Those who follow regularly this blog know that I have a keen interest in viral marketing and in better understanding how to make it effective. The Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs recently studied the subject of collective attention, central to the effectiveness of WOM at a point of time where people are bombarded with information. They analyzed the behavioral patters of one million Digg users, the digital media democracy, which allow users to submit news stories and “digg” them.
What they showed is how the interplay between novelty and popularity determines the growth and eventual saturation of viral transmission. In considering the dynamics of collective attention, two competing effects are present: the growth in the number of people that attend to a given story and the habituation that makes the same story less likely to be attractive as time goes on. Novelty propels the propagation and as it fades the speed of propagation decreases. Popularity is also a good driver but it needs novelty to keep growing.
Sounds esoteric? It allows for example to calculate at which rate new items should be added on a website to maximize viral effects and to prioritize which ones should be displayed at the top to balance novelty and popularity. In the case of Digg, the decay of a new news item is on average 69min, which is consistent with the fact that a story lives for 1-2 hours on the front page.
Full study: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/novelty/novelty.pdf
Technorati tags: Hewlett Packard, hp, Eric Kintz, marketing, word of mouth, Viral marketing, HP Labs, digg
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