Dr. Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, well done!

Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj has defended her PhD thesis on "Evaluation Framework for Social Media Brand Presence" (the thesis will online here in a few months from now). Irena started in 2009 with her first project about using Facebook to connect things [1]. She really got fascinated by social media and started publishing quite an impressive series of papers investigating the content users share on Facebook brandpages [2],  emotions and motivation of users to engage on such pages, effectiveness of moderator activities to increase number of fans [3,4,5], detection of trending topics on Facebook [6],  and an evaluation framework [7] summarizing her findings as best practices for practitioners (two more are under review). It is a bit ironic that Facebook has been down since her defense, I'm glad she didn't plan for a demo;)


It was again fascinating to see how single papers which appeared to be rather diverse and unrelated in the beginning, could be put together into a comprehensive and coherent thesis deriving both lessons for literature and practitioners of social media. After Mikko Lehtonen, Felix von Reischach and Erica Dubach, Irena is the fourth student receiving a PhD from our lab (the next candidate is due in a couple of days!).

I'm glad Irena will stay in our lab and start forming her own group on social media-related research within the next months.

Congralutions to your great work! Good luck, and thank you very much for the opportunity to working with you, Irena!

[1] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Goekmen Cetin, Stephan Karpischek, Florian Michahelles: Influence of Facebook on Purchase Decision Making, What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen (CIoT) Workshop at The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010), Helsinki, Finland, May 2010 [PDF].
[2] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Understanding Social Media Marketing: A Case Study on Topics, Categories and Sentiment on a Facebook Brand Page, In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (MindTrek '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175-182. DOI: 10.1145/2181037.2181066. URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2181037.2181066. [PDF]
[3] A Case Study of the Effects of Moderator Posts within a Facebook Brand Page, Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles, In: Datta, Anwitaman, Shulman, Stuart, Zheng, Baihua, Lin, Shou-De, Sun, Aixin, Lim, Ee-Peng (eds.) Social Informatics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011, Volume 6984/2011, 161-170, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-24704-0_21. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24704-0_21 [PDF]
[4] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Erica Dubach Spiegler, Florian Michahelles: The Effect of Post Type, Category and Posting Day on User Interaction Level on Facebook, Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT '11), 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom '11) , pp.810-813, 9-11 Oct. 2011. DOI: 10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.21. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6113221&isnumber=6113084 [PDF]
[5] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj: Usability Testing of a Facebook Brand Page, World Usability Day 2011 Slovenia, Kranj, Slovenia, 10th November 2011. [PDF]
[6] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Monitoring Trends on Facebook,Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2011 IEEE Ninth International Conference on, pp.895-902, 12-14 Dec. 2011. DOI: 10.1109/DASC.2011.150. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6118886&isnumber=6118342 [PDF]
[7] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Understanding the User Generated Content and Interactions on a Facebook Brand Page, , International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing (IJSHC) Special Issue "Contemporary Social Media Topics in Business and Public Organizations", Inderscience Publishers, 2012. [PDF]