Klout Topics for Modeling Interests and Expertise of Users Across Social Networks

This paper presents Klout Topics, a lightweight ontology to describe social media users' topics of interest and expertise. Klout Topics is designed to: be human-readable and consumer-friendly; cover multiple domains of knowledge in depth; and promote data extensibility via knowledge base entities. We discuss why this ontology is well-suited for text labeling and interest modeling applications, and how it compares to available alternatives. We show its coverage against common social media interest sets, and examples of how it is used to model the interests of over 780M social media users on Klout.com. Finally, we open the ontology for external use.

Analyzing users' sentiment towards popular consumer industries and brands on Twitter

Social media serves as a unified platform for users to express their thoughts on subjects ranging from their daily lives to their opinion on consumer brands and products. These users wield an enormous influence in shaping the opinions of other consumers and influence brand perception, brand loyalty and brand advocacy. In this paper, we analyze the opinion of 19M Twitter users towards 62 popular industries, encompassing 12,898 enterprise and consumer brands, as well as associated subject matter topics, via sentiment analysis of 330M tweets over a period spanning a month. We find that users tend to be most positive towards manufacturing and most negative towards service industries. In addition, they tend to be more positive or negative when interacting with brands than generally on Twitter. We also find that sentiment towards brands within an industry varies greatly and we demonstrate this using two industries as use cases. In addition, we discover that there is no strong correlation between topic sentiments of different industries, demonstrating that topic sentiments are highly dependent on the context of the industry that they are mentioned in. We demonstrate the value of such an analysis in order to assess the impact of brands on social media. We hope that this initial study will prove valuable for both researchers and companies in understanding users' perception of industries, brands and associated topics and encourage more research in this field.