Social network influence determined by location  
Author: admin

A new study has been able to shed light on the manner in which information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks.

It is expected that the findings will help marketers and public relations officers conduct more effective social media and social marketing campaigns.

From Timesofindia.indiatimes.com:

“The important thing is where someone is located in a network,” Nature quoted Makse as saying.

“If someone is in the core, they can spread information more efficiently. The challenge is finding the core,” he said.

That kind of information could help marketers and public relations practitioners conduct more effective social media and social marketing campaigns.

It could also help epidemiologists target resources to reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

In the study, the researchers examined four networks representing archetypical examples of social structures: members of LiveJournal.com; email contacts in the computer science department at University College London; inpatients of Swedish hospitals, and adult film actors.

The latter group was studied because it is a distinct subgroup of the acting profession whose members rarely appear in other genres, Makse explained.

The team of researchers was led by Dr. Hernan Makse of the City College of New York (CCNY) and the findings appeared in Nature Physics.