The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

Lada Adamic
Assistant Professor
School of Information

6:30pm - 8:30pm
Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
411 West Hall (Ehrlicher Room) directions...

We present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a million products. We observed the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which can be explained by a stochastic model. We then established how the recommendation network grows over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver of the recommendations. While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, there are product and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very effective.

This is joint work with Jure Leskovec from CMU and Bernardo Huberman from HP Labs.

Please help us publicize this event by downloading a poster and putting it up in your school/office.

About the Speaker

Lada A. Adamic is an assistant professor in the School of Information. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. She worked previously in Hewlett-Packard's Information Dynamics Lab on research projects relating to networks constructed from large data sets. These projects included mining the medical literature for gene-disease connections, tracking and modeling information flow in E-mail and blog networks, modeling search processes on real-world social networks, and building expertise-finding systems.

Updates & Links

Thanks to Lada and everyone who showed up for the talk. Here are a number of links to follow up Lada's stimulating presentation:

Lada's website

Lada's powerpoint presentation