Finding influential users of online health communities: a new metric based on sentiment influence.
OBJECTIVE
Online health communities (OHCs) have become a major source of support for people with health problems. This research tries to improve our understanding of social influence and to identify influential users in OHCs. The outcome can facilitate OHC management, improve community sustainability, and eventually benefit OHC users.


METHODS
Through text mining and sentiment analysis of users' online interactions, the research revealed sentiment dynamics in threaded discussions. A novel metric--the number of influential responding replies--was proposed to directly measure a user's ability to affect the sentiment of others.


RESULTS
Using the dataset from a popular OHC, the research demonstrated that the proposed metric is highly effective in identifying influential users. In addition, combining the metric with other traditional measures further improves the identification of influential users.
Department of Management Sciences, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
Kang
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8321-2804
K
Zhao
College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA.
John
J
Yen
American Cancer Society, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Greta
G
Greer
eBay Inc, San Jose, California, USA.
Baojun
B
Qiu
College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA.
Prasenjit
P
Mitra
American Cancer Society, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Kenneth
K
Portier
D000328:Adult; D057225:Data Mining; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007857:Leadership; D012944:Social Support
cancer survivors; influential users; online health community; sentiment analysis and influence