How infectious are you?
No, I’m not talking about the ubiquitous swine flu, or even this beautifully-URL’d little gem. I’m talking about the Spanish researchers who have been investigating how the viral nature of online memes is highly dependent on the ‘infectiousness’ of the people carrying them.
Whereas standard calculations around the viral potential of content focuses on the properties of the content itself (how funny, how useful, how sticky it is), José Luis Iribarren from IBM and Esteban Moro at the Carlos III University in Madrid have built a model which takes into account how individual behaviour affects its spread (i.e. how quickly and enthusiastically different people pass it on). It’s proving startlingly accurate, and the researchers believe that it could be used for social media as well as email.
The speed and volume of word of mouth are only two ways to measure its success – it’s important to consider emotional engagement, long term impact, relevance and much more – but this is undeniably cool. Read the full New Scientist article here.
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