There are lots of mathy examples here, but you wanted a 

real world example, so with a

bit of thinking, this is possibly the best I can offer:
You find a person who has contracted a given contageous infection, which is non fatal,
and fixes itself quickly( Type A) , Except for one in 5 people ( We'll call these type B ) who
become permanently infected with it and shows no symptoms and merely acts a
spreader.

This creates quite annoying waves of havoc when ever type B infects a multitude of type
A.

Your task is to track down all the type Bs and immunise them to stop the backbone of
the disease. Unfortunately tho, you cant administer a nationwide cure to all, because the
people who are typeAs are also deadly allergic to the cure that works for type B.

The way you would do this, would be social discovery, given an infected person(Type A),
choose all their contacts in the last week, marking each contact on a heap. When you
test a person is infected, add them to the "follow up" queue. When a person is a type B,
add them to the "follow up" at the head ( because you want to stop this fast ).

After processing a given person, select the person from the front of the queue and apply
immunization if needed. Get all their contacts previously unvisited, and then test to see if
they're infected.