Participant Selection for Offline Event Marketing Leveraging Location-Based Social Networks

Offline event marketing invites people to participate in a sponsored gathering, thus allowing marketers to have face-to-face, direct, and close contact with their current and potential customers. This paper presents a framework that supports marketers in improving marketing effectiveness by carefully selecting invitees to such sponsored offline events by leveraging location-based social networks. In particular, we first transform the participant selection task into a combinatorial optimization problem. Second, we propose a marketing effect quantitative model that considers the distance and overlapping social influence. Third, we introduce algorithms to determine a participant team that can maximize the marketing effect while fulfilling the scale and item coverage constraints. We finally evaluate the effectiveness of the framework and validate the proposed marketing effect of the quantitative model with real-world data.