US Military Scientists Solve a Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing
><i>"For example, with the FourSquare online social network, under majority threshold (50% of incoming neighbors previously adopted), a viral marketeer could expect a 297-fold return on investment"</i><p>This is illustrative of what bothers me about the paper: they're already trying to market the algorithm, and they're not being honest about its limitations. Now I'm uncertain of whether to trust them on the network analysis part at all.<p>Take the cited example: What is the return? It will vary wildly and take into account factors like how related the message is to the product/service, previous exposure, quality and likelihood to share, and website quality/conversion rate. Second, what is the investment? Marketing costs can range from 0 to many tens or even hundreds of thousands.<p>To those who say the "message is all that matters": relevant, quality content fails to go viral all the time. It's easy to think it doesn't happen if you don't work in marketing, since you'll never see it. Identifying key people effectively really can have value in a marketing campaign. That said, connected people (also most people) will likely  ignore you if your message or content is shit (uninteresting, unsurprising, unclear, etc.)