Connecting People at a Conference: A Study of Influence between Offline and Online Using a Mobile Social Application

Location-based mobile applications such as Foursquare and Jiepang help bridge the gap between offline and online. People that we encounter and connect with around physical resources such as conferences, provide opportunities for extending our social networks from offline to online. We give a preliminary study on the relationship between the online and physical social networks in terms of the online and offline interactions (O2O) established during the conference, using a mobile social proximity-based platform called Find & Connect. We propose metrics of overlap fraction, network scale, and O2O transfer amount to quantify the O2O behavior of conference attendees. Our results demonstrate that more than half of the online interactions are included in the offline interaction network, and the offline to online transfer holds the dominant position in this bidirectional O2O transition between online and offline interaction networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the influence of offline to online, and vice versa, in a restricted environment using a social proximity-based system.