With rapid development of information technology, we can easily access to the Internet with our phone, tablet, laptop, and PC. Social networking is no longer limited by the time or location. The communication takes place through the electronic devices on the way home, during break in class or any time you like.
By witnessing how this happens and changes our daily lifestyle, no one could ignore the importance of social networking. When social networking becomes a new-opened course in MSc of IE, I decided to take it without hesitation and hope it could help me form a systemic knowledge and get acquainted with the state-of-art development of this area.
From the first two lectures, we could see that social networking is an interdisciplinary subject involving multiple fields including computer networks and application, psychology, and sociology. And we also talked about Social Tasks, Social Media, Social Media and Marketing. Influenced by my undergraduate supervisor who specializes in E-commerce and Data Mining, I am interested in social media marketing and think its prospects are quite promising.
Social media marketing is about information sharing. With Web 2.0, users can now express their views and publish information online. When most people buy the products, they inquire about other people’s opinion and refer to recommended product. Today, more and more websites, such as Amazon (http://www.amazon.com), Taobao (http://www.taobao.com), lead people to write their opinion about products they are interested in. Thus online data is becoming a more useful and important information resource for customer to do a purchase decision. What’s more, the online review data is also precious marketing information for manufacturers as they can gather feedback from the data to do market analysis and prediction.
Figure 1. Overview of Opinion Mining Method
Opinion mining is one of the most popular topics in the field of social media marketing. Its ultimate goal is to extract customers’ opinions on product reviews and to provide useful information for others. Figure 1. presents an overview of opinion mining method using POS tagging and association rules[1]. Besides, I foud an interesting study about the problem of generating a "rated aspect summary" of short comments[2], which is a decomposed view of the overall ratings for the major aspects so that a user could gain different perspectives towards the target products or services(Figure 2.).
Figure 2. Rated Aspect Summarization Generating System
Reference:
[1] Won Young Kim, Joon Suk Ryu, Kyu Il Kim, and Ung Mo Kim. A method for opinion mining of product reviews using association rules. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interaction Sciences: Information Technology, Culture and Human, pages 270-274, 2009.
[2] Yue Lu, ChengXiang Zhai, and Neel Sundaresan. Rated aspect summarization of short comments. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, pages131-140, 2009.
