Abstract

The objective of viral marketing is to utilize existing social interactions between customers for world–of–mouth advertising of products. In order to design effective marketing strategies, one needs to understand how influence is propagated across such social networks. Here we study a simple influence propagation process in a network composed of two loosely coupled communities. We find that for a certain range of network parameters, the dynamics of the influence propagation is characterized by a doubly–critical behavior. Our results also suggest that the presence of the community structure, or network modularity, might have important implications for choosing appropriate marketing strategies.
The idea behind viral marketing is to use existing social structures for world–of–mouth advertising of products or services (Domingos & Richardson 2001; Leskovec, Adamic, & Huberman 2006). Instead of targeting customers indiscriminately, efficient marketing strategies aim at targeting certain customers that will propagate the influence among many others. An important problem is then to decide what nodes to target so that the propagation of the influence will be maximized (Kempe, Kleinberg, & Eva Tardos 2003). Thus, to understand implications of specific targeting strategies, it is imperative to understand how the influence propagates through a social network. In recent years there has been an extensive amount of work on studying various dynamical processes on complex networks. Most of the studies have focused on the effect of the scale–free degree distribution on dynamical processes. In this paper, we focus on networks that have a modular …

Date

January 12, 2026

Authors

Aram Galstyan, Paul R Cohen

Conference

AAAI Spring Symposium: Social Information Processing

Pages

21-23