‘Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks’
This article mentions a research about the effect of viral features designs on the worth-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion. They found that passive-broadcast messaging is used more often, generating more total peer adoption in the network.
‘Leveraging Public Sentiment to Beat the Market’
It links Twitter information regarding individual stocks with market performance. They conclude that buying, holding and selling stocks based on past sentiment leads to several profitable outcomes. However, economic theory suggests that if profitable trading strategies have now been proven to have existed historically, there is no guarantee they will persist in the future.
‘Strategies for Two-Sided Markets’
It discusses the challenges that come along with the two-sided markets. They show how to deal with these problems when you are in a two-sides market. They also bring up the fact that the two-sided markets are unexplored, so there is a lot of uncertainty. And because of the internet, firms have easy access to both sides of new markets, so there is a pressure you have to do it right the first time.
With this week’s topic ‘Diffusion and Social Influence’ in mind, I found two more articles related to this topic.
The first article is ‘The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion’. They examine the role of social networks in online information diffusion. They did numbers of field-experiments to find out that people who were exposed to signals about friends’ information are significantly more likely to spread information than those who are not exposed. They also found out that weak ties may play a more dominant role in the dissemination of information online, although stronger ties are individually more influential.
Second article is ‘How does the Data Sampling Strategy Impact the Discovery of Information Diffusion in Social Media?’ This article also mentions sharing things with friends through social media. But now they focus on the sampling methods. The results where that for small sample sizes you have to sample both topology and user-context to improve on naïve methods.
I found a lot of mini-cases related to the topic.
One is from UNICEF , the Unicef UK Ambassador Jemima Khan posted a selfie when he woke up with the hashtag #WakeUpCall and the message to donate money. More and more people followed his example and even many celebrities joined the hype. #WakeUpCall became an internet hit and it reached over 300 million people all over the world.
Second is #thumbsupforStephen. Stephen Sutton was a teenager suffering incurable cancer. A photo of Stephen doing a thumbs-up from his hospital bed went viral and lead people to post similar photos. He has now raised over 5 million pounds for the charity.
Both of these examples show that one small picture can make a lot of difference. The social media is a very cheap, easy and effective way to reach a lot of people and create awareness among the society.
References:
– Aral, S. and Walker, D. (2011) Creating Social Contagion through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks. Management Science 57(9) 1623-1639
– Bakshy, E. Marlow, C. Rosenn, I. and Adamic, L. 2012. The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion. University of Michigan
– De Choudhury, M. Lin, Y.R. Sundaram, H. Candan, K. S. Xie, L, and Kelliher, A. 2010. How Does the Data Sampling Strategy Impact the Discovery of Information Diffusion in Social Media? Arizona State University
– Eisenmann, T. Parker, G., and Van Alstyne, M.W. (2006) Strategies for Two-Sided Markets. Harvard Business Review 84(10) 92-101
– Li, t., Sprengers, D., and van Dalen, J. (2013) Leveraging in Public Sentiment to Beat the Market. Working Paper
– http://blogs.unicef.org.uk/2014/10/07/wakeupcall-syria/, 2015
– http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/thumbs-up-stephen-sutton-first-5698813, 2015
