Viral marketing is a fascinating process, though not one that every company can easily master. There’s so much that goes into spreading word-of-mouth about something, and doing it reliably and cost-effectively isn’t exactly a science.That may be changing, though, based on new research.
Three military scientists from the West Point Network Science Center at the US Military Academy in West Point – Paulo Shakarian, Sean Eyre and Damon Paulo, may have found a way to find the “seed groups” to help make viral marketing more of a viable process, so that the message in mind can be spread across an entire network with ease.
Their method is based around the idea that certain individuals could catch onto a message if friends are already receiving it, which they feel is a critical breakthrough in the process. From there, it’s repeated with even more friends to see who raises the most attention when spreading the message, but pruning those who have the greatest excess.
When no one is left in the network that has a greater amount than the threshold is left, the “seed group” is then nailed down, with a message sent to every member to begin spreading the message.
Said Shakarian, “We present a method guaranteed to find a set of nodes that causes the entire population to activate – but is not necessarily of minimal size.”
It’ will be interesting to see how this process is commercialized in the future. Marketers would certainly pay to know how to get solid viral marketing results with minimal cost and effort.
Source: Technology Review
