Dr. Turetken's Insights on Online Popularity & Business Performance

Dr. Ozgur Turetken, Associate Dean, Research, delivered a talk on May 11, on Online Popularity and Business Performance at Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey. The implications of the findings along with the next steps in this stream of research were discussed.

Abstract:  Social media provides a wealth of information that can be used by researchers as well as practicing managers for monitoring and predicting business performance. We seek to exploit this abundance of information by investigating the potential of online popularity of a company in predicting business performance (market share and financial metrics). Online popularity is measured through Google Trends, the service that illustrates the trends in Google search activity. The series of studies to be presented aim to estimate the performance of a single player in an industry through not only the trends related to that player, but also those of its competitors in an oligopoly. The oligopolistic markets studied are the telecom service providers in the US and Canada as well as Canadian chartered banks. To differentiate popularity from notoriety, we integrate the tone, or the valance, of the “chatter” about a company through tweet sentiments obtained by Google’s deep learning algorithm into our modeling. The predictive power of some of the models is promising.

To learn more about Dr. Turetken's research, visit https://www.torontomu.ca/~oturetke/