  Viral marketing campaigns seek to recruit the most influential individuals to
cover the largest target audience. This can be modeled as the well-studied
maximum coverage problem. There is a related problem when the recruited nodes
are connected. It is called the maximum connected cover problem. This problem
ensures a strong coordination between the influential nodes which are the
backbone of the marketing campaign. In this work, we are interested on both of
these problems. Most of the related literature assumes knowledge about the
topology of the network. Even in that case, the problem is known to be NP-hard.
In this work, we propose heuristics to the maximum connected cover problem and
the maximum coverage problem with different knowledge levels about the topology
of the network. We quantify the difference between these heuristics and the
local and global greedy algorithms.

Social and Information Networks;Physics and Society