Lior Zalmanson

TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Spring 2016

Tuesday, May 3rd

KMC 8-170

Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.

"New Perspectives on User Engagement"

Lior Zalmanson

I will present two works-in-progress that study various aspects of user engagement on social media.

The first work (with Naama Tzur-Ilany and Gal Oestreicher Singer at Tel Aviv University) studies users' personal information revelation behavior and emphasizes the effect of call-to-actions on subsequent information disclosure on social media. We show, through a randomized trial on a video website environment, that users who receive a call to rate videos (1-5 stars) in the midst of their website experience will also contribute more personal information in the end of the test period compared to users who did not see such prompts. We also show that the appearance of prompts themselves deems the website more trust-worthy in the eyes of the participants. This links to previous work on the persuasive qualities of website-initiated participation (Zalmanson & Oestreicher-Singer 2015) and introduces a new bias to the previous notions of an information disclosure cost-benefit analysis conducted by users in similar scenarios (Acquisiti & Gross 2005, Acquisti & Grossklags 2012, Tufecki 2008, Eliison et al. 2011). If online engagement and information disclosure are in fact inextricable, awareness of the possible harm associated with engagement should come to the attention of policy makers and the public in general.

The second work (with Boris Gorelik from Automattic) studies the retention of bloggers on the WordPress platform, the world's largest blogging service (operated in part by the Automattic company). WordPress suffers from a very low retention rate (less than 5% continue posting a year after enrollment). In order to find new solutions for increasing engagement and retention, we focus on understanding the dynamics of shared blogs (with two or more authors) and linked to the (more than a) century old debate: do people perform better in groups than alone? (Ringelmann 1913, Kohler 1926, Karau and Williams 1991). We find that in the case of shared blogs, even though each of the postings is done individually, the survival rate of bloggers increases as they are involved in more shared environments. We find out that this is the case even when the focal blogger experiences unequal contribution ("free-riding" behavior from his fellow co-bloggers). The initial results hint at the potential of a "blogger matching" solution to the low retention challenge.