How 20% of Social Network Actions or Actors Determine 80% of Results

"If you wanted to nudge people on a social network into trying a new product or get a biochemical system to turn compound A into compound B, you could just push your product or compound into every entry point in the network. But that’s sort of a silly approach, says Jean-Jacques Slotine of MIT. A much more efficient tactic would be to target just the nodes needed to get the desired outcome.

So, along with colleagues Albert-László Barabási and Yang-Yu Liu of Northeastern University in Boston, Slotine developed an algorithm that calculates the minimum number of these driver nodes and finds them. 'Dense networks, on the other hand, such as many social networks, were much easier to control: Influence roughly 20 percent of the nodes and the whole network responds.

Those findings suggest that very-large networks are not chaotic, but rather structured, in terms of how influence and impact works across the network.

How 20% of Social Network Actions or Actors Determine 80% of Results