Who is persuasive? The role of perceived personality and communication modality in social multimedia

Persuasive communication is part of everyone's daily life. With the emergence of social websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, persuasive communication is now seen online on a daily basis. This paper explores the effect of multi-modality and perceived personality on persuasiveness of social multimedia content. The experiments are performed over a large corpus of movie review clips from Youtube which is presented to online annotators in three different modalities: only text, only audio and video. The annotators evaluated the persuasiveness of each review across different modalities and judged the personality of the speaker. Our detailed analysis confirmed several research hypotheses designed to study the relationships between persuasion, perceived personality and communicative channel, namely modality. Three hypotheses are designed: the first hypothesis studies the effect of communication modality on persuasion, the second hypothesis examines the correlation between persuasion and personality perception and finally the third hypothesis, derived from the first two hypotheses explores how communication modality influence the personality perception