Towards Maximising Cross-Community Information Diffusion

Abstract

In recent years, companies have started to utilise online social communities as a means of communicating with and targeting their employees and customers, and such online communities include discussion fora. The conversational dynamics of users in fora can influence their neighbours in the underlying social network. We make use of such influence to target specific communities with information, i.e. post in them, because a post is generally shared with the community and not just with individual users. In short, we study information diffusion across communities and show that we can achieve high community (and user) spread using an efficient targeting strategy. In order to achieve this, we use a set of novel measures for cross-community influence and show that it outperforms other targeting strategies on two different data-sets: the largest Irish online discussion system, Boards.ie, and technical support fora, SAP SCN.