Spatial Analysis of Social Media Response to Live Events: The Case of the Milano Fashion Week

Social media response to catastrophic events, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, has received a lot of attention. However, social media are also extremely important in the context of planned events, such as fairs, exhibits, festivals, as they play an essential role in communicating them to fans, interest groups, and the general population. These kinds of events are geo-localized within a city or territory and are scheduled within a public calendar. We consider a specific scenario, the Milano Fashion Week (MFW), which is an important event in our city. We focus our attention on the coverage of social content in space, measuring the propagation of the event in the territory. We build different clusters of fashion brands, we characterize several features of propagation in space and we correlate them to the popularity of involved actors. We show that the clusters along space and popularity dimensions are loosely correlated, and that domain experts are typically able to understand and identify only popularity aspects, while they are completely unaware of spatial dynamics of social media response to the events.