Inferring the Origin Locations of Tweets with Quantitative Confidence

Social Internet content plays an increasingly critical role in many domains, including public health, disaster management, and politics. However, its utility is limited by missing geographic information; for example, fewer than 1.6% of Twitter messages (tweets) contain a geotag. We propose a scalable, content-based approach to estimate the location of tweets using a novel yet simple variant of gaussian mixture models. Further, because real-world applications depend on quantified uncertainty for such estimates, we propose novel metrics of accuracy, precision, and calibration, and we evaluate our approach accordingly. Experiments on 13 million global, comprehensively multi-lingual tweets show that our approach yields reliable, well-calibrated results competitive with previous computationally intensive methods. We also show that a relatively small number of training data are required for good estimates (roughly 30,000 tweets) and models are quite time-invariant (effective on tweets many weeks newer than the training set). Finally, we show that toponyms and languages with small geographic footprint provide the most useful location signals.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Version 2: Move mathematics to appendix, 2 new references, various other presentation improvements. Version 3: Various presentation improvements, accepted at ACM CSCW 201

Guiding internet-scale video service deployment using microblog-based prediction

Mini-Conference - MC16: Social NetworksOnline microblogging has been very popular in today's Internet, where users exchange short messages and follow various contents shared by people that they are interested in. Among the variety of exchanges, video links are a representative type on a microblogging site. More and more viewers of an Internet video service are coming from microblog recommendations. It is intriguing research to explore the connections between the patterns of microblog exchanges and the popularity of videos, in order to potentially use the propagation patterns of microblogs to guide proactive service deployment of a video sharing system. Based on extensive traces from Youku and Tencent Weibo, a popular video sharing site and a favored microblogging system in China, we explore how patterns of video link propagation in the microblogging system are correlated with video popularity on the video sharing site, at different times and in different geographic regions. Using influential factors summarized from the measurement studies, we further design neural network-based learning frameworks to predict the number of potential viewers of different videos and the geographic distribution of viewers. Experiments show that our neural network-based frameworks achieve better prediction accuracy, as compared to a classical approach that relies on historical numbers of views. We also briefly discuss how proactive video service deployment can be effectively enabled by our prediction frameworks. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 31st Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2012), Orlando, FL., 25-30 March 2012. In IEEE Infocom Proceedings, 2012, p. 2901-290

The Spread of Scientific Information: Insights from the Web Usage Statistics in PLoS Article-Level Metrics

The presence of web-based communities is a distinctive signature of Web 2.0. The web-based feature means that information propagation within each community is highly facilitated, promoting complex collective dynamics in view of information exchange. In this work, we focus on a community of scientists and study, in particular, how the awareness of a scientific paper is spread. Our work is based on the web usage statistics obtained from the PLoS Article Level Metrics dataset compiled by PLoS. The cumulative number of HTML views was found to follow a long tail distribution which is reasonably well-fitted by a lognormal one. We modeled the diffusion of information by a random multiplicative process, and thus extracted the rates of information spread at different stages after the publication of a paper. We found that the spread of information displays two distinct decay regimes: a rapid downfall in the first month after publication, and a gradual power law decay afterwards. We identified these two regimes with two distinct driving processes: a short-term behavior driven by the fame of a paper, and a long-term behavior consistent with citation statistics. The patterns of information spread were found to be remarkably similar in data from different journals, but there are intrinsic differences for different types of web usage (HTML views and PDF downloads versus XML). These similarities and differences shed light on the theoretical understanding of different complex systems, as well as a better design of the corresponding web applications that is of high potential marketing impact

A META-ANALYTIC REVIEW OF SOCIAL MEDIA STUDIES

Social media such as social networking sites, blogs, micro-blogs, Wikis, are increasingly and widely used in our daily lives. In the information system (IS) discipline, social media have become a hot research area and draw the attention of many scholars. The paper systematically reviewed social media studies published in Association for Information Systems (AIS) listed top 20 journals from 2009 to 2013. The publication time, journal preferences, research objects and research topics are discussed. Generally, the current social media studies including four areas, namely user, management, technology and information. Each area has distinct focuses and topics. By thoroughly analyzing the research topics, the authors formulate our projections and recommendations for future social media studies

Managers’ Perspectives on the Effects of Online Grapevine Communication: A Qualitative Inquiry

The purpose of this study was to understand how modern-day managers perceived their subordinates were reacting to the phenomenon of online grapevine communication in the workplace. A qualitative inductive inquiry drawing upon techniques of grounded theory was conducted to collect and analyze feedback provided by 15 top-level corporate managers from 10 organizations in India. Managers cited several evidences of employees engaging in online grapevine communication and discussed reasons behind such behavior. Some of the key factors behind such behavior of employees were level of internet familiarity, anonymity of the rumor mongers, quicker and wider reach and opportunity for cyber loafing. A theory of antecedents of online grapevine communication and management reaction to this phenomenon gradually emerged from our data

Public Health

Twitter, crowdsourcing, and other medical technology inventions producing real-time geolocated streams of personalized data have changed the way we think about health (Kostkova 2015). However, Twitter’s strength is its two-way communication nature – both as a health information source but also as a central hub for the creation and dissemination of media health coverage. Health authorities, insurance companies, marketing agencies, and individuals can leverage the availability of large datasets from Twitter to improve early warning services and preparedness, aid disease prevalence mapping, and provide personal targeted health advice, as well as in"uence public sentiment about major health interventions. However, despite the growing potential, there are still many challenges to address to develop robust and reliable systems integrating Twitter streams to real-world provision of healthcare

Toward a Social Media Usage Policy

Social media has become the archetype of technology underpinning communication and collaboration across all lifestyles, from the personal to the public. Despite its increasing deployment into corporate technology infrastructures, the encroachment of social media poses several doubts, including its business value, need for a social media strategy and its appropriate management. Although given a pressing need, there is a lack of clear guidance from IS literature around how to study these challenges, and ultimately to answer the question— is the use of social media a distraction at the work place? This research-in-progress paper lays the foundation to answer this specific question. Our work positions social media as a platform that can enable business and service value co-creation. We propose the Social Media -Beliefs, Action and Outcomes (SM-BAO) model, to help develop a framework that can inform social media use policy in the workplace

MARKETING COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION OF E-TAILING FIRMS IN PORT HARCOURT

The nexus of this work was to ascertain the extent to which marketing communication strategies affects customer satisfaction of e-tailing firms in Port Harcourt. Two dimensions were studied; impersonal communication and online direct communication. Their effects on customer satisfaction were measured in the study. Descriptive research design was used and four hypotheses were formulated and tested using the data collected from 400 respondents through a five Point Likert Scale questionnaire, with the sampling frame selected through cluster sampling. Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient was adopted to conduct the inferential statistics. Findings showed that the dimensions of marketing communication strategies influenced customer satisfaction, by revealing that marketing communication strategies have a positive and significant relationship with customer satisfaction. It was therefore recommended that, e-tailing firms should engage adequately in the use of marketing communication strategies to enhance customer satisfaction