Came across this Research document on- How does content become Viral in a social network- that could be used for Social Media Marketing. Conducted by Eric Sun from Stanford.

Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion Through Facebook News Feed

Eric Sun

Fundamentally, it says something similar to what I have mentioned in my theory of MicoInfluencers.

That it is not only one or two super-influencers/celebrities that influence decision making or the spread of ideas- rather it is people like you and me- that spread ideas as a collective unit.

The only Difference between the documents from Eric Sun and Duncan Watts (another good paper on what he calls “accidental influencers”) is that I tend to believe that Micro-Influencers effuse have certain traits that you could identify them with.

Unfortunately cannot embed this here- but you could get the link and learn more from the site apart from downloading the presentation.

Important points:

• FaceBook diffusion chains can be really long- some about 82 levels deep
• However, they do not seem to be the result of a single chain reaction event
• Rather they seem to be a result of a substantial number of base users
• There is no meaningful evidence that a start node’s maximum diffusion chain length can be predicted with the user’s demographics or Facebook usage characteristics (including the user’s number of Facebook friends). This may provide insight into future research on public opinion formation.

  I have a point of difference here. I think data CAN help use get some level of meaningful extrapolation of behaviour. We just need to know what to look for.

• Watts says: Success depends not on how persuasive the early adopter(s) are, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded
  • It propounds that influential nodes are no more likely to trigger cascades than average nodes

Think about it

Shalabh Pandey

(twitter: @shalabhpandey)