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Impact of Human Activity Patterns on the Dynamics of Information Diffusion

Chances are good that you have some kind of mental model of how social or viral marketing works. You have a concept in mind when you say to your team that you want a message to "go viral" or you label a campaign as itself viral. As with so many practices, it's good to make our mental models explicit. Explicit models get everyone on the same page, allow us to test our assumptions about cause and effect, and lead to improvements in the models themselves. They make us more effective. In Physical Review Letters, Jose Luis Iribarren and Esteban Moro have published a paper entitled Impact of Human Activity Patterns on the Dynamics of Information Diffusion (four page PDF), in which they test some models of viral marketing in an email experiment with over 30,000 people. It seems that messages tend to spread much more slowly than previous models have suggested, primarily because there are huge variations in the response time of individuals in a network. We tend to regard response time as uniform (or speed of message spreading for a given person) as uniform, but it turns out that is not the case. There are insights here for people looking to bring their campaigns to the tipping point of success. Posted: 12/2/09; 6:06:22 PM #

Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion

Lots of so-called "best practices" in social marketing are never backed up with real data. At best, we get case studies, which tend to be cream-skimmed examples selected to demonstrate the point being made by the expert who is pitching the practice. Since I'm teaching a seminar on this next week - Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits - I thought I would share some real research on the topic. I'm no fan of the pharmaceutical industry, but they are definitely experts at relationship marketing. The industry commissioned a study of social marketing, with a particular focus on the idea of targeting "opinion leaders", from Raghuram Iyengar, Christophe Van den Bulte, and Thomas Valente of the Wharton School's Marketing Science Institute. The result is a report entitled Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion (94 page PDF). Nonprofits would do well to learn from its insights, which emphasize the role of connectivity of a stakeholder (rather than their status) as the key predictor of a message being spread. We help nonprofits map out this connectivity and almost none of the organizations we've worked with have the slightest idea of the levels and channels of connectivity of their stakeholders. Do you? Posted: 12/2/09; 5:44:41 PM #