Simula@BI seminar: Ivan Belik, NHH

Interdisciplinary Analysis of Information Diffusion in Large-scale Media Platforms 

Interest in the phenomenon of social influence has elicited fruitful research across many disciplines, including social network analysis and digital marketing. However, much remains unknown about the complex processes that guide spreading of word-of-mouth, especially in large-scale online networks of consumers. 

Aiming to better understand dynamics of information diffusion and the role played in it by consumer attitudes towards brand-related content, we employ a novel combination of topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and network analysis that allows us to extract thematically homogeneous networks from the vast array of unstructured textual data produced by users of the popular social network Reddit.

Our analysis of 270 million postings spanning all activity produced in 1,027 Reddit communities over a 12-month period reveals two key findings. First, in the task of facilitating electronic word-of-mouth the importance of consumers’ attitude towards the topic of word-of-mouth is far outweighed by the importance of their position in the social media network's topology. Second, in highly asymmetrical social networks, commonly used and well-established methods of identifying influential spreaders are often outperformed by simpler metrics.

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