Assessing the ripple effects of online opinion leaders with trust and distrust metrics

This study evaluates the influence of opinion leaders on other users in a social network and investigates the impact of the sizes of opinion leaders on the outcome of social network marketing (SNM) campaigns when trust and distrust relationships among users are considered. In particular, we assume that SNM managers utilize one of three trust metrics (knowledge score (KS), matching coefficient (MC), and Jaccard coefficient (JC)) to reflect the strength of trust relationships among users as well as to determine the outcome of SNM campaigns in terms of connected (i.e., who are exposed to marketing campaigns) and activated users (i.e., who actually purchase a product). Our experimental results indicate that while all three simple topological metrics such as in- and out-degree and hybrid measures of in- and out-degree are very useful to identify opinion leaders, the outcome of SNM campaigns with MC trust metric is heavily affected by out-degree and the outcomes of SNM campaigns with KS and JC metrics are much more affected by in-degree. It is also noted that the total numbers of connected and activated users increase as the size of opinion leaders grows, but the net numbers of connected and activated users start to decrease after a certain size of opinion leaders. The greatest impact of distrust relationships is observed in SNM campaigns based on JC followed by MC and KS. Therefore, if SNM managers consider distrust relationships critical to estimate the success of SNM campaigns or they like to under-estimate rather than over-estimate the reach of SNM campaigns, JC trust metric is the most appropriate metric than any other metrics due to its sensitiveness to the distrust relationships among users.

► Estimate the impacts of opinion leaders on outcomes of social network marketing (SNM).
► Investigate the positive impacts of trust relationships on the outcomes of SNM.
► Compare outcomes of SNM based on three trust metrics to measure the strength of trust.
► Investigate the negative impacts of distrust relationships on the outcomes of SNM.
► Estimate the success of SNM in terms of hit rate, referral multiplier, and exclusion rate.