Viral Marketing: Networks
Whenever I see my friends post up statuses regarding a restaurant or exhibition they went to, I tend to trust their judgment depending on how close a friend he or she is. In class, we discuss about information cascade, which occurs when people tend to abandon their own information and follow the crowd or another person’s action. We all observe the actions of our friends on Facebook and we take in information that they provide. One day my friend went to check out a “Chicken and Waffles” restaurant and posted on Facebook that it was amazing. I saw how there were many likes on the post, which made me believe that the restaurant was a popular place despite my own opinion that chicken and waffles don’t sound good.
Similarly, Facebook and other social networking sites have the power to spread certain brands around the Internet. Taking advantage of advancement in technology, “viral marketing” is interesting component that allows companies or individuals to increase their brand and reputation by spreading throughout different networks. Aside from being based on social networks, “viral marketing” benefits heavily from the “word of mouth” concept. As one person influences someone, then there becomes a global cascade of people influencing one another. This is how certain things become viral.
Viral Marketing
A fairly recent incident that went viral was the hashtag #AlexFromTarget. This movement was cause by a girl who took a picture of a worker at Target named Alex and she posted his photo online. Some believe that the it’s a marketing campaign from Target, but they deny it. Overall, this is an example of viral marketing and can relate to information cascade. As we can see whether people believe this was a marketing campaign from target or not. In my opinion, I don’t see Alex as an extremely good looking person to stand out from every guy out there. However, once a few people share this photo and receive likes, more people tend to share. Therefore, it is a possibly that this may influence people to see him more attractive as opposed to if they saw him in a store. Is he really that attractive to go viral? Also, people tend to be influenced by those who they have stronger ties with than weaker times.
#AlexFromTarget
Additionally, there was an article that discussed about whether we can predict viral cascades. It also referenced back to a research paper done at Cornell University, which Professor Kleinberg worked on. Overall, we have an abundant amount of information within the World Wide Web and certain topics get shared more than others. For example, the Ice Bucket Challenge was a large factor that numerous of people on Facebook were sharing. We can also see how certain Vine videos and Buzzfeed posts become viral. Specifically, for these type of events, the cascade tends to develop more quickly and spread to more people. The paper concluded that it was easier to predict bigger cascades than smaller ones.
http://socialtimes.com/can-viral-cascades-predicted_b145644
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/iis04.pdf
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519786/viral-marketing-successfully-modeled-by-network-theorists/
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/who-is-alex-from-target-and-why-should-i-even-begin-101686693754.html