Topic Aware Influential Member Detection in Meetup

Hosting popular Meetup events is one of the primary objectives of the Meetup organizers. This paper explores the possibility of inviting a few key influential members to attend Meetup events, who may further influence their followers to attend and boost the popularity of those Meetup events. Importantly, our pilot study reveals that topics of the Meetup events play a key role behind the effectiveness of the influential members. Leveraging this observation, in this paper, we develop Topic Aware Influencer Detection (TAID) heuristics, which recommends (i) top-k influential members I-k, and (ii) top-b influence badges R-b based on the topical interest of a Meetup group. This indicates that I-k. will be most effective in influencing the Meetup members to attend the events hosted on topic R-b. TAID heuristics contains two major blocks (a) influence propagation graph construction, and (b) recommendation generation. Rigorous evaluation of TAID on 1447 Meetup groups with three different topics reveals that TAID comfortably outperforms the baselines by influencing (on average) 15% more Meetup members.