Profiling, Assessing and Matching Personalities Active in Social Media

The world of social media influencers, bloggers and online “clothes horses” is a relatively new one. New-media personalities, a.k.a. “clothes horses”, are now endorsing brands, products and companies in a more subtle way than through traditional advertising. They carefully cultivate and position their personal brands with a view to persuading businesses to use them for relatively inexpensive, often local, online marketing campaigns. In the world of traditional media, companies wishing to advertise use agencies to match their brand and core values to appropriate personalities. In this new media world, businesses must go it alone. In this paper, we present a pipeline for assessing and understanding the online reach of new-media personalities. Using Twitter, our method determines whether the social media followers of a new media personality, as a group, match their perceived brand values. We do this using automatically-determined sentiment and classification of tweets from the new-media personality and his/her Twitter followers. We also look at how businesses might determine which social media personalities would be a good fit for them for a marketing campaign. Finally we look at the evolving nature of the reach and brand of a new-media personality.