Visual Network Analysis of Twitter Data for Co-organizing Conferences: Case CMAD 2013

The aim of this research is to explore what kinds of insights information visualization of social media data can provide for co-organizing conferences. Our paper focuses on Twitter use before, during and after conference. We present a case study based on an conference of Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD 2013). With the process of data-driven visual network analysis, we used Twitter data to analyse the network of conference participants and the conference´s discussion topics. We were able to identify e.g. influential conference participants, most interesting presentations and discussions, similarities between interests of the conference participants. Hence, several development and information needs of conference co-organization were derived from the information visualizations, which have implications for improving the planning and co-organizing of conferences, as well as for Twitter use in conference communication.