The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

Do you know what Viral Marketing is? Well, you really ought to! I found a great ebook that demonstrates how viral marketing is more efficient than the traditional recommendation social networks in the long term.

Here's the abstract:

"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 observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. We analyze how user
behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network.
Product purchases follow a ’long tail’ where a significant share of purchases
belongs to rarely sold items. We establish 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, we present a
model that successfully identifies communities, product and pricing categories
for which viral marketing seems to be very effective."

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
Jure Leskovec
Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Lada A. Adamic
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Bernardo A. Huberman
HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 94304
April 20, 2007