Strategies of Success for Social Networks: Mermaids and Temporal Evolution The main goal of this article is to investigate techniques that can quickly lead to successful social systems by boosting network connectivity. This is especially useful when starting new online communities where the aim is to increase the system utilization as much as possible. This aspect is very important nowadays, given the existence of many online social networks available on the web, and the relatively high level of competition. In other words, attracting usersxe2x80x99 attention is becoming a major concern, and time is an essential factor when investing money and resources into online social systems. Our study describes an effective technique that deals with this issue by introducing the notion of mermaids, special attractors that alter the normal evolutive behavior of a social system. We analyze how mermaids can boost social networks, and then provide estimations of fundamental parameters that business strategists can take into account in order to obtain successful systems within a constrained budget.

To Be or Not to Be: Analyzing & Modeling Social Recommendation in Online Social Networks Firms are now considering to offer rewards to customers who recommend the firmsu0027 productsservices in online social networks (OSN). However, the pros and cons of such social recommendation scheme are still unclear. Thus, it is difficult for firms to design rewarding schemes. Via empirical analysis of data, we first identify key factors that affect the spreading of a firmu0027s product in OSNs. These findings enable us to develop an accurate (i.e., with a high validation accuracy) mathematical model on social recommendations. In particular, our model captures how users decide whether to recommend an item, which is a key factor but often ignored by previous social recommendation models such as the Independent Cascade model. We also design algorithms to infer model parameters. Using these parameters in our model, we uncover conditions when social recommendation can (or cannot) improves a firmu0027s profit. These conditions help a firm to design rewarding schemes. Finally, we extend our model to an online setting and design reinforcement learning algorithms for a firm to dynamically optimize its rewarding schemes.