The perception of others: Inferring reputation from social media in the enterprise

Abstract

The emergence of social media allows people to interact with others all over the world. During interaction, people leave many traces behind that can reveal things about themselves, or about how they perceive others: having many followers may indicate that one is an influencer; forum answers that gain high ranking, are likely to testify for expertise; people who gain high ranking in eCommerce sites are likely to be trustworthy. In this paper, we examine whether public online traces can be used for inferring the reputation of a person as perceived by others in relation to trustworthiness, influence, expertise, and impact. We describe a study performed on indicators of reputation that employees leave in a rich organizational social media platform. We compare different indicators, and report the results of an extensive user study with over 500 participants who provided their perception of thousands of others through a set of hypothetical scenarios. Copyright © 2014 ACM.