Viral Marketing for Public Health Campaigns in Social Networks

Viral marketing for public health campaigns aims at identifying a group of seed users to maximize the message of public health information in a target social network. Different from traditional viral marketing problems, public health campaigns try to expand social influence in the target network, meanwhile it also focus on their target audience, who are difficult to discover. Meanwhile, besides the target network, users nowadays can also participate many other social networks. Discovering target audience and viral marketing in these networks, referred to as the source networks, can be relatively easier, and the shared users can act as intermediate nodes transmitting information from these networks to the target one. In this paper, we propose to carry viral marketing for public health campaign in the target network in a roundabout way, by selecting seed users from the target and other external networks and influence users through intra- and inter-network information diffusion. To achieve such an objective, a new inter-network information diffusion model IPADH is introduced in this paper. Based on IPADH, cross-network viral marketing framework IMDP is proposed to solve the problem. Extensive experiments are conducted on anti-smoking campaign datasets, and results demonstrate that IMDP can outperform traditional intra-network viral marketing methods with significant advantages.