Entry Point Matters - Effective Introduction of Innovation in Social Networks

Social networks have grown massively in the last few years and have become a lot more than mere message exchange platforms. Apart from serving purposes such as linking friends and family, job linking or news feeding, their nearly pervasive nature and presence in day-to-day activities make them the biggest potential market and access platform to hundreds of millions of customers ever built. Faced with such a complex and challenging environment, we claim that introducing innovation in an efficient way in such networks is of extreme importance. In this paper, we put forward a mechanism to select suitable entry points in the network to introduce the innovation, so fostering its acceptance and enhancing its diffusion. To do this, we use the underlying structure of the network as well as the influencing power some users exercise over others. We present results of testing our approach with both a Facebook dataset and different examples of random networks.