Sinan Aral's Research on Social Contagion

Question: Sinan Aral’s research focuses on social contagion, product virality, and measuring, and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks such as Twitter and Facebook affects information worker productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing.

Co-produce an excellent summary of his work and the themes he covers. Your personal opinions of his work are welcome.

This paper will explore Aral’s research on social contagion and causality with a focus on what this means for society not only business.

Fifteen years ago, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn was yet to come into existence. The evolution of digital communication has massively impacted the way that people now communicate with each other in their daily lives, their relationships, collaboration and decision-making (Rosen, 2016). In his presentation to Poptech (2010), Sinan Aral talks about his belief that through understanding how behaviours are spread in a social network there is potential to promote positive social change such as condom use, exercise and tolerance, and deter behaviours such as violence or smoking. His research has involved analysis of huge amounts of social network data to gain understanding of how social contagions are spread, the role of peer influence to buy a product or vote for a certain political party, and focuses on causal statistical estimation of social influence. These insights will assist not only marketers in consumer products, but health behavior, public policy and political mobilization (Aral, 2013).

So what can policy makers learn from Aral’s research in how to design and target a public health intervention? How does this get people out to vote? How can the outcomes be optimized in positive societal behavior change?  In his article ‘Poked to Vote’ (Aral, 2012), Aral points to the peer influence and digital social signals that can be used to promote ‘widespread behavior change and thus transform commerce, politics and public health’. Thinking about the crucial role social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has played over recent years in social movements, protests and even political election campaigns, the importance of this research is very clear.  Using one recent example, it was suggested that Trump’s presidential campaign success was due to his use of social media, with more than 60% of US adults receiving their election news this way (BBC, 2016). Trump’s campaign spent approximately $90 million on digital advertising, mostly on Facebook, and proved to be a powerful way to hone their message, interact with supporters and start conversations, hugely influencing voters’ behavior. Supporting this, an earlier study by Brown et al (2010) proved a single election-day Facebook message resulted in 340,000 extra people turning out to vote.