Engaging with Users on Public Social Media

Speaker
Jeffrey Nichols
Manager of the Social Media and Crowd Research group and Research Staff Member, IBM Research

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Video
Video link

Description

On some social media platforms, such as Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, and tumblr, much of the content generated by users is publicly accessible and communication can be easily initiated between strangers who have never previously communicated before. The communities that have risen up around these platforms, particularly on Twitter, can also be inclusive and supportive of interactions between strangers. The public and open nature of these communities creates an opportunity to create a new kind of crowdsourcing system, where individuals are identified who may be good candidates to complete various tasks based on their published content. We explore the potential of such a system through several information collection tasks, examining the response rate and information quality that can be obtained through such a system. We also explore a means of leveraging users’ previous social media content to predict their likelihood of response and optimize our system’s collection behavior. At IBM Research - Almaden, we are now looking to extend these ideas to additional domains, including proactive and reactive customer support, and precision marketing campaigns.

Speaker's Bio

Jeffrey Nichols is a Research Staff Member and Manager of the Social Media and Crowd Research group at IBM Research - Almaden. He leads research efforts on crowdsourcing, social media analysis and social engagement. He joined IBM in 2006 after receiving his Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. He has worked in the areas of mobile computing, automated design, and end-user programming. He is the author of more than 30 publications in academic conferences and journals, and co-edited the book “No Code Required: Giving Users Tools to Transform the Web,” published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2010. He is also an Associate Editor and Information Director for ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI), the premier journal in the field of human-computer interaction. He taught introductory human-computer interaction courses at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and 2010.

Speaker's Website
http://www.jeffreynichols.com/

Host
Brad Myers