, body snaps and face images that portray fashion items more naturally tend to receive a larger number of likes and comments by the audience. Our findings bring insights into building an automated tool for classifying or generating influential fashion information. We make our novel dataset of {24,752} labeled images on fashion conversations, containing visual and textual cues, available for the research community.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, This paper will be presented at ICWSM'1

A comparison of theory and practice in market intelligence gathering for Australian micro-businesses and SMEs

Recent government sponsored research has demonstrated that there is a gap between the theory and practice of market intelligence gathering within the Australian micro, small and medium businesses (SMEs). Typically, there is a significant amount of information in literature about 'what needs to be done', however, there is little insight in terms of how market intelligence gathering should occur. This paper provides a novel insight and a comparison between the theory and practices of market intelligence gathering of micro-business and SMEs in Australia and demonstrates an anomoly in so far as typically the literature does not match what actually occurs in practice. A model for market intelligence gathering for micro-businesses and SMEs is also discussed

A comparison of theory and practice in market intelligence gathering for Australian micro-businesses and SMEs

Recent government sponsored research has demonstrated that there is a gap between the theory and practice of market intelligence gathering within the Australian micro, small and medium businesses (SMEs). Typically, there is a significant amount of information in literature about 'what needs to be done', however, there is little insight in terms of how market intelligence gathering should occur. This paper provides a novel insight and a comparison between the theory and practices of market intelligence gathering of micro-business and SMEs in Australia and demonstrates an anomoly in so far as typically the literature does not match what actually occurs in practice. A model for market intelligence gathering for micro-businesses and SMEs is also discussed

Customer empowerment in tourism through Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM)

We explain Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM) and adopt this new technique to travel context. Benefits and disadvantages of the CCM are outlined together with warnings of typical caveats Value: CCM will be expected as the norm in the travel industry by customers of the future, yet it is only the innovators who gain real tangible benefits from this development. We outline current and future opportunities to truly place your customer at the centre and provide the organisation with some real savings/gains through the use of ICT Practical Implications: We offer tangible examples for travel industry on how to utilise this new technology. The technology is already available and the ICT companies are keen to establish ways how consumers can utilise it, i.e. by providing ‘content’ for these ICT products the travel industry can fully gain from these developments and also enhance consumers’ gains from it. This can result in more satisfied customers for the travel (as well as ICT) companies thus truly adopting the basic philosophy of marketin

A cloud-based tool for sentiment analysis in reviews about restaurants on TripAdvisor

The tourism industry has been promoting its products and services based on the reviews that people often write on travel websites like TripAdvisor.com, Booking.com and other platforms like these. These reviews have a profound effect on the decision making process when evaluating which places to visit, such as which restaurants to book, etc. In this contribution is presented a cloud based software tool for the massive analysis of this social media data (TripAdvisor.com). The main characteristics of the tool developed are: i) the ability to aggregate data obtained from social media; ii) the possibility of carrying out combined analyses of both people and comments; iii) the ability to detect the sense (positive, negative or neutral) in which the comments rotate, quantifying the degree to which they are positive or negative, as well as predicting behaviour patterns from this information; and iv) the ease of doing everything in the same application (data downloading, pre-processing, analysis and visualisation). As a test and validation case, more than 33.500 revisions written in English on restaurants in the Province of Granada (Spain) were analyse

Implementing a Business Intelligence System for small and medium-sized enterprises

Over the years, Business Intelligence (BI) systems have become critically important to organizations due to the increasing fast-paced competition, the vast amount of daily generated data and the complexity of how to manage collected data. Business intelligence systems empower organizations to gain insights and to understand a clearer view of their vast data, business and customers, which help to make better decisions and hence produce better results and increase profit. BI refers to a collection of an organization’s resources such as tools, technologies, applications, systems and databases which enable organizations to manage insights of their business data, activities and performance in order to make better decision. However the majority of existing BI systems, target and support large organizations, and the small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs) are mostly overlooked due to lack of substantial finance. The paper elaborates the considerations for implementing BI systems for SMEs. Some new trends such as cloud BI solutions, open BI sources solutions are reviewed. The paper finally provides for the implementation of Business Intelligence system for a SME, the purpose and constraints of the system are detailed

Social media and public policy

Introduction: Government and public service delivery is taking place in a changed world. A significant level of social, economic and political activity is now happening on the internet.As people buy and sell goods, search for information, browse the web and share their day–to–day experiences with colleagues, friends and family through social networks, they produce an enormous amount of data.The use of this data to develop insights is growing rapidly. In the private sector it is being used to enhance decision making, understand customer behaviour, improve operational efficiency and identify new markets.The new information environment also obliges government to develop new capabilities to understand the information available and to compete for attention and influence within it.Part of the challenge in embracing the digital age is that, in the midst of rapid change, it’s very difficult to know where to place your bets. We do not yet know exactly what access to large volumes of social data will mean for our society. It certainly will not present a panacea for long–standing social problems; but it can add another dimension to our understanding of them.This report considers whether social media data can improve the quality and timeliness of the evidence base that informs public policy. Can the myriad of human connections and interactions on the web provide insight to enable government to develop better policy, understand its subsequent impact and inform the many different organisations that deliver public services?The report is based on an evaluation of available literature and interviews with 25 experts from a number of disciplines. Given that developments in this field are at such an early stage, it aims to provide helpful signposts rather than definitive answers