Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

>"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"

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.

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.

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.)

Shakarian isn't an unknown in the field of network analysis. The work he did specifically with network shaping to increase fragility was pretty well received (and also an interesting strategic innovation along with the algorithm).

With regard to the 297 figure, my guess is that it had a context that didn't make it into the article. His papers are pretty well reasoned and quite upfront about the capabilities of a given process or algorithm or strategy, so I find it unlikely that he's gone all used-car salesman this time around.

*Picking nits: the author of the article misspelled Shakarian's name.

You give them far too much credit. They didn't formulate a problem, make some assumptions, and then come up with a solution based on it.

What they did figure out "slick approach to a well-known problem [in graph theory]" then sell it as something that viral marketers could actually use. I see no evidence that this graph theoretic problem, although it was motivated by various real world problems, is actually a computational problem that people try to solve in the real world.

In fact, I'm pretty sure viral marketers would simply target products at people with lots of facebook friends who pass some kind of "not fake" test.

What's interesting, and not covered by the article, is why this is interesting to the military. I imagine that by identifying this group you could also stop virality of ideas, eg radical Islamic terrorists. Presumably the US has lots of data connecting phone records of these people, and they could use this network analysis to figure out who to target to reduce future flow of new ideas... could be powerful!

It could also be used offensively to start a rebellion or change political outcomes.

I smell political econometrics a brewing.

All edges derive their value from the other participants not having them also. Handheld programmable calculators once made Thomas Petterfy, Steve Fossett, Joe Ritchie and others very rich men. When people saw their success with black scholes in the options pits and followed them into the pits with calculators, the pits died and all of the trading volume moved off the floors.

When everyone got computers that were faster than calculators, hedge funds and bank trading desks bought mainframes and colocated them next to or with the exchanges' servers and all of the trading volume moved to high-frequency trading-friendly dark pools and the exchanges...

In the context of political influence, what does everyone think all of the campaign money goes toward these days? A lot of angry people start revolutions and there is nothing technology can do to placate someone(s)who is being abused for any reason and certainly not at scale!

All of these marketing firms are chasing the mass market consumers/voters that have had diminishing spending power for over a decade now. Here's a tip: build something really expensive and desirable for someone really rich because they have lots of spending power and few things to do with the money.

It also helps in containing real virus.

As a marketer, my view on content is that there are three necessary elements:

1) Quality/On-Topic

2) Correctly Timed with current events

3) Luck

It's actually quite similar to startups in general when you think about it.

4) Breaking the rules of communication or as I like to call it blasphemy.

For instance this WV commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnL-7x4n4d8

would never have been possible to do by WV themselves. Yet it is exactly this kind of commercials that have a high chance of going viral.

I wonder if the 297 number is essentially the ratio of the entire network to the seed population? So, you pay to reach x people who then spread it to 297x others.

Still, dubbing even this ROI would be a huge stretch.

That's the crux with most quantitative studies in social sciences. They are able to deliver impressive sounding claims, but in the end the external validity is more than questionable.

I'm somewhat bemused by the entire thing - as effectively they're just going "look, memetic drift imitates genetic drift!" - which isn't really all that surprising. If you want to propagate a gene through a population - start with an isolated group, let them breed, then unleash them on the wider population. This is how stuff like lactose tolerance got going.

If you want to propagate a meme through a population... you get the picture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com