Decision support for influencing opinions in web communities

Abstract: 

An increasing number of consumers are making their purchase decisions on the basis of online opinions. It is therefore important for companies to continuously monitor the formation of opinion in web communities and to influence it in their favor. In this paper, a decision support system is presented that allows to monitor the opinion formation of community members in online discussions and gives marketing managers recommendations on where an active intervention in the discussion makes sense. Text mining methods are used to identify opinions. Data mining is used to determine in which situations which influencing measures are beneficial. The use of the system is demonstrated using a case study on the iPhone. 

This publication is only available in German.