Generating cultural personas from social data: A perspective of Middle Eastern users

• Main Authors: Salminen Joni, Sengün, Sercan, KWAK, Haewoon, Jansen, Bernard, AN, Jisun, Jung, Soon-Gyo, Vieweg, Sarah, Harrell, D. Fox
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Social media analytics; personas; Middle East; mixed method research; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6291; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7294/viewcontent/GeneratingCulturalPersonasFromSocialData_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative data enrichment to generate descriptive and culturally receptive personas from social media audiences.