FIRST INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT (SoME 2011)

Workshop at WWW 2011 – Hyderabad, India, 28 or 29 March 2011

http://wwwhome.math.utwente.nl/~volkovichyv/some2011

Important dates

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· Paper submission deadline: February 12, 2011

· Notification of acceptance: February 26, 2011

· Camera ready copy deadline: March, 2, 2011

· Workshop: March 28 or 29, 2011

Submission

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· Long papers: up to 8 pages

· Short papers: up to 4 pages

Papers must be formatted according to the ACM format:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

Submissions must be made electronically in PDF through EasyChair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=some2011

Overview

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Over the last two decades the nature of human-computer interaction has transformed. The conceptualization of the user has changed from being a cog in an organizational machine and a source of errors, to a partner in social interaction and ultimately consumer, and more recently to content creator. The shift in paradigm has been tremendous, particularly on the Web. Within this shift, a strong new focus is the sharing of experiences through social media, with one of the main implications being that traditional user metrics hardly give insights into user behavior or satisfaction. Interest in engagement and how to measure it in this new setting has thus gained significant momentum, in particular given the success of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Digg, Flickr, Youtube, etc.) and the corresponding implications for advertising and user satisfaction.

Engagement defines the phenomena of being captivated and motivated: engagement can be measured in terms of a single interactive session or of a more long-term relationship with the social platform across multiple interactions. Thus, social media engagement is not just about how a single interaction unfolds, but about how and why people develop a relationship with a platform or service and integrate it into their lives.

In a world full of choice where the fleeting attention of the user becomes a prime resource, it is essential that technology providers, in particular in the context of social media not just design systems but rather engaging experiences. The questions then become: how do we do this, and closely related to that, how do we assess the experience as being the kind we would like to design? To answer these questions we need some way of assessing and measuring user engagement in the social media context. We need a framework in which user engagement can be studied, measured and explained, leading to, for example, recommendations and guidelines for user interface and interaction design, as well as having a direct impact on algorithms and functionalities implemented in social media platforms.

The aim of this workshop is to encourage discussion and sharing of ideas and research results on social media engagement. We aim to promote interdisciplinary research and exchange of ideas in this area, not only between industry and academia, but also between different fields (e.g., computer science, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc.). In particular, we would like to discuss approaches to address some of the serious research challenges we face in devising engagement metrics, in developing methodologies, and in understanding how different technical approaches can be used to enhance our understanding of user behavior in social media.

Topics of interest

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Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following:

· Qualitative and quantitative social engagement models and metrics;

· Methodologies for design and evaluation of engagement;

· Psychological, sociological, and cultural factors in measuring engagement;

· User needs and tasks in social media applications;

· Engagement within and across platforms, e.g. desktop computers,
tablets, and smartphones;

· Discovery of engagement patterns based on large-scale social media data analysis and mining;

· Case studies highlighting social media factors that can impact engagement;

· Analysis and mechanisms of incentives for engagement;

· Domain-specific engagement metrics (e.g., gaming, search, advertising, marketing, branding, etc.);

· Data sets and benchmarks suitable for measuring social media engagement;

· Social media and engagement in the developing world.



Workshop chairs

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Alejandro Jaimes (Yahoo! Research, Spain)

Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo! Research, Spain)
Yana Volkovich (Barcelona Media Innovation Centre, Spain)

TPC
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Simon Attfield (Middlesex University, UK)

Maribeth Back (FXPal, USA)

Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter, USA)

Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research, USA)

Alan Dix (Lancaster University, UK)

Debora Donato (Yahoo! Research, USA)

Elisa Giaccardi (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)

Daniel Goldstein (Yahoo! Research, USA)

Gene Golovchinsky (FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA)

Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, France)

Petter Holme (Umea University, Sweden)

Frank Nack (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Kerry Rodden (Google Research , USA)

Ian Soboroff (NIST, USA)

Elaine Toms (Dalhousie University, Canada)