Linchi Kwok, Ph.D.

Facebook has become one of the most important means for B2C (business-to-consumer) communications. When a Facebook user likes, posts comments, or shares content with their Facebook credentials, an update will appear on this person’s wall, helping companies rapidly spread information. Companies must pay close to attention to Facebook users’ reactions to the messages they send on Facebook because Facebook users’ endorsement of a message can be very important in indicating the effectiveness of a company’s social media strategy. In one of my recent studies (co-authored with Dr. Bei Yu) , we adopted the text mining techniques to identify the type(s) of Facebook messages that are endorsed (and thus propagated) by Facebook users. We analyzed 982 Facebook messages initiated by 10 restaurant chains and two independent operators and found the following results: The “more popular” messages, which receive more “Likes” and comments, contain keywords about the restaurants (e.g., menu de...

The September 1-7 issue of The Economist reported that China has become the No. 3 country by overseas-tourism spending. Between October 2011 and July 2012, the U.S. had processed one million tourist visa applications from China, a big increase of 43% for the same period a year earlier. Chinese tourists are coming to our way. In the first half of 2012, 38 million Chinese took international trips. In 2011, they spent $73 billion while traveling overseas. On average, Chinese tourists spend $6,000 per trip (per person too?) in the U.S. More Chinese are seeking “deeper” experience in a destination over the “surface-and-group” tourist activities. Many service providers have probably experienced the changing demographics of their guests. I have seen company’s effort of welcoming Chinese tourists. For example, some hotels in gateway cities have Chinese TV channels and have included Chinese breakfast items in the menu. Some hotel chains have translated every restaur...

Most of us know that the Big Brother is watching us on social media . So, whether or not we want to be watched is out of the question. The debate turns to: To what extent should we be monitored? And more importantly, are we being watched for a good reason? Twitter, for example, will soon allow advertisers to target users based on their “assumed” interests and hobbies, according to this Wall Street Journal video . Twitter is able to do that because it knows what users like by analyzing their tweets, favorite tweets, retweets, interactions with other users, keywords in Twitter search, the following list, and the follower list.   In fact, other big players in the market like Google and Facebook have been running targeted ads for a while, but I still think this could be good news because marketers will have an additional medium to reach target customers --- users on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are different in many ways in my opinions. Besides, this could an import...