> 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.
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.
Edit: clarity.