Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks - Challenges and Experiences

1. MeenakshiNagarajan, KamalBaid, AmitSheth and Shaojun Wang KNOESIS, Wright State University Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks - Challenges and Experiences M. Nagarajan, K. Baid, A. P. Sheth, and S. Wang, "Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks - Challenges and Experiences“, 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Milan, Italy

2. Targeted Content Delivery on SNSs • Content-based advertisements (CBAs) • Well-known monetization model on the Web but not translating well on SNSs • Monetizing content on Web 2.0 • Where to monetize • What to monetize • It’s the talk of the town!

3. State of the art – Content-Based Ads on SNSs May 30,June 02 2009

4. State of the art – Content-Based Ads on SNSs June 01, 2009

5. What is going on here.. • Interests stated on user home/profile pages do not translate to purchase intents • Interests are often outdated.. • Intents are rarely stated on a profile.. • Some highly demographic targeted cases work • Overall, click through stats are staggeringly low – show some

6. Intents in User Activity Elsewhere.. Missed Opportunities • Concert tickets • MP3 downloads • Services in and around location June 01, 2009

7. Intents in User Activity Elsewhere.. Missed Opportunities June 01, 2009

8. Challenges in Monetizing User Gener • Informal, casual nature of content • People are sharing experiences and events • Main message overloaded with off topic content • Non-policed content • Brand image, Unfavorable sentiments1 • People are there to network • User attention to ads is not guaranteed • I NEED HELP WITH SONY VEGAS PRO 8!! Ugh and i have a video project due tomorrow for merrill lynch :(( all i need to do is simple: Extract several scenes from a clip, insert captions, transitions and thats it. really. omggi cant figure out anything!! help!! and i got food poisoning from eggs. its not fun. Pleasssse, help? :( 1Learning from Multi-topic Web Documents for Contextual Advertisement, Zhang, Y., Surendran, A. C., Platt, J. C., and Narasimhan, M.  , KDD 2008

9. Talk Outline • System that generates ads based on activity (user generated content) elsewhere by 1. Identifying monetizable posts: intents behind user posts • Pull content with monetization potential 2. Identifying keywords for advertizing from monetizable posts • Dealing with off-topic chatter

10. System Overview and User Studies • User studies • Hard to compare activity based ads to s.o.t.a • So we evaluate subgoals • How well are we able to identify monetizable posts (component 1) • How targeted are ads generated using our keywords vs. entire user generated content (component 2)

11. Intentions Behind Content Identification, Evaluation

12. Identifying Monetizable Intents • Scribe Intent not same as Web Search Intent1 • People write sentences, not keywords or phrases • Presence of a keyword does not imply navigational / transactional intents • ‘am thinking of getting X’ (transactional) • ‘i like my new X’ (information sharing) • ‘what do you think about X’ (informationseeking) 1B. J. Jansen, D. L. Booth, and A. Spink, “Determining the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of web queries,” Inf. Process. Manage., vol. 44, no. 3, 2008.

13. From Entities to Action Patterns • Action patterns surrounding an entity (X) • How questions are asked and not topic words that indicate what the question is about • “where can I find a chottopsp cam” • User post also has an entity

14. Bootstrapping to learn Information Seeking (IS) Patterns – offline step MySpace User Posts (not annotated for intent) Extract all 4-grams > freq 3 Using seed words (who, when, why, what, how) Extract all 4-grams containing seed words Candidate / Potential set of patterns (Sc) ‘does anyone know how’, ‘where do i find’, ‘someone tell me where’…

15. Bootstrapping to learn IS patterns ‘does anyone know how’, ‘where do i find’, ‘someone tell me where’… 10 manually picked Information Seeking Patterns Sis ‘how cool are we’ is not Information Seeking Candidate patterns Sc • Remaining candidatepatternsSc = Sc - Sis Goal: Evaluate candidate patterns and judge if it is Information Seeking or not

16. Bootstrapping to learn IS patterns ‘does anyone know how’ For every known Information Seeking pattern in Sisgenerate set of filler patterns ‘.* anyone know how’ ‘does anyone .* how’ ‘does anyone know .*’ ‘does .* know how’ • For each filler • Look for patterns in candidate pool Sc • Functional compatibility of filler • words used in similar semantic contexts • - Empirical support for filler

17. Extracting and Scoring Patterns - Example • Known Information Seeking patterns Sis= {‘does anyone know how’, ‘where do I find’, ‘someone tell me where’} • pisfrom Sis = `does anyone know how’ • Match ‘does * know how’ with patterns in the Candidate Pool • ‘does someone know how’ • Functional Compatibility- Impersonal pronouns • Empirical Support – 1/3 • ‘does somebody know how’ • Functional Compatibility - Impersonal pronouns • Empirical Support – 0 • Pattern still retained – there might be support for somebody later on in the iterative process • ‘does john know how’ • Pattern discarded • Functional Compatibility from a subset of LIWC1 • -Cognitive mechanical (e.g., if, whether, wondering, find) • ‘I am thinking about getting X’ • -Adverbs (e.g., how, somehow, where) • Impersonalpronouns (e.g., someone, anybody, whichever) • ‘Someone tell me where can I find X’ 1Linguistic Inquiry Word Count,LIWC, http://liwc.net

18. Other details in the paper.. • Over iterations, single-word substitutions, functional usage and empirical support conservatively expands Sis • Infusing new patterns and seed words • Stopping conditions

19. Sample Extracted Patterns • does anyone know how • anyone know how to • idont know what • know where i can • tell me how to • idont know how • anyone know where i • does anyone know where • does anyone know what • anybody know how to • anyone know how i • im not sure what • does anybody know how • does anyone know why • i was wondering how • does anyone know when • tell me what to • im not sure how • i was wondering what • no idea how to • someone tell me how • have no clue what • does anyone know if • idont know if • know if i can • anyone know if i • im not sure if • i was wondering if • idea what you are • let me know how • and idont know • now idont know • but idont really • was wondering if someone • would like to see • see what i can • anyone have any idea • wondering if someone could • was wondering how i • i do not want

20. Identifying the Monetization Potential of a new post • Information Seeking patterns generated offline • Monetization Potential of a post calculated by • Finding its Information Seeking score : Extracting and comparing patterns in posts with extracted patterns + • Finding its Transactional Intent Score: Using the LIWC ‘Money’ dictionary • 173 words and word forms indicative of transactions, e.g., trade, deal, buy, sell, worth, price etc.

21. Benchmarking with Facebook Marketplace • Using a training corpus of 8000 user posts • MySpace Computers, Electronics, Gadgets forum • Generated 309 unique new Information Seeking patterns • Test Set: Using 3 sets of 150 posts each from Facebook ‘to buy’ Marketplace • All these posts have Information Seeking and Transactional intents • 81 % of these posts were identified as monetizable in nature using our algorithm • Validates usefulness of action patterns

22. Identifying Keywords Off-topic Noise Elimination from posts with Monetization Potential

23. Identifying Keywords for Advertizing • Identifying keywords in monetizable posts • Plethora of work in this space • Off-topic noise removal is our focus • I NEED HELP WITH SONY VEGAS PRO 8!! Ugh and i have a video project due tomorrow for merrill lynch :(( all i need to do is simple: Extract several scenes from a clip, insert captions, transitions and thats it. really. omggi cant figure out anything!! help!! and i got food poisoning from eggs. its not fun. Pleasssse, help? :(

24. Conceptual Overview – Details in Paper • Topical hints • C1 - ['camcorder'] • Keywords in post • C2 - ['electronics forum', 'hd', 'camcorder', 'somethin', 'ive', 'canon', 'little camera', 'canon hv20', 'cameras', 'offtopic'] • Move strongly related keywords from C2 to C1 • Relatedness determined using concepts of information gain • Counts from Web as a corpus • Makes for a domain independent solution

25. Off-topic Chatter - Example • C1 - ['camcorder'] • C2 - ['electronics forum', 'hd', 'camcorder', 'somethin', 'ive', 'canon', 'little camera', 'canon hv20', 'cameras', 'offtopic'] • Informative words • ['camcorder', 'canon hv20', 'little camera', 'hd', 'cameras', 'canon']

26. Evaluations Ongoing Work

27. What are we evaluating.. Ideally, we would like to deploy on SNSs and observe click throughs Approximating with subgoals • Effectiveness of using topical keywords instead of entire post content • Effectiveness of using user generated content on SNSs instead of profile (homepage) information

28. User Study – Set Up • Keywords from 60 picked monetizable user posts • 45 MySpace Forums, 15 Facebook Marketplace split into 10 sets of 6 posts each • 30 graduate students, each set of 6 posts evaluated by 3 randomly selected users

29. 1. Effectiveness of using topical keywords • Google AdSense ads for user post content vs. extracted topical keywords

30. Instructions – Example • Choose relevant Ad Impressions • VW 6 disc CD changer • I need one thats compatible with a 2000 golf most are sold from years 1998-2004if anyone has one [or can get one] PLEASE let me know!

31. Result - 2X Relevant Impressions • Users picked ads relevant to the post • At least 50% inter-evaluator agreement • For the 60 posts based on content • Total of 144 ad impressions • 17% of ads picked as relevant • For the topical keywords • Total of 162 ad impressions • 40% of ads picked as relevant

32. 2. Profile Ads vs. Activity Ads • User’s profile information • Interests, hobbies, tv shows.. • Non-demographic information • Submit a post • Looking to buy and why (induced noise) • Qsn asked: Select ads that generate interest, captured attention

33. Result - 8X Generated Interest • Using profile ads • Total of 56 ad impressions • 7% of ads generated interest • Using user submitted posts (entire content, already monetizable) • Total of 56 ad impressions • 43% of ads generated interest • Using topical keywords from submitted posts • Total of 59 ad impressions • 59% of ads generated interest

34. To note… • User studies small and results preliminary, but clearly suggest • Monetization potential in user activity • Improvement for Ad programs in terms of relevant impressions • Evaluations based on forum, marketplace • Verbose content • May not work as well for micro-blog like content, status updates etc.

35. To note… • A world between relevant impressions and clickthroughs • Objectionable content, vocabulary impedance, Ad placement, network behavior • Our works fits in a pipeline of other community efforts • No profile information taken into account • Cannot custom send information to Google AdSense

36. Thank you • Social Media Content Analysis @ Kno.e.sis • Google/Bing: Meena Nagarajan • meena@knoesis.org • http://knoesis.wright.edu/students/meena/ • Google/Bing: Amit Sheth • amit@knoesis.org • http://knoesis.org/amit • Sponsors: NSF (Semantic Discovery - SemDis), IBM UIMA Innovation Award 2007: "UIMA-based Infrastructure for Summarizing Casual, Unstructured Text”, Microsoft's Beyond Search - Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award 2008: Chatter, Intent and Good Karma for Targeted Advertising in Social Networks