Calculating user's social influence through the SmartSocial Platform

Social influence is a measure of how people, directly or indirectly, effect the thoughts, feelings and actions of others. As in various environments different possibilities for interactions among people exist, the definition and calculation of social influence vary as well. In this paper, we study social influence in the environment of the “modern information and communication technology (ICT) user”, a smartphone user with numerous online accounts, using a plethora of services such as telco services, social networking services and various other Internet services. The original scientific contribution of this paper includes both definition of social influence in the context of modern ICT user as well as an algorithm for calculating modern ICT user's social influence. Finally, preliminary experiment of calculating user's social influence on 123 modern ICT users is presented and discussed.