Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks

Meena Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth KNO.E.SIS Center

Wright State University

M. Nagarajan, K. Baid, A. P. Sheth, and S. Wang, "Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks -‐ Challenges and Experiences“, 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web

Intelligence, Milan, Italy

  On social networks

  Use case for this talk   Targeted content = content-‐based advertisements   Target = user profiles

  Content-‐based advertisements CBAs  Well-‐known monetization model for online content

May 30,June 02 2009

June 01, 2009

  Interests do not translate to purchase intents   Interests are often outdated..   Intents are rarely stated on a profile..

  Cases that work   New store openings, sales   Highly demographic-‐targeted ads

June 01, 2009

June 01, 2009

CONTENT-‐BASED ADS ON THEIR PROFILES

  Non-‐trivial   Non-‐policed content ▪  Brand image, Unfavorable sentiments1

  People are there to network

▪  User attention to ads is not guaranteed   Informal, casual nature of content ▪  People are sharing experiences and events ▪ Main message overloaded with off topic content

I NEED HELP WITH SONY VEGAS PRO 8!! Ugh and i have a video project due tomorrow for merrill lynch :(( all i need to do is simple: Extract several scenes from a clip, insert captions, transitions and thats it. really. omgg i cant figure out anything!! help!! and i got food poisoning from eggs. its not fun. Pleasssse, help? :(

1Learning from Multi-‐topic Web Documents for Contextual Advertisement, Zhang, Y., Surendran, A. C., Platt, J. C., and Narasimhan, M. , KDD 2008

  Cultural Entities

  Word Usages in self-‐presentation

  Slang sentiments

  Intentions WHAT

WHY

HOW

  Identifying intents behind user posts on social networks   Content with monetization potential

  Identifying keywords for advertizing in user-‐generated content   Interpersonal communication & off-‐topic chatter

  User studies   Hard to compare activity based ads to s.o.t.a   Impressions to Clickthroughs

  How well are we able to identify monetizable posts   How targeted are ads generated using our keywords vs. entire user generated content

Identification, Evaluation

  Scribe Intent not same as Web Search Intent1

  People write sentences, not keywords or phrases

  Presence of a keyword does not imply navigational / transactional intents   ‘am thinking of getting X’ (transactional)   ‘i like my new X’ (information sharing)   ‘what do you think about X’ (information seeking)

1B. J. Jansen, D. L. Booth, and A. Spink, “Determining the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of web queries,” Inf. Process. Manage., vol. 44, no. 3, 2008.

  Action patterns surrounding an entity

  How questions are asked and not topic words that indicate what the question is about

  “where can I find a chotto psp cam”   User post also has an entity

Set of user posts from SNSs

Not annotated for presence or absence of any intent

Generate a universal set of n-‐gram patterns; freq > f

S = set of all 4-‐grams; freq > 3

Generate set of candidate patterns from seed words

(why,when,where,how,what)

Sc = all 4-‐grams in S that extract seed words

User picks 10 seed patterns from Sc

Sis = ‘does anyone know how’, ‘where do i find’, ‘someone tell me where’….

Gradually expand Sis by adding Information Seeking patterns from Sc

Sc = all 4-‐grams in S that extract seed words


For every pis in Sis generate set of filler patterns


‘.* anyone know how’

‘does .* know how’

‘does anyone .* how’ ‘does anyone know .*’

Look for patterns in Sc -‐ Functional compatibility of filler

-‐ words used in similar semantic contexts -‐ Empirical support for filler

‘does anyone know how’

  Functional properties / communicative functions of words

  From a subset of LIWC1

  cognitive mechanical (e.g., if, whether, wondering, find) ▪  ‘I am thinking about getting X’

  adverbs (e.g., how, somehow, where)   impersonal pronouns (e.g., someone, anybody, whichever) ▪  ‘Someone tell me where can I find X’

1Linguistic Inquiry Word Count,LIWC, http://liwc.net

  Sc = {‘does anyone know how’, ‘where do I find’, ‘someone tell me where’}

  pis = `does anyone know how’

  ‘does * know how’   ‘does someone know how’ ▪  Functional Compatibility -‐ Impersonal pronouns ▪  Empirical Support – 1/3

  ‘does somebody know how’ ▪  Functional Compatibility -‐ Impersonal pronouns ▪  Empirical Support – 0 ▪  Pattern Retained

  ‘does john know how’ ▪  Pattern discarded

  Over iterations, single-‐word substitutions, functional usage and empirical support conservatively expands Sis

  Infusing new patterns and seed words

  Stopping conditions

  does anyone know how

  anyone know how to

  i dont know what

  know where i can

  tell me how to

  i dont know how

  anyone know where i

  does anyone know where

  does anyone know what

  anybody know how to

  anyone know how i

  im not sure what

  does anybody know how

  does anyone know why

  i was wondering how

  does anyone know when

  tell me what to

  im not sure how

  i was wondering what

  no idea how to

  someone tell me how

  have no clue what

  does anyone know if

  i dont know if

  know if i can

  anyone know if i

  im not sure if

  i was wondering if

  idea what you are

  let me know how

  and i dont know

  now i dont know

  but i dont really

  was wondering if someone

  would like to see

  see what i can

  anyone have any idea

  wondering if someone could

  was wondering how i

  i do not want

  Information Seeking patterns generated offline

  Information seeking intent score of a post   Extract and compare patterns in posts with extracted patterns

  Transactional intent score of a post ▪  LIWC ‘Money’ dictionary ▪  173 words and word forms indicative of transactions, e.g., trade, deal, buy, sell, worth, price etc.

  Training corpus   8000 user posts ▪  MySpace Computers, Electronics, Gadgets forum

  309 unique new patterns, 263 unambiguous

  Testing patterns for recall   ‘To buy’ Marketplace – average 81 %

Off-‐topic noise elimination

  Identifying keywords in monetizable posts   Plethora of work in this space

  Off-‐topic noise removal is our focus I NEED HELP WITH SONY VEGAS PRO 8!! Ugh and i have a video project due tomorrow for merrill lynch :(( all i need to do is simple: Extract several scenes from a clip, insert captions, transitions and thats it. really. omgg i cant figure out anything!! help!! and i got food poisoning from eggs. its not fun. Pleasssse, help? :(

  Topical hints   C1 -‐ ['camcorder']

  Keywords in post   C2 -‐ ['electronics forum', 'hd', 'camcorder', 'somethin', 'ive', 'canon', 'little camera', 'canon hv20', 'cameras', 'offtopic']

  Move strongly related keywords from C2 to C1 one-‐by-‐one   Relatedness determined using information gain   Using the Web as a corpus, domain independent

  C1 -‐ ['camcorder']   C2 -‐ ['electronics forum', 'hd', 'camcorder', 'somethin', 'ive', 'canon', 'little camera', 'canon hv20', 'cameras', 'offtopic']

  Informative words   ['camcorder', 'canon hv20', 'little camera', 'hd', 'cameras',

'canon']

Preliminary work

  Keywords from 60 monetizable user posts  Monetizable intent, at least 3 keywords in content   45 MySpace Forums, 15 Facebook Marketplace, 30 graduate students

  10 sets of 6 posts each   Each set evaluated by 3 randomly selected users

 Monetizable intents?   All 60 posts voted as unambiguously information seeking in intent

  Google AdSense ads for user post vs. extracted topical keywords

  Choose relevant Ad Impressions

  VW 6 disc CD changer   I need one thats compatible with a 2000 golf most are sold from years 1998-‐2004if anyone has one [or can get one] PLEASE let me know!

  Users picked ads relevant to the post   At least 50% inter-‐evaluator agreement

  For the 60 posts   Total of 144 ad impressions   17% of ads picked as relevant

  For the topical keywords   Total of 162 ad impressions   40% of ads picked as relevant

  User’s profile information   Interests, hobbies, tv shows..   Non-‐demographic information

  Submit a post   Looking to buy and why (induced noise)

  Ads that generate interest, captured attention

  Using profile ads   Total of 56 ad impressions   7% of ads generated interest

  Using authored posts   Total of 56 ad impressions   43% of ads generated interest

  Using topical keywords from authored posts   Total of 59 ad impressions   59% of ads generated interest

  User studies small and preliminary, clearly suggest   Monetization potential in user activity   Improvement for Ad programs in terms of relevant impressions

  Evaluations based on forum, marketplace   Verbose content   Status updates, notes, community and event memberships…

  One size may not fit all

  A world between relevant impressions and clickthroughs   Objectionable content, vocabulary impedance, Ad placement, network behavior

  In a pipeline of other community efforts

  No profile information taken into account   Cannot custom send information to Google AdSense

  Keywords to Ad Impressions   Google Adsense like web service

 Monetization potential of a keyword on the Web not the same on a social n/w?   Ranking keywords in user post

 We are building an F8 app   Collaboration for clickthrough data

  Google/Bing: Meena Nagarajan  [email protected]   http://knoesis.wright.edu/students/meena/

  Google/Bing: Amit Sheth   [email protected]   http://knoesis.wright.edu/amit

Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks

Education

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