Invited talk presented by Hemant Purohit (http://knoesis.org/researchers/hemant) at the NCSU workshop on IT for sustainable tourism development. The talk presents application of technology developed for crisis coordination into more general marketplace coordination via social media for helping suppliers (micro-entrepreneurs) and demanders (tourists).

1. 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

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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 2

3. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 3

4. Era of
Collective Intelligence
4Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

5. 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

6. 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/

7. 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/

8. 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/

9. 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
 …

10. 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)

11. 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

12. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 12

13. 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
13
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

14. 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
14
http://seventhinc.com/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

15. 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
15
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

16. 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.
16
Millenial’s information
sources
http://ypulse.com/
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

17. 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
17Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

18. 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

19. 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)
19
Edelman 2012
http://edelman.com/trust
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination

20. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 20

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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!

24. 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/2013/01/09/168
946170/thanks-but-no-thanks-when-
post-disaster-donations-overwhelm
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 24

25. 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)

26. Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 26
Identify-Match-Engage (IME)
Computing Framework

27. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 27

28. Illustration of
Social Aid Marketplace
during Disasters
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 28

29. Problem: Identifying and Matching
Demand and Supply related to Donations
29
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

30. 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
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 30
I made these during #sandy. I will donate $5 from each snowflake I sell
to the #redcross for hurricane victims. http://...

31. Current Methods
Domain: 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

32. Supervised Learning Classification
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 32
(Purohit et al., First Monday, 2014a)

33. 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)

34. 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

35. 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)

36. 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

37. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 37

38. Motivation: Event-Oriented or Brand
Page Communities
Voluminous
Data and Users!
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 38

39. Exploit Who-talks-to-Whom Network
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 39

40. Twitris Tool: Recommended Influencers to
engage with by Specific Needs
40
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

41. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 41

42. 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

43. Motivation
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 43
• Now I can
see why …
Senior Media Reporter
for The Huffington Post
Better engagement with content!
User Data Mining
Analysis &
Aggregation
Tagline
(Purohit et al., Social Informatics, 2012b)

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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 engagement
with Community
8. Applications and Conclusion
Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 46

47. Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 47
Twitris v3:
http://twitris.knoesi
s.org/yolandastorm
2013/networkTest/

48. Purohit, NCSU talk 2014: Leveraging Social Media for Tourism Marketplace Coordination 48

49. 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

50. Thanks.. 
Contact: hemant@knoesis.org , 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), Meena
Nagarajan (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), Shubha
Nabar (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