Viral

Authors: José Luis Iribarren and Esteban Moro Journal: Physical Review E 84, 046116 (2011) LINK | arXiv Abstract: Despite its importance for rumors or innovations propagation, peer-to-peer collaboration, social networking, or marketing, the dynamics of information spreading is not well understood. Since the diffusion depends on the heterogeneous patterns of human behavior and is driven by the participants’ decisions, its propagation dynamics shows surprising properties not explained by traditional epidemic or contagion models. ...

Authors: José Luis Iribarren and Esteban Moro Journal: Social Networks 33, 134-142 (2011). LINK | arXiv Abstract: Widespread interest in the diffusion of information through social networks has produced a large number of Social Dynamics models. A majority of them use theoretical hypothesis to explain their diffusion mechanisms while the few empirically based ones average out their measures over many messages of different contents. Our empirical research tracking the step-by-step email propagation of an invariable viral marketing message delves into the content impact and has discovered new and striking features. ...

Each day trillions of emails, phone calls, comments on blogs, twitter messages, exchanges in online social networks, etc. are done. Not only the number of communications has increased, but also each of these transactions leaves a digital trace that can be recorded to reconstruct our high-frequency human activity. It is not only the amount and variety of data that is recorded what is important. Also its high-frequency character and its comprehensive nature have allowed researchers, companies and agencies to investigate individual and group dynamics at an unprecedented level of detail and applied them to client modeling, organizational analysis or epidemic spreading [1]. ...

We have just published an experimental/theoretical work on the speed of information diffusion in social networks in Physical Review Letters. Specifically we have studied the impact of the heterogeneity of human activity in propagation of emails, rumors, hoaxes, etc. Tracking email marketing campaigns, executed by IBM Corporation in 11 European countries, we were able to compare their viral propagation with our theory (see below the campaigns details). The results are very simple. ...

Authors: J. L. Iribarren and E. Moro Journal: Physical Review Letters 103, 038702 (2009) LINK arXiv Abstract: We study the impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion. To this end we ran a viral email experiment involving 31183 individuals in which we were able to track a specific piece of information through the social network. We found that, contrary to traditional models, information travels at an unexpectedly slow pace. By using a branching model which accurately describes the experiment, we show that the large heterogeneity found in the response time is responsible for the slow dynamics of information at the collective level. ...

Percentage of active users in the Internet 2.0 is tiny. Fractions go from * only 1% of Wikipedia's users contribute to making it better * only 0.1% of users upload their own videos to Youtube * only 3% of people with weblogs post on a daily basis * only 1% of Amazon.com customers contribute with reviews The numbers are tiny. But not uncommon. Typical return rates of marketing campaigns or surveys are around 2-5% (see report by the Direct Marketing Association). ...