Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875

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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/elerap

Predicting the influence of viral message for VM campaign on Weibo T

a,⁎ a b a a
Li Shugang , Zhang Yuqi , Yu Zhaoxu , Zhang Fangfang , Lu Hanyu
a
School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, PR China
b
Department of Automation, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, PR China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Viral marketing (VM) method has the benefits of rapid dissemination and is easy to reach the “hard-to-get”
Weibo audience, consequently, it has irritated the interest of academics and entrepreneurs. On social network sites, the
Viral marketing prerequisite for successfully launching an effective VM campaign is to accurately predict the influence of viral
Seeding strategy message (IVM) under various seeding strategies that initiate and promote the campaign. However, in current
FEM
prediction models of IVM, the effect of seeds on viral messages dissemination is ideally assumed to be constant
and the corresponding seeding strategies are ignored. In this study, an IVM prediction model is proposed by
taking the seeds’ influence with respect to infecting their followers into consideration. The attention features of
seeding strategies, which get users to be attentive to a viral message, are identified and the flexible ensemble
model (FEM) is developed to estimate seed’s influence under various seeding strategies. FEM evaluates the
generalization ability of prediction models by generalization performance index and adaptively selects the ap-
propriate model with the highest similarity to other models that perform well in generalization using rough
similarity index. The proposed models are assessed with the real VM cases on Weibo and the experiment results
show that FEM can offset the performance variability of traditional data mining models in different conversion
volume samples and has strong robustness and adaptability.

1. Introduction
In 1996, venture capitalist Steve proposed the term “viral marketing
(VM)” to depict the marketing scheme of free e-mail service Hotmail
(Kaikati and Kaikati, 2004). Currently, more and more companies are
actively utilizing the vast amount of users’ reaction to the posts on
social network websites (SNWs) to create sustainable VM campaign,
because SNWs offer users with a convenient and competent electronic
platform to share reviews of products with their connected friends, and
the size of participants on SNWs can substantially increase in a short
time.
Compared with the conventional mass media marketing, viral
methods have numerous benefits, for instance, targeted communica-
tion, reduction of redundancy, rapid dissemination and low distortion
of the message, high possibility of reaching “hard-to-get” audience, etc.
Many corporations, including Evian, Burger King, Old Spice, and eBay,
have invested huge sums of money on social networks to utilize users’
reviews of the product (users’ posts) to develop VM campaigns and
affect consumer purchasing decisions (Kumar and Mirchandani, 2012).
Besides, Old Spice launched the electronic viral video campaign on
social network platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and You-
Tube, consequently, garnering over 23 million views after 36 h. Since
people can actually participate and create viral content in VM cam-
paign, we believe that more challenge-wise VM examples can be an-
ticipated in the future.
On SNWs, accurately predicting the influence of viral message
(IVM) is of critical significance in order to carry out VM triumphantly,
especially when the duration of consumers’ shopping passion is short.
For example, during the online shopping festival, the large crowds
enthusiastically shop, but their shopping passion usually lasts only a
few days. Even if a broad literature in this field exists, researchers only
defined and studied individually the features of messages’ authors, se-
lected some important message-related predictive features and used
these features to develop effective prediction models for message in-
fluence (Adamic et al., 2008). However, different from VM campaigns
in other traditional media, such as e-mail, which mainly relies on the
content or sender features of viral message to get it shared quickly
among people, seeding strategies that initiate and promote the VM
campaign on SNWs principally determine IVM, and consequently they
should be considered when building the accurate prediction model of
message influence (Stewart et al., 2004; Bampo et al., 2008).
Although some researchers have conducted the preliminary pilot
researches in this area, these studies are limited to estimating the effect
of viral marketing campaigns under various seeding strategies using

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: westside_li@163.com (S. Li).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2019.100875
Received 11 January 2017; Received in revised form 30 June 2019; Accepted 7 July 2019
Available online 08 July 2019
1567-4223/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
S. Li, et al.
discrete-time models, for instance, some well-known susceptible-in-
fected (SI), susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR), and susceptible- in-
fected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic models. These models are based on an
analogy with the spread of infectious disease, which assume that one
starts with a seed individual who spreads the viral message by infecting
their friends. However, there is an important flaw in the epidemic
analogy models: the effect of seeds on viral message dissemination is
assumed to be constant and known in advance. In reality, seed’s effects
change dynamically and are determined by seeding strategies.
To address these problems, this study builds a prediction model to
accurately calculate IVM under various seeding strategies which are
designed to attract the attention of users on SNWs. Specifically, a list of
attention features of seeding strategies is identified from three dimen-
sions: seed selection, seeding time, and embellishment of the viral
message. In addition, a flexible ensemble model (FEM) is developed to
estimate the influencing power of the sponsored seed and promotional
seeds on viral message dissemination in each stage of viral message
spread according to these attention features. In FEM, for the sake of
improving the robustness and accuracy of the model, the generalization
performance index is proposed to screen out the efficient base models,
from which the highly efficient model that shares the most similarity
with the other base models is selected according to our novel rough
similarity index. Finally, the influence of each seed on viral message
spread is accurately estimated by its conversion volume and true IVM is
predicted. Empirical results of VM campaign on Weibo show that the
proposed method achieves significantly stable and excellent perfor-
mance as compared with the existing methods.
The article is set out as follows: In Section 2 the related literature is
reviewed, the problem is set up in Section 3, and FEM is offered in
Section 4. An empirical analysis of the attention features and evaluation
of FEM are given in Section 5. Conclusions and discussions for future
studies are Provided in Section 6.
2. Literature review
The conversion from traditional e-mail service to SNW has greatly
prolonged the chances for real-time, large-scale communication
(Dellarocas, 2003), and in the process, created prevalent and fasci-
nating cases of large-scale dissemination of messages (Goldenberg et al.,
2001), which has irritated the interest of researchers from various
disciplinary backgrounds. On the whole, the wealth of cross-dis-
ciplinary literature on message influence prediction can be divided into
four emerging streams: author features, quality and contents, the
topologies of the network, and seeding strategies based methods.
2.1. Author features
The recent and typical studies on calculating the message’s influ-
ence essentially concentrate on the author characteristics. Bui et al.
(2014) used the author properties, reader properties, association, con-
tent, and the number of published posts to calculate the influence of
bloggers in their group. Zhu et al. (2012) proposed a mutual informa-
tion measure to assess the correlation between topics and developed a
new approach for evaluating author impact. Wang et al. (2016a) con-
structed a cascade-based model to identify the influencer who had the
maximum positive influence on three real networks, namely, Facebook,
HEP-PH and Epinions. Zeng et al. (2016) proposed an approach to find
top-K influential nodes given a threshold of influence loss because of
the nodes’ failure. Chen et al. (2014) built two models for predicting the
influence of posts on SNWs using both post- and author-related features
as predictors.
2.2. Quality and contents
Because the number of messages rapidly increases on social net-
works, the impact of message quality and contents on its influence has
2
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875
attracted the interest of researchers. Kim et al. (2016) proposed
weighted comments and trackback algorithm for efficient blog ranking.
Their method carried out a ranking procedure through both inter-
connection of posts and structural weights for contents. Lagnier et al.
(2013) developed a new probabilistic model to predict how a content
diffused on a network based on the content of the message, the user’s
profile, and willingness to diffuse. Using the data set on YouTube, Qiu
et al. (2015) found that learning primarily drove the popularity of
quality-oriented content and the network effects made the attention-
grabbing content to go viral.
2.3. Topologies of the network
Based on call data from a telecom company, Kiss and Bichler (2008)
compared different centrality measures for the diffusion of marketing
messages. They found differences in the various centrality measures
relying on the underlying network topology and dissemination process.
Zhao et al. (2013) integrated both the network topology and interac-
tions among nodes into the model of node influence calculation. Chiu
and Chen (2013) found that a weak tie facilitated the spread of in-
formation. They proposed the mechanism to choose good weak ties in
each stage of the propagation process.
2.4. Seeding strategies
Stonedahl et al. (2010) built a strategy space for consumer seeding
by mixing the network characteristics such as the average path length,
clustering coefficient, and degree. They evaluated strategy effectiveness
with five different social network structures: random, lattice, small-
world, preferential attachment model, and the structure extracted from
Twitter friendship data. Godinho De Matos et al. (2014) studied the
effect of peer influence on the dissemination of the iPhone 3G across
several communities. They analyzed the rewards of using traditional
marketing strategies to seed the iPhone 3G. Wang et al. (2016b) pro-
posed the maximum influence arborescence model to discover a seed
set and maximize the expected influence over the potential customers in
the promoted location. Dinh et al. (2012) developed the method to find
optimal seeds for medium-size networks and proposed VirAds to
minimize the seeding cost.
Even though there are emerging groups of literature in this area, this
study is distinctive in several respects. First of all, IVM is predicted by
taking both sponsored seed outcome and promotional seed outcome in
marketing campaigns into consideration. Furthermore, the attention
features of seeding strategies, which affect the seed’s infectious power,
are studied and a novel FEM is proposed to calculate the influencing
power of the seed under various seeding strategies.
3. Problem setup
In this section, we first define the problem of predicting the influ-
ence of viral message (IVM) under various seeding strategies of VM
campaign on Weibo and then provide attention features of seeding
strategies.
3.1. IVM prediction and viral marketing platform
Accurate prediction of IVM under various seeding strategies is vital
for successfully carrying out the VM campaign. The overall IVM de-
pends on seeds that initiate and promote the campaign, the time to
propagate the viral message, and the message itself, all three of which
constitute three parts of seeding strategies. As the viral message dis-
semination on Weibo is mainly achieved by seeds infecting their direct
and indirect followers, IVM is the aggregate influence of seeds that
trigger and promote the viral message. In order to predict the influence
of seed, attention features of seeding strategies, which consist of seed
selection, seeding time, and embellishment of the viral message, are
S. Li, et al.
Table 1
Attention features of seeding strategies.
Dimension Sub-dimension Features
Seed selection (χ) General influence of seed Followed count
Follower count
Active level of seed Recently response count
Seeding time (λ) Publishing date and time Day
Time
Embellishing the viral message (ω) Content Promotional words
Expression Presentation form
proposed and shown in Table 1. However, the influence of seed is dy-
namically changing under various seeding strategies. It is a tough task
to accurately estimate seed’ influence using the fixed and rigid pre-
diction model. Accordingly, FEM is developed to forecast the influence
of each seed according to the attention features of seeding strategies as
well as the follower count of the ancestor seeds in the dissemination
path, which is depicted in Section 5.1, and then IVM prediction model is
constructed by ensemble each seed’s FEM.
We choose Weibo as the VM platform because it has three ad-
vantages which make it an appropriate network to be used for VM
campaign. First of all, Weibo has grown to be the largest microblog
website in China in respect of user scale. For instance, Weibo had
owned over 3.92 million monthly active users worldwide by December
2017. Furthermore, messages on Weibo are short statements with a
specific length limit, which decides that Weibo communication is both
instant and constant. Finally, users on Weibo are connected with weak
ties and information can be transmitted in an instant to an unlimited
number of people (Ma, 2013). That is different from other social net-
works with strong ties, such as Facebook and WeChat, and commu-
nication through these platforms is limited within comparatively small
circles.
3.2. Attention features of seeding strategies
It has been found that attention is the primary barrier to informa-
tion propagation on social networks (Roy et al., 2015). Identifying the
features that get users to be attentive to a message is a vital prerequisite
to predict future popularity and lifetime of messages. According to
previous works and observations of Weibo, we compile a list of atten-
tion features of seeding strategies from three dimensions: seed selec-
tion, seeding time, and embellishing the viral message, as shown in
Table 1. Firstly, the general influence of seed is the primary feature to
affect the users’ attention, which can be measured by its follower count
and followed count. Furthermore, the interaction between seeds and
their followers and social network structure of seeds also affect the
follower’s attention distribution towards responding the viral message.
However, collecting this data is a difficult and hard task because of
huge follower size (say tens of millions in a seed). Therefore, the seed's
active level, namely the recent response count in this month, is devel-
oped to indicate the effects of interaction and network structure. Be-
sides that, since the latest messages on Weibo are placed in the pro-
minent positions on users’ screen, the viral messages posted during
Internet rush hours, for example between 7 and 11 p.m., will be placed
in the prominent positions on the most users’ screens and attract their
attention. Therefore, whether the message is published during Internet
rush hours or not can also be correlated with mass attention. In addi-
tion, a large number of users access the Internet during the online
shopping festival, so the message that is released during the date will be
noticed by more users. Finally, the content and expression of the mes-
sage can definitely affect the collective attention and drive users to
respond, for a message with stimulating language and vivid expression
are more likely to attract the users’ interest.
3
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875
Denotation Definition
F The number of users who are followed by the seed
F _c The number of fans who are interested in seed and follow him/her
AR_c The number of responses of all seed’s posts in this month
D Whether a topic is posted during the online shopping festival
T Whether a topic is posted during the Internet rush hours
P _w The content with the label of “Prizes”, “Lottery”, “Reward”, etc.
P _f Pure text or image/video
4. FEM for the influencing power of a seed
4.1. The architecture of FEM
Given the attention features of seeding strategies, as shown in
Table 1, and the follower count of the ancestor seeds (i.e., (u) , where u
represents a seed), three types of data mining models can be adopted to
estimate the influencing power of each seed: (a) models of fitting trend
of dependent variable (FTDV), for example, regression models, (b)
models of high dimension data classification (HDDC), for instance,
support vector machine (SVM), and (c) models of fitting nonlinear
model (FNM), such as neural networks. However, due to the complexity
of viral message dissemination, it has not been proved that which type
of model is the most suitable to accurately depict the influencing power
of a viral message. As a result, FEM is developed to offset this variability
and select the appropriate model which can achieve stable and ex-
cellent performance according to the specific scenarios of information
diffusion. FEM is composed of four main components, namely attention
features of seeding strategies, model set, model screening and model
selection. The overall architecture and the interaction between different
components are depicted in Fig. 1.
4.2. Model set
In the model set component, a series of data mining models are
adopted. First of all, in the set of FTDV, 8 types of multiple regression
models (RG1 ~RG8) are adopted, which are most frequently used to
find mapping relations between the dependent variable and in-
dependent variables. In HDDC set, SVM is taken into account for the
reason that it can efficiently perform a non-linear classification using
what is called the kernel trick. Finally, in FNM set, Back-Propagation
neural network (BPNN), General Regression neural network (GRNN),
and Radial Basis Function neural network (RBFNN) are considered
because they are the most commonly used neural networks. Table 2
shows the output/ kernel functions of each data mining model. In this
table, X is the input vector, and y is the output variable, the other
parameters are constant.
Fig. 1. The architecture of FEM.
S. Li, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875

Table 2 on the gap between the training error and test error, namely
The set of models. |TeMSEi TrMSEi|, it is hard to know the exact value of TeMSEi . In
Dimension Model Output/ kernel function order to further measure the ability of a model to perform accurately on
new and unseen examples, generalization error is necessary to be in-
FNM BPNN k troduced into GPI formulation, namely TeMSEi .
1 + exp ( X )
RBFNN The ascending ranking of GPI for each model is adopted to screen
X c2
exp
2 2 the model. Specifically, the model i is removed if the rank index of GPI
GRNN K is smaller than the given threshold .
k = 1 wk f (X , Xk )
y= K , where
k = 1 f (X , Xk )
Xk )T (X
f (X , Xk ) = exp
(X Xk )
4.4. Model selection
2 2
FTDV RG1 y = aX + b
RG2 In order to improve the prediction accuracy and reliability, FEM
y = aX b
RG3 y= ae bX
selects the data mining model which performs well in generalization
RG4 y = a + lnX and shares as many similarities as possible with the other models.
RG5 y=
a
+b However, the similarity of models has a variety of meanings, it is dif-
ficult to accurately measure it using the traditional methods. Therefore,
X
RG6 1
= a + be X
y a rough set is employed to depict the similarity of the models, and it can
RG7 y = a + bX + cX2 provide a formal approximation of a crisp similarity in terms of a pair of
RG8 y = a + bX + cX2 + dX 3 indicators which give the lower and the upper approximation of the
HDDC SVM 2)
exp ( Xi Xj
similarity. Specifically, rough similarity index (RSI) is defined to mea-
sure the similarity between the selected model and the other base
models which are narrowed down through GPI rank index and given
4.3. Model screening
threshold .
With model j , one can obtain a partition of training sample set N, as
The model set includes some frequently used prediction models that
shown in the following formula: Y = N / j = {Yj1, Yj2, , YjC } , where Yjk
may yield a good solution. To choose the best model is the heart of the
represents the set of samples whose output is divided into category k by
matter. In supervised learning, what we can do is to struggle to mini-
the estimated result of model j , C denotes the number of categories.
mize the empirical error (i.e., training error), yet what we really want is
Given the sample set Yjk , lower approximation and
N
a learner which is able to accurately predict outcome values for unseen i (Yjk )
j
_
data, namely a model with the minimum generalization error (Shalev- upper approximation ¯i (Yjk ) of similarity between model and model
j i
Shwartz and Ben-David, 2014; Goodfellow et al., 2016). Therefore, are defined as follows:
given the specific sample, it is necessary to remove the model whose
performance is inconsistent with expectations. N
Common theoretical tools for evaluating generalization perfor- _i (Yjk ) = Yik Yjk |Yik
i
mance are the principle of empirical risk minimization, leave-one-out
error, cross-validation error, etc. (Zou and Li, 2006). In these tools, we and
adopt k-fold cross-validation because it is more suitable for estimating
the generalization performance of the classifiers than the other mea- N
¯i (Yjk ) = Yjk |Yik Yjk , Yik
sures that are often used by the previous methods (Songsiri et al., i
2015). In this context, Train-Validation-Test Split is adopted to select
The set { i (Yjk ), ¯i (Yjk )} is called a rough set of similarity between
the model that performs well on generalization (Shalev-Shwartz and _
i

Ben-David, 2014). We split the available examples into three sets: train, and j with respect to Yjk .
validation (i.e., generalization), and test. The first set is used to choose All base models are ranked in ascending order of GPI, let L ( j ) be the
the parameters to reduce training set error and the second is used as a rank index of GPI ( j ), consequently the accuracy of the rough-set re-
validation set (i.e., generalization set) for model screening and model presentation of the models’ similarity with respect to Yjk is defined in
selection. After we select the best model, the performance of the output formula (2):
predictor on the test set will be tested finally.
To screen out models with poor generalization performance, we |_i (Yjk )| L ( j )
(Yjk ) = .
propose a generalization performance index (GPI) and it is defined by i C
h=1
|Yjh |2 | ¯i (Yjk )| (2)
formula (1):
Accordingly, RSI of model i is defined by formula (3):
1 1
GPI ( i) = + ,
exp (|TeMSEi TrMSEi |) exp (TeMSEi ) (1) C
(Yjk )
j,j i k= 1 i
RSI ( i ) = ,
where TrMSEi and TeMSEi are the average mean square error (MSE) of C·exp ( R (TeMSEi )) (3)
training sets and generalization sets for model i , respectively. Instead
where is a constant. R (TeMSEi ) is the rank index of TeMSEi in as-
of some existing measurements in the literature, such as generalization
cending order. The model with the maximum RSI is selected as the
error, we utilize the GPI for the following reasons. (1) The factors de-
model to estimate the influencing power of the seed.
termining how well a machine learning algorithm will perform are its
ability to: (a) Make the training error small. (b) Make the gap between
training and test error small (Goodfellow et al., 2016). The former re- 5. Performance assessment of the prediction model
quirements can be met during the model training process. The latter
corresponds to one central challenge in machine learning: overfitting, In this section, the seeding strategies and measurement of IVM for
which occurs when the gap between the training error and test error is VM campaign on Weibo are proposed at first. Next, data collection and
too large. In other word, |TeMSEi TrMSEi| represents this gap; the preprocessing are conducted. Finally, the performance assessment of
larger it is, the more serious the overfitting is. (2) However, since IVM prediction model is made in terms of accuracy and stability in the
TrMSEi is various corresponding to different prediction models, based real VM cases on Weibo.

4
S. Li, et al.
Fig. 2. Seeding strategies for one viral message.
5.1. Seeding strategies and measurement of IVM
The seeding strategy consists of three parts: seed selection, seeding
time, and embellishment of the viral message. Seed-selecting process, a
vital component of seeding strategies, is clearly represented in Fig. 2
and is elaborated as follows. Initially, marketers select an “elite user” as
the sponsored seed to trigger viral marketing by publishing the viral
message, and the predicted influence of the seed informs this pre-
liminary choice. The viral message gets exposed to all the followers of
the sponsored seed, some of whom are infected and forward the viral
message to infect their followers. In other words, the influence of seed
includes both the direct and indirect influence driven by it. When the
viral message gets flooded by other messages, marketers will pick out
some excellent users who have not forwarded the message, namely
promotional seeds, to continue forwarding the viral message and infect
their followers. In the same way, the predicted influences of all can-
didate promotional seeds inform this selection. This process will be
constantly repeated and recycled until the scale of infected users
achieves the fixed goal.
It should be noted that the promotional seeds in each time-stage are
selected from the followers of seed(s) at the last time-stage, which
means that the selections of sponsored seed and following promotional
seeds are dependent. Considering the practicability of Weibo network,
this kind of tactics is reasonable. On the one hand, it has been de-
monstrated that Sina Weibo network has apparent scale-free char-
acteristics, no matter for indegree or outdegree. Moreover, the mixing
pattern of Sina Weibo is assortative, which means the trend for high-
degree nodes to other high-degree nodes (Fan et al., 2011). As a result,
it is more likely to target “elite users” from the followers of some “elite
users”. On the other hand, users “follow” stem from the similarity in
interest, topic, profession, and so on, between them and their friends on
a social network (Scott, 2017; Weng et al., 2010). Considering this kind
of homophily, it is more convenient and credible to target a group of
users who share a similar taste from the fans of an “elite user”.
Additionally, the influence of seed at stage t excludes the influence
of promotional seeds selected from its followers, because that influen-
cing power of these “elite users” are triggered by some economic in-
centives, rather than by spontaneity.
As aforementioned, the IVM is the aggregate influencing power of
the sponsored seed and promotional seeds. Although influence can be
measured in many ways, such as the number of forwards (Hong et al.,
2011) and the number of browsers (Ratkiewicz et al., 2010), “total
5
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875
forwarding times” of the viral message is adopted as the target variable
to gauge IVM, namely total conversion volume of seeds, considering
that forwarding action can spread information much more widely than
the action of replying and clicking “like” does. Similarly, the influen-
cing power of each seed is measured by the conversion volume trig-
gered by the seed. Therefore, the IVM prediction model is developed,
mainly consisting of conversion volume of every selected sponsored
seed or promotional seeds in each dissemination stage, and the con-
version volume is predicted by FEM. Formula (4) shows the IVM pre-
diction model:
IVM = FEM0,1 ( 0,1 , 0,1, 0,1)
T St
+ FEMt , j ( t,j , t, j , t,j , (u 0,1), (u1, h (1, j) ), ,
t =1 j=1
(ut 1, h (t 1, j) )), (4)
where u 0,1 represents the selected sponsored seed,
ut , j (t = 1, , T ; j = 1, , St ) is promotional seed j at dissemination stage
t, and St is the number of promotional seeds at dissemination stage t.
t , j , t , j , and t , j represent the seed selection, seeding time, and em-
bellishment of the viral message for seed ut , j (t 0) respectively, and those
are components of attention features of seeding strategies. For the sole
sponsored seed, these three components are sufficient to predict its
conversion volume using model FEM(·) . However, for promotional
seeds, the influence of their ancestor nodes is necessary to be in-
troduced when predicting, which stems from the fact that the ancestor
users in one dissemination path leave significant marks at the top of a
viral message, such as their account names, short comments, and hy-
perlinks, which are called Diffusion Path Information. Therefore,
(ut , j ) , the follower count of seed ut , j is introduced. In the predicted
formula of conversion volume for promotional seed ut , j , ut i, h (t i, j) de-
notes the ancestor of seed ut , j at spreading stage t-i in dissemination
path, and (ut i, h (t i, j) ) denotes its follower count. Thus, the influence
of one viral message is represented as the comprehensive influence of
sponsored seed and all promotional seeds.
5.2. Samples setup
We selected one famous consumer electronics company in China
and collected the data of its attention features and forwarding times of
viral message on Weibo in VM campaigns from November to December,
S. Li, et al.
and that period including the “Single Day”, namely the most famous
Chinese online shopping festival held on November 11. From 2014 to
2016, 864 valid samples were selected, which were composed of 405
sponsored seed samples, 333 first stage promotional seed samples, and
126 s stage promotional seed samples.
For each message on Weibo, it should be noted that the original data
of “forwarding times” generated by the sole sponsored seed actually
reports the “total forwarding times” generated by both sponsored seed
and promotional seeds. In order to clarify the contribution of each seed,
we calculate conversion volume generated by various seeds via
Diffusion Path Information which contributes to outline information
dissemination path.
In these samples, categorical variables, for instance, features of
content, expression, day and time, were discretized into the interval [1,
2]. Considering that outcome variable, namely “forwarding times” of a
viral message usually distributes non-uniformly and fluctuates largely,
most of the outcome variable will remain non-uniformly if it is nor-
malized using the percentile method. Therefore, logarithm transfor-
mation was taken to uniformly normalize the outcome variable.
5.3. The analysis of attention features
We calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient among all of the
attention features using SPSS software to measure the linear association
between any two features, as shown in Table 3–5, where FF_C refers to
the follower count of the first stage promotional seed who infects the
second promotional seed. As mentioned above, the experiments were
applied in one company, and the VM campaigns were triggered by its
official account on Weibo, namely sponsored seed. Accordingly, the
sponsored seed’ general influence is the same in all samples and the
analysis of the feature is omitted.
It can be seen from Table 3–5 that the correlation coefficient be-
tween any two features is < 0.3, which indicates there is nearly no
linear association between any two of them.
In addition, adopting all features of each kind of seed in Table 3–5, a
multiple linear regression model (MLRM) was built to analyze the joint
impact of features on the conversion volume. The coefficient of features
in MLRM is provided in Table 6. In this study, if the absolute value of
the feature coefficient in MLRM is significant and no < 0.10, the feature
is considered an important one. In Table 6, number 1 is used to re-
present these important features. We analyzed the magnitude of mul-
ticollinearity by considering the size of the Variance Inflation Factor
(VIF). It is usually suggested that a VIF above 10 indicates possible
multicollinearity. It can be seen from Table 6 that the VIF of each
feature is < 10 and multicollinearity problem can hardly be found
among these features.
Based on the estimated results of MLRM (Table 6), we can find that
promotional words, publishing date and time, and the active level of the
seed have a significantly positive impact on the conversion volume of
sponsored seed, which is consistent with expectation. Obviously, a viral
message with incentive words can efficiently attract users on Weibo.
The massive responses of a seed reflect its great influence power and
charm among its followers. Publishing the message during the online
shopping festival makes it worth more popularity than on a usual day
Table 3
Correlation analysis of attention features of sponsored seeds.
T AR_c P _w
D P _f
D 1.000 −0.052 −0.071 0.128 **
0.071
T −0.052 1.000 −0.016 0.240** −0.116**
−0.071 −0.016 1.000 −0.046 −0.035
AR_c
P _w 0.128** 0.240** −0.046 1.000 −0.192**
P _f 0.071 −0.116** −0.035 −0.192** 1.000
*
p < 0.05.
**
p < 0.025.
6
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875
because a large crowd of users is active on Weibo during these days.
Unexpectedly, publishing time negatively influences conversion vo-
lume. This may result from the sampling bias. Almost half of the viral
messages in our sample were released during the period of the online
shopping festival, and it was possible that consumers were continuously
immersed in the shopping spree 24 h in this duration, so that “for-
warding times” increased significantly from midnight to dawn.
For the first stage promotional seed, active level, and promotional
words have a positive influence on the outcome, which is consistent
with the finding of sponsored seed. Table 6 illustrates that follower
count positively affects conversion volume. Selecting seed with large
fans base can promote the forwarding volume effectively. However, the
presentation form plays a negative effect on the viral message dis-
semination, which means that the viral messages with pictures and/or
videos are less likely to be forwarded. This may stem from the fact that
users on Weibo are more inclined to pay attention to the concise post
rather than the wordy one.
Similarly, the active level of the second stage promotional seed has a
significantly positive influence on conversion volume. Particularly,
FF_c plays a positive impact on the outcome, which illustrates that the
first stage promotional seed is still influential in the follow-up stages,
especially for those “Sina Vs” who have massive fans. Follower count of
the seed at the second stage negatively affects the forwarding volume. It
is probably that the seeds at the second stage, especially those with a
large number of followers, share the same group of fans with the an-
cestor seeds in the message dissemination path. On the contrary, pro-
motional words have a negative influence. That can be explained as
follows: follower overlap between seed and its ancestors causes that the
incentive effect of promotional words is released in advance of second
stage dissemination. Additionally, the viral message which is able to be
forwarded no less than two hops is usually published by famous “Sina
V” so that the viral message is soft advertisement without obvious
promotional words.
According to Table 6, the initial samples (IS) for sponsored seeds
(ISSS), first stage promotional seeds (ISPS1), and second stage promo-
tional seeds (ISPS2) were built by including all their respective features.
Similarly, the essential samples (ES) for sponsored seeds (ESSS), the
first stage promotional seeds (ESPS1), and the second stage promotional
seeds (ESPS2) were built, respectively, which were composed of the
important features (marked by number 1) in Table 6.
5.4. Performance of FEM
Two types of experiments were carried out to evaluate the perfor-
mance of the FEM: IVM test and independent seed conversion volume
test. In each test, we randomly selected 90% samples as training sam-
ples, 7% samples as generalization test samples, and the rest as accu-
racy test samples. By the way, in the IVM test, the samples were com-
posed of the samples of the second stage promotional seeds and their
ancestors in dissemination path.
First of all, FEM was compared with an existing typical epidemio-
logical model of viral marking. In this study, we adopt SI model because
once a user forwards the viral message, or in other words, is infected by
the viral message, he/she will not forward it again, that is, transform
into R (recovery) state with immunity. Dissemination path for one viral
message is shown in Fig. 2. In every time-step, all the susceptible fol-
lowers of the infected users, namely S, become infected (i.e. I) with
constant probability β. It should be noted that neglecting the influen-
cing power of the different infectious individual, the probability of in-
fection is usually considered to be constant in research on information
diffusion in web or social networks (Khelil et al., 2002; Woo and Chen,
2016). For each selected sponsored or promotional seed, obtaining
corresponding forwarding probability β through training 97% samples,
based on which, we predicted the forwarding times of the viral mes-
sage, namely IVM for the rest samples. Table 7 reports the average MSE
of the SI model in 100 trials.
S. Li, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875

Table 4
Correlation analysis of attention features of the first stage promotional seeds.
F F _c D T AR_c P _w P _f

*
F 1.000 −0.059 0.046 0.010 0.034 −0.120 −0.011
F _c −0.059 1.000 −0.035 0.130* −0.091 0.181** −0.167**
D 0.046 −0.035 1.000 0.013 −0.258** 0.298** −0.194**
T 0.010 0.130* 0.013 1.000 −0.115* −0.026 −0.170**
AR_c 0.034 −0.091 −0.258** −0.115* 1.000 0.029 0.296**
P _w −0.120* 0.181** 0.298** −0.026 0.029 1.000 −0.097
P _f −0.011 −0.167** −0.194** −0.170** 0.296** −0.097 1.000

* p < 0.05.
** p < 0.025.

Then, the performance of FEM is compared with that of twelve Table 6

existing models in Table 2. These models were achieved in Matlab The results of correlation analysis between conversion volume and each feature.
software with the default settings. In FEM, set α to be 0.03, θ to be 8. Attention MLRM VIF of Importance
The average MSE of IVM and conversion volume for sponsored seeds features coefficient MLRM
and promotional seeds in 100 randomized trials are shown in Tables 7
and 8, respectively. For six types of samples in Table 8: ISSS, ESSS, Sponsored seed D 0.175** 1.074 1
T −0.119** 1.008 1
ISPS1, ESPS1, ISPS2, and ESPS2, the models were ranked in ascending
AR _c 0.257** 1.037 1
order of average MSE. Fig. 3 shows the sum of the rank index for each P _w 0.312** 1.123 1
model in all six types of samples and the rank index for each model in P _f 0.035 1.054
each type of sample. The first stage F 0.032 1.029
From Tables 7 and 8, it can be found that the average MSE of FEM is Promotional seed F _c 0.397** 1.096 1
D −0.094 1.251
the best in all tests except for the test in ISPS2 samples where it achieves
T 0.084 1.047
the second best. What is more commendable is that in both IS samples AR _c 0.210** 1.292 1
and ES samples of IVM test, FEM offers much better performance than P _w 0.115* 1.219 1
any other models. That indicates FEM is of great practical value to the P _f −0.136* 1.266 1
marketers since they value the prediction performance of the joint ef- The second stage FF _c 0.286** 1.161 1
Promotional seed F −0.015 1.164
fects of all seeds instead of the single type of seeds. Furthermore, from F _c −0.232* 1.695 1
Fig. 3, it can be seen that the sum of the rank index for FEM is the best D −0.091 1.226
and the fluctuation of ranking in each test is the smallest, however, the T 0.019 1.242
ranking of the base models such as BPNN, GRNN, RBFNN, SVM and AR _c 0.408** 1.616 1
P _w −0.183* 1.245 1
most of the regression models, fluctuates with considerable amplitude.
P _f 0.016 1.356
Additionally, paired samples of any two models’ MSE on the con-
version volume prediction test set in 100 runs were collected and * p < 0.05.
Student t-test was adopted to determine whether the means of the two ** p < 0.01.
samples were statistically equal. As a result, all of the determined P-
Values are less than the significant level of 5%, which indicates that data. Repeated the above steps until all predictors were excluded once.
there are significant differences among models. By statistical analysis, For each model, the MSE obtained after removing one predictor was
we can draw the conclusion that FEM performs better in terms of MSE sorted in ascending order, and the rank index is shown in Tables 9 and
compared with most of the other models in the model set. 10. Apparently, the scale of the rank index is equal to the predictor
Consequently, the above analysis confirms the stable and excellent count in each sample, and the larger the rank index of a predictor is, the
performance of FEM. more important it is.
As Table 9 shows, for sponsored seeds, the sum of the rank index of
5.5. Measurement of predictor importance MSE for promotional words is the largest, which indicates that it is the
most crucial factor to predict conversion volume. Similarly, in MLRM,
We investigated the predictor importance in each individual model the magnitude of the coefficient of promotional words is the largest.
by removing one predictor from the model every time. For each type of Therefore, in viral marketing practice, promotional words contribute to
seed, removed one predictor, used the remaining predictors to predict marketing success and are worthy of consideration. Besides, the active
IVM, and calculated the MSE of prediction based on the whole sample

Table 5
Correlation analysis of attention features of the second stage promotional seeds.
FF _c F F _c D T AR_c P _w P _f

FF _c 1.000 −0.174* −0.242** 0.058 −0.081 −0.245** −0.041 0.152

F −0.174* 1.000 0.107 0.151 −0.254** −0.034 −0.036 −0.212*
F _c −0.242** 0.107 1.000 −0.120 −0.066 0.294** 0.016 −0.297**
D 0.058 0.151 −0.120 1.000 −0.269** −0.055 −0.260** 0.007
T −0.081 −0.254** −0.066 −0.269** 1.000 0.130 −0.118 0.197*
AR _c −0.245** −0.034 0.294** −0.055 0.130 1.000 −0.225* 0.088
P _w −0.041 −0.036 0.016 −0.260** −0.118 −0.225* 1.000 −0.231**
P _f 0.152 −0.212* −0.297** 0.007 0.197* 0.088 −0.231** 1.000

* p < 0.05.
** p < 0.025.

7
S. Li, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875

Table 7
Average MSE of IVM.
FEM BPNN GRNN RBFNN SVM RG1 RG2 RG3 RG4 RG5 RG6 RG7 RG8 SI

IS 2.26 2.98 4.21 4.07 3.16 2.6 2.48 2.57 2.51 3.36 3.63 4.25 7.75 7.62
ES 2.39 3.69 4.41 8.74 3.69 3.15 3.31 3.15 3.14 3.43 3.53 5.74 8.82

Table 8
Average MSE of conversion volume.
FEM BPNN GRNN RBFNN SVM RG1 RG2 RG3 RG4 RG5 RG6 RG7 RG8

Sponsored seed ISSS 0.48 0.57 0.62 0.86 0.60 0.49 0.49 0.52 0.48 0.53 0.78 0.50 1.14
ESSS 0.56 0.69 0.64 0.74 0.68 0.59 0.68 0.63 0.59 0.69 0.91 0.58 1.30
The first stage promotional seed ISPS1 0.49 0.71 0.84 1.25 0.845 0.55 0.51 0.57 0.55 0.75 0.82 0.69 1.11
ESPS1 0.60 0.77 0.85 1.33 0.85 0.62 0.61 0.72 0.64 0.80 0.81 0.78 1.26
The second stage promotional ISPS2 1.04 1.27 1.85 1.17 1.2 1.09 1.05 1.07 1.00 1.17 1.36 2.12 2.84
seed ESPS2 1.15 1.40 1.67 3.63 1.28 1.26 1.27 1.15 1.24 1.16 1.15 2.45 2.90

Fig. 3. The ranking of models.

level has a great influence on conversion volume and the same result largest and the second largest, which indicates they are significantly
can be seen in Table 6. related to conversion volume, and the similar results can be seen in
In Table 9, similarly, for the first stage promotional seed, the sum of Table 6. Particularly, promotional words, which are proved to be the
the rank index of MSE for follower count and promotional words are the most critical factor for sponsored seed, can also facilitate the conversion

8
S. Li, et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875

Table 9
Ranking of MSE for predictors of the first stage promotional seed and sponsored seed.
Sponsored seed The first stage promotional seed

D T AR_c P _w P _f F F _c D T AR_c P _w P _f

BPNN 2 1 2 5 4 7 6 1 4 2 5 3
GRNN 3 5 4 2 1 2 7 6 1 3 5 4
RBF 1 3 5 2 4 2 5 2 4 1 6 7
SVM 1 1 4 3 4 2 7 1 3 5 4 6
RG1 1 3 4 5 2 5 7 2 1 4 6 3
RG2 1 2 3 5 3 3 7 5 2 3 6 1
RG3 1 4 3 5 2 3 7 2 4 5 6 1
RG4 1 2 4 5 3 2 7 4 1 5 6 2
RG5 1 4 4 2 3 3 7 5 1 4 6 2
RG6 1 1 4 5 1 1 6 1 1 1 7 1
RG7 2 1 4 4 3 6 1 2 2 7 2 5
RG8 3 3 1 3 2 6 1 2 2 7 2 5
Total 18 30 42 46 32 42 68 33 26 47 61 40

Table 10 from 1 to 12. Fig. 5 shows the impact of θ on the average performance
Ranking of MSE for predictors of the second stage promotional seed. of FEM in 100 randomized trials.
FF _c F F _c D T AR_c P _w P _f
From Figs. 4 and 5, it can be discovered that FEM can acquire the
best performance when α = 0.03 and θ = 8. From another point of
BPNN 5 8 3 4 1 7 6 2 view, when the value of α and θ are changed, the small-scale fluctua-
GRNN 7 8 2 1 5 4 3 6 tions of MSE indicate that FEM weakly depends on its parameters, and
RBF 1 2 5 2 8 2 6 6
has strong robustness and adaptability.
SVM 3 8 4 1 7 6 4 2
RG1 8 3 6 3 1 5 2 7
RG2 8 1 3 6 2 5 4 7 6. Conclusions and discussions
RG3 8 4 6 7 2 3 1 4
RG4 7 1 3 5 8 2 4 6
Accurately predicting the IVM is essential to competently and suc-
RG5 3 3 7 6 8 1 1 3
RG6 4 2 2 4 1 8 7 4
cessfully launch VM campaigns on Weibo. Instead of individually using
RG7 6 8 4 3 1 7 5 2 the features of messages and their authors, which have been extensively
RG8 8 5 6 1 1 7 4 1 studied by extant research, this study, for the first time, employs the
Total 68 53 51 43 45 57 47 50 attention features of seeding strategies to construct IVM prediction
model. Compared with other prediction methods of message influence,
the proposed model is distinctive in the following three aspects: (a) It
volume of promotional seeds. In Table 10, the active level and follower
focuses on the combined outcome of sponsored seed and promotional
count of parent seed exert a great influence on conversion volume. The
seeds rather than just the outcome of one single seed, in addition, the
same result can be found in MLRM (Table 6).
conversion volume of each seed under various seeding strategies is
estimated. We highlight that an excellent IVM prediction model needs
5.6. Parameters analysis to consider not only the separate effect of seeds but also their joint
effects. (b) The attention features of seeding strategies are extracted
The value of α in RSI is increased from 0.005 to 0.05 when the other from the perspective of describing seeding activities such as the selec-
parameters are the same as Section 5.3, Fig. 4 shows the impact of α on tion of seeds, seeding time and embellishment of the message. These
the average performance of FEM in 100 randomized trials. Similarly, features definitely get users to be attentive to the viral message. (c) FEM
the value of θ in the model screening component of FEM is increased is proposed to estimate the seed’s conversion volume according to these

Fig. 4. The impact of α on the performance of FEM.

9
S. Li, et al.
Fig. 5. The impact of θ on the performance of FEM.
attention features. FEM can offset the performance variability of tra-
ditional prediction models by adaptively selecting the appropriate
model which shares as many similarities as possible with the other
models that perform well in generalization, so that the stable and ex-
cellent performance can be achieved.
Empirical results show that the proposed attention features of
viral messages contribute to predicting conversion volume.
Furthermore, the outcomes of experiments also indicate that FEM
can offset the performance variability of traditional data mining
models in different conversion volume samples and has strong ro-
bustness and adaptability.
According to the results of this study, the following suggestions are
put forward for the academics and entrepreneurs to develop effective
VM campaigns on Weibo. Firstly, identifying features which catch
users’ attention to the viral message is a vital prerequisite to predict
IVM. The attention features proposed in this study can provide an
effective reference for identifying the key features that affect future
popularity and lifetime of viral messages. Secondly, seeding strategies,
including seed selection, seeding time and embellishment of the viral
message, should be taken into consideration in marketing practice.
When it comes to seed selection, higher active level will lead to a
higher conversion volume. For the sponsored seed, embellishing the
message with some striking incentive words, such as “Prizes”,
“Lottery”, “Reward”, etc., is an effective way to enhance conversion
volume. The followers of the first stage promotional seed with larger
follower count are appropriate candidate group for the second stage
promotional seed because the follower count of the first stage pro-
motional seed exerts a great influence on conversion volume of second
stage promotional seed. Thirdly, the model sharing as many simila-
rities as possible with the other efficient models is a highly efficient
model. Using GPI to screen out the efficient models and employing RSI
to select the model with the highest similarity to other models con-
tribute to developing the outstanding prediction model for IVM.
Finally, for a specific message, the best seed that initiates or promotes
the VM campaign can be found indirectly using the identified pre-
diction model. Specifically, given the features of seeding time and
embellishing viral message, the conversion volume generated by each
potential seed can be predicted via the proposed model, and subse-
quently, the seed which produces the largest conversion volume is
regarded as the best one.
This study also has several limitations which should be improved in
the future study. For instance, the life cycle of the viral message can be
adopted to express its influence power besides forwarding count. The
number of positive or negative comments of the viral message can be
used to depict IVM.
10
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 36 (2019) 100875
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this
work.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Chinese National Natural Science
Foundation (Nos. 71871135, 71271132).
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