Final year SMU undergraduate students Ms Chan Wei Yin (School of Information Systems) and Ms Lee Jaehyun (Lee Kong Chian School of Business) had the opportunity to rub shoulders with leading marketing scholars, practitioners and policy makers when they presented their research paper at the 37th ISMS Marketing Science Conference in Baltimore, USA, 18-20 June 2015.
Hosted by John Hopkins Carey School of Business in Baltimore, the conference comes under the auspices of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). It featured nearly six hundred research presentations covering traditional topics such as advertising, branding and channels; contemporary issues in market measurement and internet research; as well as newly emerging areas such as social media, mobile marketing, and neuroscience applications in marketing.
Wei Yin and Jaehyun have taken up the university-wide second major in Analytics, a programme managed by the School of Information Systems (SIS). They had worked on a project for their analytics practicum course under the supervision of SIS lecturer Seema Chokshi. The project’s client, Professor Srinivas Reddy of Lee Kong Chian School of Business was impressed with their work and encouraged them to submit an abstract of their research to the conference. The abstract was accepted and the duo were invited to present their findings at the prestigious event.
Entitled “Twitter and Tweeters: A Network Analysis of Tweeter Influence on Virality – The Case of Kolaveri Di”, the focus of their study was to examine how social media, specifically Twitter, contributes to the viral propagation of content. The team illustrated this phenomenon by using a music video on YouTube called Why This Kolaveri Di which went from a standing start to being the most watched video in 2011. It was uploaded on 16 November 2011 and amassed 16.5 million views by 5 December 2011.
Within this period, the video generated a total number of 96,323 tweets with the hashtag #kolaveridi, and the Twitter platform garnered over 8 million impressions. The video not only received 146,224 likes but was also awarded a gold medal for the most popular video and silver medal for trending. In their study, Wei Yin and Jaehyun examined how Twitter and some key tweeters could have contributed to the virality of this video. They developed a network analysis model which maps the direct and indirect relationships among the tweeters, and identified the key influencers who have contributed to the explosive growth of the video. Preliminary results of their research showed that different players play a role at different times in the progressive adoption of the content. The team observed that what is less apparent is that it is often not those who have the largest follower base that have the greatest influence. The framework developed by the team can be applied to other types of video and non-video content.
Wei Yin said, “As one of the youngest participants at the conference, it was a privilege to be able to share the preliminary findings of our research to an audience of professionals and seasoned researchers in the marketing field. The experience was indeed an invaluable one.
“After our presentation, we gathered feedback and insights on our research from the conference participants, which would definitely help improve our work in the future, as Professor Reddy is already preparing a marketing case study based on our research.”
About Analytics as Second Major
Since its inception in Term 1 of AY2013/2014, about 200 SMU students have enrolled in the Analytics Second Major course, of which over 40% of the enrolled students are from the other SMU schools.
SMU first introduced an undergraduate specialisation in Business Intelligence & Analytics in 2008 within the School of Information Systems. In response to requests from various industries and government agencies for SMU to make the analytics training available to a wider base of students, SIS introduced the Analytics second-major as a university-wide programme that is open to all students pursuing a bachelor’s degree at any of SMU’s six schools.
Within the Analytics Second Major, students can choose to specialise in one of the following five tracks: (i) Marketing Analytics, (ii) Operational Analytics, (iii) Urban & Regional Analytics, (iv) Advanced Technology for Analytics and (v) Accounting Analytics.
To give students hands-on experience, SIS has tied up with the industry to incorporate special enrichment activities, collaborative projects, internships, and full-time job placements.
[Featured photo: Chan Wei Yin (left) and Lee Jaehyun with Professor Srinivas Reddy at the ISMS Marketing Science Conference in USA in June.]