Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks - Shawndra Hill, Foster Provost and Chris Volinsky

(1) "Network neighbours" - those consumers linked to a prior customer - adopt the service at a rate 3-5 times greater than baseline groups selected by the best practices of the firm's marketing team. In addition, analyzing the network allows the firm to acquire new customers who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks, because they would not have been identified based on traditional attributes. (2) Statistical models, built with a very large amount of geographic, demographic and prior purchase data, are significantly and substantially improved by including network information. (3) More detailed network information allows the ranking of the network neighbours so as to permit the selection of small sets of individuals with very high probabilities of adoption.

Driving results through Social Networks - Rob Cross

"When you look inside teams and see networks that are forming around an idea, you get a totally different perspective about how value is getting built in organizations. And that perspective offers killer insight for sales teams."

Opinion leadership and social contagion in new product diffusion - Prof. Raghuram Iyengar, Prof. Christophe Van den Bulte working with Prof. Thomas Valente

The evidence justifies the deployment of network-based marketing strategies - heavy users are attractive viral seeding points over and above their greater "stand alone" customer value.

Mining social networks: Untangling the social web - Economist Technology Quarterly, 2 Sep 2010

Software: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful. Companies can spot influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of data with sophisticated "network analysis" software. Instead of looking at the records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network. The ability to retain customers is particularly important in hyper-competitive markets...

Social Networks: Enabling the Market of Me - Accenture

Social networking sites are extremely valuable to marketers - not so much in themselves but for the detailed information they can provide. Marketers in pursuit of high performance can use this information in a number of ways to create highly personalized experiences for their customers - true "markets of Me" in fact.

Communities of Clinical Practice: Knowledge Exchange in Pediatric Communities - Roberto Dandi, PhD and Federica Brunetta, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome (Italy)

Roberto Dandi PhD, proposes that health managers may motivate non-members to join an association; they may also better promote expert recognition and access to particular treatment areas. According to the researchers, the study makes apparent at a couple of key drivers that may be crucial for pediatric advice networks:

• Pediatricians rely on the same pediatricians/hospitals-relationships in different treatment areas
• Advice exchange is positively related with same association memberships and guideline adoptions
• Physical proximity plays an important role for seeking advice from other pediatricians
• Advice networks have a high centralization towards major hospital hubs

HBR article: Better Sales Networks - Tuba Üstüner and David Godes, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

A salesperson trying to gain buy-in at a potential customer must map out the prospect organization network and understand how it works.

Open Doors with B2B Social Networking - Tom Aley, SVP and Managing Director, Dow Jones Group

The No. 1 reason that salespeople lose deals, apart from price, is because the prospect has a preexisting relationship with another vendor, according to a study by CSO Insights. Smart salespeople understand that relations and connections open doors to important accounts.