DoC PhD student awarded Royal Commission Industrial Fellowship

Ben Chamberlain has been awarded an Industrial Fellowship sponsored by Starcount and the Royal Commission to look at social media spam filtering.

Starcount and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 have jointly funded a research fellowship with Imperial College London’s Department of Computing to look into making social media spam a thing of the past replacing it with useful information to engaged communities. Ben Chamberlain supervised by Dr Marc Deisenroth has been awarded this  Fellowship which  will run for three years.

Research from UCL has shown that newsfeed advertising is one of the main reasons young people cite for giving up on Facebook.

Social media traffic obeys Pareto’s famous law: 80% of the traffic revolves around 20% of the users.

There are many reasons to connect with a star like David Beckham, for example: He’s a style icon, a devoted father and husband and a football legend. Someone who also follows the rest of Manchester United’s class of ‘92 is likely to be a passionate Manchester United fan and a candidate for certain football content.

However someone else who, in addition to Beckham, also connects with David Gandy, Orlando Bloom and Adam Levine, probably doesn’t want to see any football content. By merging interaction information across multiple networks it is possible to make up a fairly accurate picture of what people are passionate about and - just as importantly - what they don’t want to see messages about.

Alternatively, companies blindly paying Facebook £10,000 to send a post out to a few million people are likely to find "deal-hunters" who exploit companies lack of sophistication and the prevalence of "like this page for a coupon" ads. Instead, if content is entertaining, relevant to the specific user and ultimately fits with the brand image, social media marketing will begin to see attitudes shift in both brand perception and how advertising on social networks is perceived.

To read more see:

http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/social-media-marketing/tackling-social-media-spam/1181