WORKSHOP REPORTFirst International Workshop on
Social Media Engagement (SoME 2011)
Alejandro Jaimes
Yahoo! Researchajaimes@yahoo-inc.com

Mounia Lalmas
Yahoo! Researchmounia@acm.org

Yana Volkovich
Barcelona Media Innovation Centre
yana.volkovich@barcelonamedia.org
Abstract
The first international workshop on Social Media Engagement1 was held on March 29,
2011 in conjunction with the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 20112 ) inHyderabad, India. The goal of the workshop was to encourage interdisciplinary discussion
and sharing of ideas and research results on social media engagement. A particular focus
was on discussing research challenges to devise engagement metrics, to develop methodologies, and to understand how different technical approaches can be used to enhance ourunderstanding of user behavior in social media.

1Introduction

Over the last two decades the nature of human-computer interaction has transformed. The
conceptualisation of the user has changed from being a cog in an organisational machine
and a source of errors, to a partner in social interaction and ultimately consumer, and more
recently to content creator. The shift in paradigm has been tremendous, particularly on
the Web. Within this shift, a strong new focus is the sharing of experiences through social
media, with one of the main implications being that traditional user metrics hardly giveinsights into user behavior or satisfaction. Interest in engagement and how to measure itin these new settings has gained significant momentum, in particular given the success ofsocial media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Digg, Flickr, Youtube, etc.), andthe corresponding implications for advertising and user satisfaction.
Engagement defines the phenomena of being captivated and motivated. Engagement canbe measured in terms of a single interactive session or of a more long-term relationship withthe social platform across multiple interactions. Thus, social media engagement is not justabout how a single interaction unfolds, but about how and why people develop a relationshipwith a platform or service and integrate it into their lives.
1
2

http://wwwhome.math.utwente.nl/~volkovichyv/some2011
http://www.www2011india.com/

In a world full of choice where the fleeting attention of the user is a prime resource, itis essential that technology providers, in particular in the context of social media, not justdesign systems, but rather engaging experiences. The questions then become:• how do we do this,and closely related to that,• how do we assess the experience as being the kind we would like to design?
To answer these questions we need some way of assessing and measuring user engagement in the social media context. We need a framework in which user engagement can bestudied, measured and explained, leading to, for example, recommendations and guidelines
for user interface and interaction design, as well as having a direct impact on algorithms andfunctionalities implemented in social media platforms.
We aimed at organizing an interdisciplinary workshop that was especially focused onsocial media engagement. This was the first time that a workshop focusing specifically onsocial media engagement was organized. Several related recent events have been organizedaround social media topics, including search, mining, and machine learning, among others.
Related workshops include SOMA (at KDD 2010), WSM (at Multimedia 2009-10), SMUC(at CIKM 2010), and MLSC (at NIPS 2010). None of these previous events, however, focused
specifically on social media engagement.

1.1

Topics of interests

The workshop sought papers on the following topics:• Qualitative and quantitative social engagement models and metrics;• Methodologies for design and evaluation of engagement;• Psychological, sociological, and cultural factors in measuring engagement;• User needs and tasks in social media applications;• Engagement within and across platforms, e.g. desktop computers, tablets, and smart
phones;• Discovery of engagement patterns based on large-scale social media data analysis andmining;• Case studies highlighting social media factors that can impact engagement;• Analysis and mechanisms of incentives for engagement;• Domain-specific engagement metrics (e.g., gaming, search,advertising, marketing, branding, etc.);• Data sets and benchmarks suitable for measuring social media engagement;• Social media and engagement in the developing world.

1.2

Format of the workshop

The workshop was highly interactive, and all attendees contributed. The program included
an introductory summary of current challenges, an explanation of the goals of the workshop,
five presentations of the results reported in the refereed papers, a keynote-talk on targetingadvertisement, and break-out sessions. One of the outcomes of the workshop was a set oftopics that attendees deemed important in determining future research directions on socialmedia engagement. In particular, attendees worked in two groups: engagement metrics, andsocial media engagement and development. In the following section we present a summaryof the workshop.

2Workshop Summary

2.1

KeynoteThe keynote talk entitled “An introduction to Online Targeted Advertising: Principles, Implementation, Controversies” was given by Andrei Broder. Andrei is a Yahoo! Fellow andVice President for Computational Advertising and also serves as Chief Scientist for Yahoo’s
Advertising Product Group.
As all comes down to the money, in many cases studies of social engagement strongly
coincide with the scientific and technical foundations of the online advertising industry. Theindustry, which according to E-Marketer, was estimated to achieve $25.8B dollars in revenue
in 2010 in US alone, for the first time exceeding print advertising revenue at “only” $22.8B
dollars. The central problem of Computational Advertising, an emerging scientific subdiscipline of the online advertising, is to find the “best match” between a given user ina given context and a suitable advertisement. In other words, the central problem of theComputational Advertising is to answer the question how to engage a given user or groupof users to participate into an advertising campaign. Depending on the definition of “bestmatch” this problem leads to a variety of massive optimization and search, with complicatedconstraints.
The focus of Broder’s talk was on targeted advertising, a form of personalized advertisingwhereby advertisers specify the features of their desired audience, either explicitly, by specifying characteristics such as demographics, location, and context, or implicitly by providing
examples of their ideal audience. A particular form of targeted advertising is behavioral
targeting, where the desired audience is characterized by its past behavior. Broder discussed
how targeted advertising fits the optimization framework, presented some of the mechanisms
by which targeted and behavioral advertising are implemented, and briefly surveyed the open
issues surrounding behavioral advertising, particularly in regards to privacy. The presentation concluded with some insights on the future of personalized advertising and potentiallyinteresting areas of future research.

2.2

Refereed Papers Presentation

There were five refereed papers, which were accepted for presentation. Below we list thepresented papers, together with a brief description of each.
• R. Jain, V. Singh and M. Gao, Social life networks
The authors believe, rightly, that by using the enormous reach of mobile phones equippedwith myriads of sensors, the next generation of social networks can be designed not only
to connect people with other people, but to connect people with essential life resources.
The authors refer to these networks as Social Life Networks and believe that now isthe right time to focus efforts to discover and develop technology and infrastructure to
design and build these types of networks.
• V. Pathak, S. Smaldone and L. Iftode, Social farm: making social networks
work for profit
This paper presents the Social Farm architecture, which aims at encouraging user contribution through the profit motive. The aim here is to leverage the connectivity andtrust relationships available in online social networks to create and operate businesses
using the programming interface provided by existing on-line social networks. With
Social Farm, the tasks of finding partners, implementing the business workflow, managing profits and reputation, and managing the day-to-day operations of the business,become automated. The authors argue that by doing so, this will encourage contribution and engagement by providing an automatic mechanism for transparent and fair
distribution of profits to contributors.
• M. Patel, S. Chaudhary and M. Bhise, Agro-produce Marketing Using Social Networks
People can use social network platforms for marketing, buying and selling their products. Indeed, social networks can be used as a mechanism to bring sellers and buyers
closer. Microblogging services are part of social network platforms, which allow people
to exchange short messages. For example, sellers can tweet regarding product information including links of related photos, videos etc, whereas a buyer can show interest in
the product by means of tweets. Microblogs can be parsed and analyzed to generate
useful suggestions, e.g. sellers can be informed about potential buyers to get higher
profit. Such information can be used to generate classified information to help users tomake decisions, e.g. minimum expected price of a crop that sellers expect in a given
region. This paper proposes the use of a social network platform like twitter to enable
trade interactions among farmers and merchants, provide suggestions and recommendations based on classified summarized information using technologies such databases,
RDF/RDF(S) and OWL for better decision making.
• H. Purohit, Y. Ruan, A. Joshi, S. Parthasarathy and A. Sheth, Understanding User-Community Engagement by Multi-faceted Features: A Case Studyon TwitterThe widespread use of social networking websites in recent years has suggested a needfor effective methods to understand the new forms of user engagement, the factors
impacting them, and the fundamental reasons for such engagements. By performing
exploratory analysis on Twitter to understand the dynamics of user engagement bystudying what attracts a user to participate in discussions on a topic, the authors
identified various factors which might affect user engagement, ranging from content
properties, network topology to user characteristics on the social network. They thenused these to predict user joining behavior. Using their framework, People-ContentNetwork Analysis, they performed experiments on various Twitter user communities
formed around topics from diverse domains, with varied social significance, durationand spread. The findings suggest that capabilities of content, user and network features vary greatly, motivating the incorporation of all the factors in user engagement
analysis, and hence, a strong need can be felt to study dynamics of user engagement
by using their framework. The study also revealed certain correlation between types ofevent for discussion topics and impact of user engagement factors.

• L. Morado, D. Anastasiou, C. Exton and I. O’Keeffe, Web 2.0 and Localization
The more web-based communities multiply in number, type and geographical distribution, the more varied and global their requirements will become. This paper focuses
on a selection of Web 2.0 domains and considers how these communities provide both
new challenges, and new opportunities, to the software localization community. Inaddition to discussing how localization requirements are affected by this new content
type, two possible solutions to the challenges that Web 2.0 represents for localization
are considered, Machine Translation and Social Translation.

2.3Discussions

A main goal of the workshop was to encourage on-site discussion about the topics related
to engagement. The second half of the workshop was thus dedicated to discussions. The
organizers proposed the following topics:• Engagement and Development,• Metrics,• Behavior Analysis,• Economics of Engagement.
“Engagement and Development” and “Metrics” were selected by the audience for intense
discussion, and the workshop participants created two groups, each one focused on of thetwo above topics. Initially, each group was asked to think about the main topics of impact
in their corresponding area. Below we present the statements that were produced during thesession.

2.3.1

Metrics

Participants of the “Metrics” discussion group first aimed to understand and define typesof social activities and participation in social media. The following dimensions of social
activities were presented:• content contribution. There are different types of contributions and content. In particular, there is also metadata, e.g. comments;• perimeter of circulation;• endorsement, ratings, etc;
• joining and leaving various social groups. In particular, to answer the questions: what,how, and when?
• temporal patterns, such as longevity, burst, continuous and long engagements;• popularity and influence;• cultural dimensions.
The attendances noted that this list is not a final and complete list, and that other social
aspects could be possibly considered. The metrics of engagement, therefore, could be defined
through a multidimensional approach that takes into account all or almost all above listed
dimensions. Another important feature for the metric of engagement is that it should bea cross-measure between various platforms, meaning that ideally the devised metrics would
apply to different sites and services.
Based on defined desirable features the audience proposed a number of research directions.
Therefore, in order to model incentives, in particular, there was a proposal to consider
techniques from chaos and game theory. For defining models for users of social media known
results on group dynamics could be interfered. Finally, in terms of cross-platform capability,
more research should be done in order to understand how different devices might affectengagement.

2.3.2

Development

Participants of the “Engagement and Development” discussion group formulated the following challenging questions: how to use social media to focus on social problems? and how tomake social media available for the people who generally do not have access to the Internet?
According to the group of participants discussing development, the following issues should
be addressed:• geographical aspects;• spam and vulnerable behavior detection;• local language support• multimodal and multicultural aspects• e-government (laws, public knowledge (e.g. against corruption))• money engagement• personalization
Other aspects that need to be considered include the following: trust, management andbuilding of reputation; anonymity; flexible tools; laws and information access; rating (referring to trust as well); access to market; localization; credit systems, and bonuses.

3Conclusions

The workshop was successful in the sense that lively discussions took place and the questions
that were raised, both during the paper presentations and during the discussion sessions
highlighted important research issues. For instance, the idea of thinking of the metrics ofengagement in terms of dimensions consisting of different activity/content types lends itself
to many possibilities that have not been explored. For example,• do different types of contributions have different engagement value?
• are geographical aspects important in engagement for development?
One of the big challenges identified in the workshop also became quickly apparent in thediscussions:
The meaning of engagement is very much context-dependent and thus thinking ofa general definition is difficult at best.

From this perspective, focusing the discussion without a specific property or service in mind
was a real challenge. In spite of this, it also became clear that thinking of engagement requires
an interdisciplinary approach and different disciplines will have different perspectives andanswers on what engagement is and how to measure it. One of the key conclusions might
therefore be that in a workshop of this type the discussion sessions need to be a lot longer
and perhaps grounded on specific examples with a limited scope. Nonetheless, we think thatthe outcome and conclusions of each of the groups give us important insights into the typesof topics that are relevant for social media engagement research.