Internet-induced marketing techniques: Critical factors in viral marketing campaigns

The rapid diffusion of the Internet and the emergence of various social constructs facilitated by Internet technologies are changing the drivers that define how marketing techniques are developed and refined. This paper identifies critical factors for viral marketing, an Internet-based ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing technique. Based on existing knowledge, five types of viral marketing factors that may critically influence the success of viral marketing campaigns are identified. These factors are the overall structure of the campaign, the characteristics of the product or service, the content of the message, the characteristics of the diffusion and, the peer-to-peer information conduit. The paper discusses three examples of viral marketing campaigns and identifies the specific factors in each case that influence its success. The paper concludes with a viral marketing typology differentiating between viral marketing communications, unintended viral marketing and commercial viral marketing. This is still a rapidly evolving area and further research is clearly needed to monitor new developments and make sense of the radical changes these developments bring to the market

Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version includes corrected typo

Differential Games of Competition in Online Content Diffusion

Access to online contents represents a large share of the Internet traffic. Most such contents are multimedia items which are user-generated, i.e., posted online by the contents' owners. In this paper we focus on how those who provide contents can leverage online platforms in order to profit from their large base of potential viewers. Actually, platforms like Vimeo or YouTube provide tools to accelerate the dissemination of contents, i.e., recommendation lists and other re-ranking mechanisms. Hence, the popularity of a content can be increased by paying a cost for advertisement: doing so, it will appear with some priority in the recommendation lists and will be accessed more frequently by the platform users. Ultimately, such acceleration mechanism engenders a competition among online contents to gain popularity. In this context, our focus is on the structure of the acceleration strategies which a content provider should use in order to optimally promote a content given a certain daily budget. Such a best response indeed depends on the strategies adopted by competing content providers. Also, it is a function of the potential popularity of a content and the fee paid for the platform advertisement service. We formulate the problem as a differential game and we solve it for the infinite horizon case by deriving the structure of certain Nash equilibria of the game

Lipdubs as an Instrument to Overcome Invisibility in the Mass-Media. A study of four enthusiastic cases recorded in Quebec, USA, Catalonia and the Basque Country

This paper summarizes the principal conclusions of an investigation into lipdub as an instrument used by social movements in order to get more social influence. Since its creation in 2006, the phenomenon of lipdubs has increased\ud considerably. This research presents an analytical model for this type of video, providing general data, figures about the number of participants, characteristics of the song used and information about the profile of the audience. The work\ud highlights the main hypothetical features and components of a good lipdub. Four videos with high impact on Youtube are analyzed. This work claims that, at this time, a good lipdub can be a crucial tool for social movements in order to\ud overcome the invisibility with which the mass-media often punishes any expression which challenges mainstream tendencies