Social Media driven Coordination of Tourism Marketplace
NCSU workshop on ‘IT for Sustainable Development’Invited Talk, May 12 2014
Hemant Purohit (Computational Social Sci., PhD Candidate, Advisor: Prof. Amit Sheth)
Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis)
Dept. of Computer Sci. & Eng., Wright State University, USA
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage with
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 2
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage with
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 3
Era of Collective Intelligence
4Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Citizen Sensing: Voice of People/Customers/Providers!
http://news.accuracast.com/social-media-7471/social-networking-most-popular-online-activity/http://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks/chart/913/the-rise-of-social-networking-in-the-united-states/
Express opinions
Share experience
Report…
5Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Penetration into Almost All Domains in the Recent Years
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 6
http://paradivision.com/blog/2009/12/how-marketers-will-use-social-media-in-2010/
Tourism Industry: A Social Perspective
Approximately one-fifth of leisure travellers worldwide turn to social media platforms for inspiration within different categories of their travel planning including:
Hotels (23%)
Vacation activities (22%)
Attractions (21%)
Restaurants (17%)
*Via eMarketer 2013 (referencing research conducted by Redshift Research)
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 7
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2014/02/07/the-impact-of-social-media-in-the-travel-marketing-industry/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 8
http://www.tnooz.com/article/social-travel-sites-are-screaming-for-attention-but-industry-and-consumers-are-not-really-listening/
Global Initiatives for Marriage of Tourism and Social Media
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 9
Africa: Kenya’s tourism boost via social media http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/mobile/?articleID=2000111172&story_title=social-
media-holds-key-in-kenya-s-bid-to-boost-tourism
Global: Social media conference for destination marketers https://www.facebook.com/SoMeTourism
…
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 10
Which platforms to use?
http://heidicohen.com/inside-scoop-on-how-marketers-use-social-media-research/
(For Marketing)
Benefits of Social Media for Tourism: Opportunity for Data Analytics
Reputation management
Customer service channel
Inbound marketing to reach more customers
Personalized search
Mobile support for on-the-fly services
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 11
Source: http://www.tourism-review.com/travel-tourism-magazine-top-5-social-media-trends-in-tourism-category1651
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 12
Challenge: Heterogeneity
Multiple channels
Phone, fax, TV, radio, newspapers, internet, sensor networks, etc.
Coexistence of technologies, a constant
Social media is heterogeneous
Verified accounts
Re-tweets from well-known sources
Eyewitness reports
Lots more!
Different types (unstructured text, structured, multimedia) may require different tools
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http://blogs.lse.ac.uk
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenge: Velocity
According to recent Twitter statistics: (Twitter Blog, 2013)
During specific events, tweeting rate has reached 143,199 tweets/sec.
Average 5,700 tweets/sec.
~500 million tweets/day
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http://seventhinc.com/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenge: Scale
In some countries a sizable fraction of the population has Internet access
Tweets are small and nimble but they point to webpages, include images, videos, etc.
You need to process a lot to obtain a little There are many tweets but
Only some of them contain usable information
Only a fraction of those can be handled by automatic systems
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Top-4 countries by Twitter penetration among Internet users; by Comscore via http://5mk.co/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenge: Redundancy
Information from multiple information channels may not be unique
Near-duplicates frustrate users and waste their time Definition of abstraction level (to merge items) is always
arbitrary, depends on the application
Automatic systems tend to pick what is redundant first Not necessarily a bad thing, e.g. phrases that are often
repeated, tweets that are often re-tweeted, etc.
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Millenial’s information sources http://ypulse.com/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenge: Biases Social Media Bias:
Youngers better user than elders
Educated users more existent than uneducated
Technology Privileged users more existent than unprivileged
Study carefully, with the grains of salt!
Smart sampling
Smart data cleaning
Smart algorithms
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Challenge: Noise Everyone wants to be heard
Independently of adding any value
Emotional expressions and even jokes drive the data traffic
Informal text and jargon hinders automatic text processing
18Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenge: Verifiability
Social media users are starting to develop their own methods to validate information
Sometimes most rumors are spread by well-intentioned people But there are also some pranksters
We need a more fine-grained approach than true/false (we have always needed it)
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Edelman 2012http://edelman.com/trust
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 20
Social Media driven Tourism Marketplace: Stakeholders
Tourists (info/resource seekers)
Micro-entrepreneurs (info/resource suppliers)
Opinion makers/ Discussion Leaders, ..
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 21
Social Media driven Tourism Marketplace: Activities
Matching framework for needs of tourists & service providers
Micro-Payment: Mobile-Social based
e.g., Amazon’s Hashtag based initiative on Twitter
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-05-05/twitter-teams-up-with-amazon-to-let-customers-shop-by-hashtag
e.g., TinyGive: Pre-registered users using specific hashtags and key-phrase constructs to show intent for transaction
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 22
Example to Crisis Response: Varying but Few Important Intentions
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 23
Image: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/04/how-we-identify-single-voices-in-a-crowd/
BIG QUESTION: Can these needles be identified in the haystack of massive datasets?
Me and @CeceVancePR are coordinating a clothing/food drive for families affected by Hurricane Sandy. If you would like to donate, DM us
Does anyone know how to donate clothes to hurricane #Sandy victims?
[REQUEST/DEMAND]
[OFFER/SUPPLY]Coordination teams
want to hear!
WHY Coordination of Marketplace? Uncoordinated engagement reduces efficiency
Under-supply of required demands
Over-supply of not required supplies
• Hurricane Sandy example, “Thanks, but no thanks”, NPR, Jan 12 2013. Story links:
• http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168946170/thanks-but-no-thanks-when-post-disaster-donations-overwhelm
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Goal: Data to Meaning Transformation to assist Coordination
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 25
Coordination of Actions
Citizen Sensing related to Crisis on Social Media
Interpretation of sensed data via context categories (e.g., need types)
Annotated data explicitly specifying meaning (e.g., intent/behavior, type, what-where-when-who-why metadata)
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 26
Identify-Match-Engage (IME) Computing Framework
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 27
Illustration of Social Aid Marketplace
during Disasters
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 28
Problem: Identifying and Matching Demand and Supply related to Donations
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How to volunteer, donate to Hurricane Sandy: <URL>
If you have clothes to donate to those who are victims of Hurricane Sandy …
Red Cross is urging blood donations to support those affected <URL>
I have TONS of cute shoes & purses I want to donate to hurricane victims …
Does anyone know how to donate clothes to hurricane #Sandy victims?
Does anyone know of community service organizations to volunteer to help out?
Needs to get something, suggests scarcity:
REQUEST (Demand)Offers or wants to give, suggests abundance:
OFFER (Supply)
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Challenges Demand and Supply intentions are intermingled and subjective
Simple heuristic of Questioning may not imply a demand (seeking) behavior
Existence of group demand or supply: Authors can be individuals or organizations
Intent of demand from the third party is possible (e.g., request for the blood drive via Red Cross)
Imbalanced resource class distribution
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I made these during #sandy. I will donate $5 from each snowflake I sell to the #redcross for hurricane victims. http://...
Current MethodsDomain: Crisis Response
Manual: Demand and Supply information collection via registration
e.g., recovers.org, AidMatrix, VolunteerMatch, TapRoot, etc.
Challenge: Limitation of scale and human resources
Automatic: A Classification Problem
Plain Supervised Text Classification
Challenge: Confusing intentions in text of human expressions
ML & NLP based method for identifying problem/aid nuclei (Varga et al., 2013)
Assumption: Problem/Aid nuclei via noun-predicate dependency relation
31Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Supervised Learning Classification
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 32(Purohit et al., First Monday, 2014a)
Demand-Supply Classifier: Employing Colloquial Knowledge
1st Experimental trial: with traditional word N-gram features
Challenge: Confusing n-gram patterns, such as-
“want to donate for help, check here ...” (demand) vs. “want to donate some money to help my friends who lost everything in hurricane sandy disaster” (supply)
2-fold Solution:
Leverage domain colloquial knowledge of word patterns used in manual data mining
Shared by colleagues at American Red Cross. E.g., need help , place to stay
Sequential Classification: use prediction probability of 1st classification in the 2nd
Classifier 1: {Exclusive Request, Exclusive Offer or None}
Classifier 2: {Exclusive Offer, None}
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 33(Purohit et al., First Monday, 2014a)
Resource Type Classifier: Modified Design
Highly imbalanced class distribution of the data: observed from the first round of labeling and therefore, employed bias sample proportions
Classes labeled:
Features: General N-gram features, with addition of domain features (regex based)
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 34
• Clothing• Food• Medical supplies
including blood• Money
• Shelter• Volunteer work• Not request or offer• Request or offer for
something else• Cannot judge
Text \"FOOD\" to 32333, REDCROSS to 90999, or STORM to
80888 to donate $10 in storm relief. #moore
#oklahoma#disasterrelief #donate
VICTIM SITE
Does anyone know where to send a
check to donate to the tornado victims?
Where do I go to help out for
volunteer work around Moore? Anyone know?
Matched
If you would like to volunteer today, help is desperately needed in Shawnee. Call 273-5331
for more info
RESPONSE TEAMS
CITIZEN SENSORS
Match DEMAND-
SUPPLY
Image: http://offthewallsocial.com/tag/social-media/
Matched
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 35(Purohit et al., First Monday, 2014a)
Geo-Location Semantics: Important driver for Marketplace Analytics
Enabling Complex Queries, e.g.
Find potential tourists for Raleigh with interest in farms
Data Challenge: Highly sparse geo-metadata
Device metadata (cellphone coordinates)
Mentioned locations in text
Use of Informal language makes it harder to identify locations
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 36
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 37
Motivation: Event-Oriented or Brand Page Communities
Voluminous Data and Users!
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 38
Exploit Who-talks-to-Whom Network
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 39
Twitris Tool: Recommended Influencers to engage with by Specific Needs
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Influential users are for respective needs. Right side
shows their interaction network on social media.
Engaging with influencers in the communities can be very powerful for- a.) getting important information, b.) Correcting rumors in the network, c.) Propagating important information back into the citizen sensor
communityPurohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 41
Motivation: Generic Problem of User Engagement with Influencers
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 42
HuffingtonPost• Increasing use of recommended influencers and their content from social media.
• No relevance cues about who they are and why they are experts
• Problem of user engagement with the content
Motivation
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 43
• Now I can see why …
Senior Media Reporterfor The Huffington Post
Better engagement with content!
User Data Mining
Analysis & Aggregation
Tagline
(Purohit et al., Social Informatics, 2012b)
What Data to Exploit?
Meformer Self Descriptive
e.g., Profile Bio, Content of the user posts
Informer Others describe the person: available in external knowledge bases
e.g., Wikipedia, IMDB, Freebase etc.
44Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination
Faceted Engagement: Use of Generated Expertise Summaries
Classification of users (summaries) into occupation types to provide classified facets for engagement Journalism
Medical
Technology, etc.
Useful for enabling coordinators to do customized/ ‘personalized’ engagement as per class type e.g., In disasters, response coordinator may want to communicate
with ‘humanitarian’ professionals differently than ‘journalists’
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 45
Outline
1. Role of Social Media for Tourism
2. Social Computing challenges
3. Social Media driven marketplace
4. Identifying demands and supplies
5. Contextual matching of
demand-supply
6. Recommend influencers for whom to engage
7. Providing faceted engagementwith Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 46
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 47
Twitris v3: http://twitris.knoesis.org/yolandastorm2013/networkTest/
Conclusion A marketplace’s function-centric (Identify-Match-Engage)
technology can leverage social media Automatically identifying demand and supply of tourism needs
Automatically match demand-supply of tourism needs
Recommendation for whom to engage with, and
Faceted engagement via user summarization
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 49
Thanks.. Contact: [email protected] , Twitter: @hemant_pt
NSF for the SoCS grant #IIS-1111182 to support the work on social media based coordination during emergencies
Adviser Prof. Amit Sheth, and Interdisciplinary Co-advisers: Profs. Valerie Shalin (Cognitive Sci., WSU), John Flach(Cognitive Systems, WSU), Srini Parthasarathy (Network Sci., OSU)
Mentors: Patrick Meier (QCRI), Carlos Castillo/ChaTo (QCRI), Fernando Diaz (Microsoft Research), MeenaNagarajan (IBM Research), Alex Dow (Facebook), Jitendra Ajmera (IBM Research), Omar Alonso (Microsoft), Kevin Haas (Microsoft), Lei Duan (Microsoft), Sachindra Joshi (IBM Research), Ashish Verma (IBM Research), ShubhaNabar (LinkedIn)
Colleagues:
Kno.e.sis Social Computing team including Andrew Hampton from the WSU Psychology dept., in addition to Yiye Ruan, and Dave Fuhry at the Data Mining Lab, Ohio State University.
Digital Volunteers from the organizations- StandBy Task Force, info4Disasters, Crisis Mappers network, Humanity Road, Ushahidi, etc. and the subject matter experts at UNFPA
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 50