Viral marketing and social networks

The dynamics of information dissemination in social networks is of paramount importance in processes such as rumors or fads propagation, spread of product innovations, ”word-of-mouth” communications or viral marketing.

Due to the difficulty in tracking information when transmitted by people, most understanding of information spreading in social networks comes from models or indirect measurements. Using data collected in Viral Marketing campaigns that reached over 31,000 individuals in eleven European markets, we find that information travels mostly by bursty or superspreading events and at an unexpected low pace (logarithmic in time). This is due to the large variability both in the frequency and intensity of participants’ actions, despite them being confronted with the common task of receiving and forwarding the same piece of information.

Remarkable accurate description of the results is done through a stochastic branching process which corroborates the importance of heterogeneity and shows how traditional population-average descriptions fail to describe information diffusion in social networks.

The fact that humans show similar degrees of heterogeneity in many other activities suggests that our findings are pertinent to other human driven diffusion processes like rumors, fads, innovations or news which has important consequences for business management, communications, marketing and online communities.