Viral marketing has become an important dissemination channel of content, products, and political campaigns. Despite the excitement, the precise mechanisms by which information is exchanged over social networks are not well understood. We investigate social cascades and how information disseminates through social links in OSNs. We test how position and structural characteristics of spreaders in the social network are related to the diffusion of the content. For instance, our findings suggest that nodes with medium degrees are crucial for diffusion of information and that nodes connecting different social groups facilitate the dissemination of content.

 

The world of connections and information flow in Twitter
Meeyoung Cha, Fabricio Benevenuto, Hamed Haddadi, and Krishna P. Gummadi. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics -- Part A, 2012.

Delayed Information Cascades in Flickr: Measurement, Analysis and Modeling
Meeyoung Cha, Fabricio Benevenuto, Young-Yeol Ahn, and Krishna P. Gummadi. Elsevier Computer Networks, 2012.

Social Features of Online Networks: The Strength of Intermediary Ties in Online Social Media
Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz, José J. Ramasco, Esteban Moro, Josep M. Pujol, Victor M. Eguiluz. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29358, 2010.

A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network
Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, Krishna P. Gummadi. Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Madrid, Spain, April 2009.

Characterizing Social Cascades in the Flickr Social Network
Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, Ben Adams, Krishna P. Gummadi. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop On Social Networks (WOSN), Seattle, WA, USA, August 2008.