W examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. To econometrically identify the effectiveness of different viral features in creating social contagion, we designed and conducted a randomized field experiment involving the 1.4 million friends of 9,687 experimental users on Facebook.com. We f...

Twitter is a popular microblogging site where users can easily use mobile phones or desktop machines to generate short messages to be shared with others in realtime. Twitter has seen heavy usage in many recent international events including Japan earthquake, Iran election, etc. In such events, many tweets may become viral for different reasons. In this paper, we study the virality of socio-poli...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether provision of vaccine-health-literacy-promoting information in text message vaccine reminders improves receipt and timeliness of the second dose of influenza vaccine within a season for children in need of 2 doses. METHODS During the 2012-2013 season, families of eligible 6-month through 8-year-old children were recruited at the time of their first influenza vacc...

Social networks make it possible to share rapidly and massively information. Yet, one of their major drawback comes from the absence of verification of the piece of information, especially with viral messages. This is the issue addressed by the participants to the Verification Multimedia Use task of Mediaeval 2016. They used several approaches and clues from different modalities (text, image, s...

OBJECTIVES To assess whether short message service (SMS) text messages sent as prenotification or postnotification reminders improve questionnaire response rates in randomized controlled trial (RCT) follow-up. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING Three "trials within a trial" assessed text message notifications sent before or after receipt of a follow-up questionnaire within an RCT for patients with depr...

BACKGROUND Back pain is reported to occur already in childhood, but its development at that age is not well understood. The aims of this study were to describe BP in children aged 6-12 years, and to investigate any sex and age differences. METHODS Data on back pain (defined as pain in the neck, mid back and/or lower back) were collected once a week from parents replying to automated text-mess...

At this time of uncertainty, viral marketing is emerging as one of the most intriguing communication strategies, due to low cost and the results it obtains. However, the success of this kind of practice depends on a range of factors including what we explore and refer to in the present research as the individual’s ‘‘viral dynamics’’. We thus propose a causal model in which viral dynamics is det...