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.
Hello, my friend. Taobao is a great platform for its completely comments system. Each time I search a product, I would review other buyers' comments firstly. For my experience, the comments can be divided into two kinds which are weak comment and strong comment. The former is something like "Good", "Bad", "I feel very happy to get this..." etc. But the latter can deliver many useful information, like "I am 177cm tall and 77 kg, I feel the XL is the right size", "This color is not as bright as the picture", etc. So can I say the "rated aspect summary" is a method to avoid weak comments?
ReplyDeleteHello my friend, thank you for your comment!
DeleteYour interpretation of the "rated aspect summary" is exactly right with the vivid examples. The author proposed the novel method to convert the "weak comment" to more useful information so that customers could use them to do better purchase decisions. However, the present method can just provide opinion summary and still to be improved to generate more detailed opinions like you illustrated, "This color is not as bright as the picture".
hello!haha`~~ I like the Figure 2 Rated Aspect Summarization Generating System. It's important to expound your central meaning. More importantly, your reference is a shining part. This is a good artical for analysis. I really want to be a follower of your post, but I don't know how to do it.TT
ReplyDeleteThank you for your encouragement~ And it's shown that you have been one of the followers on my page. Can't you see this from your account?
DeleteHi, blogger Luo! Glad to see that you and your 2 followers are interested in on-line customer review, one important aspect of UGC, which is still a mainstream in MIS research.
ReplyDeleteYou,or rather the literature you piched up, gave a fantastic reseach direction, which also had some application meanings. Nevertheless, I recommend you to do a research on that which aspects in a customer review really help our potential customers before you get down to realizing the "rated aspect summary". Maybe some details like customers compliments are useless to us, while something about the reviewers status information is critically important.
So, you may refer to a passage in MISQ which focuses on deciding a useful review in behavior and economic perspectives.
Hope you good luck in your research.
Hi, so glad to see you here, my old friend! Appreciate your informative comment and suggestion always.
DeleteUGC is an important part of WEB2.0 and will be continuously applied to many other business fields. I agree that it's essential to filter out the useless contents as much as possible so that we would not drown in the large information pool!
I find UGC is really exceptionally popular. A professor from the Eller College, University of Arizona is invited to come here to deliver a lecture on "'Popularity Effect' in User-Generated Contents: Evidence from Online Product Reviews" this Friday. I'm ready to attend and will compare notes with you if I pick up sth. useful.
DeleteThe lecture sounds great and it may trigger your new thought and solution for your assignment of BI~
DeleteImpressive. I also made a lot of orders on Taobao this year. Based on my own experience, the sales volume, price, rating and users'comments are important criteria on my decision. Among the comments, I will firstly check the "negative comment" and "additional comment". Because negative comment acknowledges me potential drawbacks on the product or the seller. Additional comment is also helpful as original comment must be made in first few days after the buyer received the product while some products cannot be evaluated in such short duration.
ReplyDeleteWe could say that the information is enough to help us make judgement. Nevertheless, it is time costly. I believe that it will be much more helpful if there is a more powerful filter, which could recommend product not just by the price and rating, but also by the comments.
Just as the title of this blog says, more value is to be discovered.
Hi, thank you for your comments!
DeleteI feel like that's what I would do before I finally make a purchase decision when I refer to your shopping experience. I also pay a lot of attention to the "negative comment" because you won't find them from the sellers' own descriptions of the products. And you pointed out the present searching and referring cost is high as it's time consuming and efficiency and effectiveness of information in social media marketing are both to be improved in the near future.
Yes, opinions and comments is important in social media marketing. For me, I would always look at comments of others before buying a product in Taobao. Your essay also brings another view that these comments can be marketing information for manufacturers, which I have not thought about before.
ReplyDelete