This doesn't seem useful to me. It doesn't matter if you "find" the optimal people to send a message to. The important thing is the message, and whether they will find it interesting enough to spread in the first place.
If it was so easy to get something viral, then a blanket message sent to a large group of people would automatically result in viral marketing. ie - spam. And we see how often spam becomes viral....
It is useful because it means you can strategically identify a much smaller set of users to focus on. If you get the seed group to trigger, you get massive payoff. And so you can target initial messages to them, and analyse who takes action and who doesn't and why, iterate, and retarget on the seed group rather than wasting lots of time on the much larger full network.
True. I guess I'm just a bit skeptical about whether this would really work. And as others pointed out, if marketers start using this type of targeting, then this "seed" audience will be over-saturated.
> It doesn't matter if you "find" the optimal people to send a message to. The important thing is the message
Well, the message matters and the initial set of people also matters.
A good message has a higher probability to be transfered by a peer to its friends. So yeah spam emails don't go viral because they have a very low probability to be transfered.
But given two messages of the same quality, they may or may not go viral depending on where you inject them.
To clarify, the actual scientific paper do not claim that they "solved the fundamental problem of viral marketing" they just propose a new heuristic to find good seeds and show that it's good.
If it was so easy to get something viral, then a blanket message sent to a large group of people would automatically result in viral marketing. ie - spam. And we see how often spam becomes viral....