The paper wins top honours in the Information Technology track at conference hosted by IIM Lucknow
14 DECEMBER, 2022: A paper by doctoral student Aishvarya, co-authored with Professor U Dinesh Kumar, faculty in the Decision Sciences area at IIMB, and Professor Denis Dennehy, has received the Best Paper award, in the Information Technology track, of the AIRC conference organized by IIM Lucknow.
The paper is titled, ‘What Drives Growth in Online Community?: A Data-Driven Approach’. Sharing an abstract of the paper, Aishvarya writes: “Building a larger online community helps firms in dissemination of information to a larger audience, gain more visibility and increase business value. However, research on how firms can grow and learn from their online community is limited. Using a text analytics approach, the authors quantify the effect of firm-initiated engagement (number of tweets posted by firm’s official handle, and users’ response on these tweets) and users’ perception of a firm (reflected in user-generated content) and study its association with firm’s online community size. Since social media platforms act as a medium for diffusion of information, the authors hypothesize that the growth of a firm’s online community may be associated with a.) The extent and quality of its online engagement with users, and b.) Users’ perception of the firm.”
Taking the case of an emerging business like the online fantasy sports sector, the authors find that the marginal effect of users’ perception of a firm is significantly greater than that of the firm-initiated engagement, thus indicating that users’ experiences send a much stronger signal than the official tweets posted by firms in influencing users’ decision to join or quit the firm’s online community.
The authors also identify the different user experiences using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that have an impact on how users view the business generally and can be used by businesses to find areas that need improvement.
Keywords: Social Listening, Online Community, Social Media Analytics, Text Analytics, IIMB, PhD, Decision Sciences, Dinesh Kumar