Overlapping Social Network Communities and Viral Marketing

Social networks have highly been used to understand the behavior and activities of individuals in nature and society. They are being used as a means to communicate, diffuse information, and to control the spread of diseases and computer viruses, in addition to many other tasks. Business organizations look upon social networks as an opportunity to spread the word-of-mouth for viral marketing and this task has gained significance with the popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs). However, an important characteristic of social networks, including OSNs, which is the existence of overlapping communities of users, has not been exploited yet for the task of viral marketing even though it seems promising. This paper aims to present the importance of identifying overlapping communities for the task of viral marketing in social networks and also provides some experimental results on an email network to back the claims.