16-01-2013, 12:52 PM
MOTIVATING CONTRIBUTORS IN SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS
INTRODUCTION
With the emergence ofWeb 2.0 and multiple related socialmedia applications like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia
research interest has grown in multiple aspects of social media including data sharing, image tagging, mashups,ontologies, retrieval etc. While these contributions have significantly advanced the state of the art from the technologyperspective, not much research attention has been given till
now to the end-user or social aspect of social media research.
Despite signi_cant interest in concepts like crowd-sourcing
[8], collective intelligence [11], human-computation [19] etc.,
the tools to undertake user behavior analysis in social media
networks are still in their infancy and no theoretical frame-
works are available to mathematically analyze why and how
often do users contribute to such social media?
That notwithstanding, social media networks are becom-
ing increasingly relevant each day. Citizen-journalists are al-
ready providing interesting event information and images for
common bene_t to various news agencies[3]. Similarly multi-
ple users are already using tools like Google Image Labeler[1]
to tag images and contributing content to Wikipedia[4], thus
creating a rich collective information mechanism which can
provide common bene_ts to a larger society.
An important point to consider in all these applications
is that the user contribution is totally voluntary. Further
the decision making is completely distributed and there are
no means for central coordination or explicit communication
between the various participating users. This brings us to
the important issue of user motivation and that the individ-
ual users will contribute to such social media networks only
based on their personal utility decisions.
RELATED WORK AND DOMAINS
Why are social media networks different?
Similar problems have been studied in multiple contexts
in the past. From an economics perspective, the problem of
`public goods' [13] and optimal taxation [6] is well studied.
However, emerging web-based `societies' are fundamentally
di_erent as participation in them is voluntary and as such
no taxation can be enforced. Only incentives, if appropriate
can be given. Further, the reward on these social media sites
etc. is typically a `virtual currency' which has very di_erent
dynamics than real money. Such virtual currency (e.g. rep-
utation points, extra bandwidth, virtual weaponry, gadgets
etc.) is like `fairy gold-dust' and typically costs the sys-
tem designers exponentially less than their perceived value
from user perspective. While some of this virtual currency is
starting to be traded by users for real-world money [17], the
marginal cost for system designers to grant such currency
remains very low.