The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion by Eytan Bakshy, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow and Lada Adamic.
Abstract:
Online social networking technologies enable individuals to simultaneously share information with any number of peers. Quantifying the causal effect of these technologies on the dissemination of information requires not only identification of who influences whom, but also of whether individuals would still propagate information in the absence of social signals about that information. We examine the role of social networks in online information diffusion with a large-scale field experiment that randomizes exposure to signals about friends’ information sharing among 253 million subjects in situ. Those who are exposed are significantly more likely to spread information, and do so sooner than those who are not exposed. We further examine the relative role of strong and weak ties in information propagation. We show that, although stronger ties are individually more influential, it is the more abundant weak ties who are responsible for the propagation of novel information. This suggests that weak ties may play a more dominant role in the dissemination of information online than currently believed.
Sample size: 253 million Facebook users.
Pay attention to the line:
We show that, although stronger ties are individually more influential, it is the more abundant weak ties who are responsible for the propagation of novel information.
If you have an “Web scale” (whatever that means) information delivery issue, you need to not only target CNN and Drudge with press releases but should consider targeting actors with abundant weak ties.
Thinking this could be important in topic map driven applications that “push” novel information into the social network of a large, distributed company. You know how few of us actually read the tiresome broadcast stuff from HR, etc., so what if the important parts were “reported” piecemeal by others?
It is great to have a large functioning topic map but it doesn’t become useful until people make the information it delivers their own and take action based upon it.