Editors: Pablo Cesar, Mario Montagud, Carsten Griwodz
The SIGMM Records have renewed, with the ambition of continue being a useful resource for the multimedia community. The intention is to provide a forum for (open) discussion and to become a primary source of information (and of inspiration!).
The new team (http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/impressum/) has committed to lead the Records in the coming years, gathering relevant contributions in the following main clusters:
- Open science: with columns on open source software, datasets and benchmarks, and standards.
- Opinion: with columns on multi-disciplinary topics, interviews to outstanding members of our community, and viewpoints of the community.
- Information: current affairs including call for papers, summaries of PhD theses, open positions, and reports from our social media leaders.
The team has also revitalized the presence of SIGMM on Social Media. SIGMM accounts on Facebook and Twitter have been created for disseminating relevant news, events and contributions for the SIGMM community. Moreover, a new award has been approved: the Best Social Media Reporters from each SIGMM conference will get a free registration to one of the SIGMM conferences within a period of one year. The award criteria are specified at http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/20/awarding-the-best-social-media-reporters/
The following paragraphs detail the impact of all these new activities in terms of increased number of visitors and visits to the Records website (Figure 1), and broaden reach. All the statistics presented below started to be collected since the publication of the June issue (July 29th 2017).
Figure 1. Number of visitors and visits since the publication of the June issue
Visitors and Visits to the Records website
The daily number of visitors ranges approximately between 100 and 400. It has been noticed that this variation is strongly influenced by the publication of Social Media posts promoting contents published on the website. In the first month (since July 29th, one day after the publication of the issue), more than 13000 visitors were registered, and more than 20000 visitors have been registered until now (see Table 1 for detailed statistics). The number of visits to the different posts and pages of the website accumulates up to more than 100000. The top 5 countries with highest number of visitors are also listed in Table 2. Likewise, the top 3 posts with highest impact, in terms of number of visits and of Social Media shares (via the Social Media icons recently added in the posts and pages of the website) are listed in Table 3. As an example, the daily number of visits to the main page of the June issue is provided in Figure 2, with a total number of 224 visits since its publication.
Finally, the top 3 referring sites (i.e., external websites from which visitors have clicked an URL to access the Records website) are Facebook (>700 references), Google (>300 references) and Twitter (>100 references). So, it seems that Social Media is helping to increase the impact of the Records. More than 30 users have accessed the Records website through the SIGMM website (sigmm.org) as well.
Table 1. Number of visitors and visits to the SIGMM Records website
| Period | Visitors |
| Day | ~100-400 |
| Week | ~2000-3000 |
| Month | ~8000-13000 |
| Total (Since July 29th) |
20012 (102855 visits) |
Table 2. Top 5 countries in terms of number of visitors
| Rank | Country | Visitors |
| 1 | China | 3339 |
| 2 | United States | 2634 |
| 3 | India | 1368 |
| 4 | Germany | 972 |
| 5 | Brazil | 731 |
Table 3. Top 3 posts on the Records website with highest impact
| Post | Date | Visits | Shares |
| 29/08/2017 | 619 | 103 | |
| Interview to Suranga Nanayakkara | 13/09/2017 | 376 | 15 |
| Standards Column: JPEG and MPEG | 28/7/2017 | 273 | 44 |
Figure 2. Visits to the main page of the June issue since its publication (199 visits)
Impact of the Social Media channels
The use of Social Media includes a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@sigmm). The number of followers is still not high (27 followers in Facebook, 88 followers in Twitter), which is natural with recently created channels. However, the impact of the posts on these platforms, in terms of reach, likes and shares is noteworthy. Tables 4 and 5 lists the top 3 Facebook posts and tweets, respectively, with highest impact up to now.
Table 4. Top 3 Facebook posts with highest impact
| Post | Date | Reach (users) | Likes | Shares |
| >10K visitors in 3 weeks | 21/08/2017 | 1347 | 7 | 4 |
| Interview to Suranga Nanayakkara | 13/09/2017 | 1297 | 89 | 3 |
| Interview to Prof. Ramesh Jain | 30/08/2017 | 645 | 28 | 4 |
Table 5. Top 3 tweets with highest impact
| Post | Date | Likes | Retweets |
| Announcing the publication of the June issue | 28/07/2017 | 7 | 9 |
| Announcing the availability of the official @sigmm account | 8/09/2017 | 8 | 9 |
| Social Media Reporter Award: Report from ICMR 2017 | 11/09/2017 | 5 | 8 |
Awarded Social Media Reporters
The Social Media co-chairs, with the approval of the SIGMM Executive Committee, have already started the processes of selecting the Best Social Media Reporters from the latest SIGMM conferences. In particular, the winners have been Miriam Redi from ICMR 2017 (her post-summary of the conference is available at: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/09/02/report-from-icmr-2017/) and Christian Timmerer for MMSYS 2017 (his post-summary of the conference is available at: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/10/02/report-from-acm-mmsys-2017/). Congratulations!
The Editorial Team would like to take this opportunity to thank all the SIGMM members who use Social Media channels to share relevant news and information from the SIGMM community. We are convinced it is a very important service for the community.
We will keep pushing to improve the Records and extend their impact!
The Editorial Team.