Online Actions with Offline Impact

Abstract

Many of today’s most widely used computing applications utilize social networking features and allow users to connect, follow each other, share content, and comment on others’ posts. However, despite the widespread adoption of these features, there is little understanding of the consequences that social networking has on user retention, engagement, and online as well as offline behavior. Here, we study how social networks influence user behavior in a physical activity tracking application. We analyze 791 million online and offline actions of 6 million users over the course of 5 years, and show that social networking leads to a significant increase in users’ online as well as offline activities. Specifically, we establish a causal effect of how social networks influence user behavior. We show that the creation of new social connections increases user online in-application activity by 30%, user retention by 17%, and user offline real-world physical activity by 7% (about 400 steps per day). By exploiting a natural experiment we distinguish the effect of social influence of new social connections from the simultaneous increase in user’s motivation to use the app and take more steps. We show that social influence accounts for 55% of the observed changes in user behavior, while the remaining 45% can be explained by the user’s increased motivation to use the app. Further, we show that subsequent, individual edge formations in the social network lead to significant increases in daily steps. These effects diminish with each additional edge and vary based on edge attributes and user demographics. Finally, we utilize these insights to develop a model that accurately predicts which users will be most influenced by the creation of new social network connections.

Unblurring the boundary between daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games, visual online ethnography on Pokémon GO

“…Ethnography is derived from anthropological tradition of documenting and interpreting aspects of human experience and cultural behaviour. According to Senior and Chenhall (2012), ethnography is a methodology with a non-reductionist view of the world (Althoff, Jindal, and Leskovec 2017), capable of capturing the lived experiences of human, their context to gain in-depth understanding. Skågeby (2008) defines ethnography as a description of individuals, groups or cultures in their own environment often over an extended period.…”

“…Game achievements and captured Pokémon are reported extensively, when personal matters, prevalent in personal social media content, are not as common (Hu, Manikonda, and Kambhampati 2014;Majgaard and Larsen 2017). Activity in social networks has been found to result in enhanced physical activity in related activities, which combined with the increased physical activity of the Pokémon GO players can enhance the healthy effect (Althoff, Jindal, and Leskovec 2017;Althoff, White, and Horvitz 2016). The reach of Pokémon GO to the digital space of social media also has other implications.…”

Beautiful and Damned. Combined Effect of Content Quality and Social Ties on User Engagement

“…Stuart addressed the problem of estimating causal effects [64] using observational data, and explained how to design matching methods that replicate a randomized experiment as closely as possible by obtaining treated and control groups with similar covariate distribution. Those type of techniques are increasingly used being used to analyze digital traces [2]; we leverage them in our work too.…”

“…There are several ways to perform matching [50,55,64] and to measure the equivalence between treatment and control groups. Here we borrow a framework introduced by Rubin [56] and later summarized by Stuart [64], which has been successfully used in other observational studies aimed at infer causality [2]. This framework assumes that G t and G c are somehow formed and provides a function to check their statistical equivalence.…”

System to evaluate social network groups for the implementation of marketing activities

“…Среди сущест-вующих направлений исследований можно отметить следующие: изучение методов пропаганды, инфор-мационных войн, выявление центров распростране-ния информации (например, источника сплетен [2]), исследование причин и признаков распространения ложной информации участниками сети [3], меха-низмов формирования репутации и доверия к дру-гим участникам, оценка влияния социальных сетей на поведение людей, их здоровье, экономические и политические процессы [4], классификация элемен-тов сети [5], выявление элементов, относящихся к определенной группе [6], мониторинг социальных процессов с помощью социальных сетей и др.…”