In a communications world where the viral imperative is assumed to significantly diminish a brand's required media spend (media strategy = go viral), a lot of thought has gone into identifying the most influential spreaders. There are many different aspects that can contribute to an individual's "likelihood to effectively spread". In specific industries or on certain subject matters these might include the degree to which an individual perceives himself/herself as a voice of authority on the subject (or, hey, even actual authority). Or it might be more about degree of visibility of the spreader's online voice (Pagerank, Twitterank etc).

But of course one long-time prevailing assumption has been that an individual's level of connectedness  (friends, followers, inbound links etc) is the strongest determinant of influence. A new piece of research, largely based around looking at the 5.5 million members of Livejournal.com, has added a very interesting twist to this. As discussed on Technologyreview.com, Maksim Kitsak at Boston University has revealed that his research showed that "the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people". Rather than showing that people of the centre of a network with the most connections are the most influential, his research demonstrated that:

"... if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network. By contrast, "a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population."

It does kind of seem obvious when you read it like that but if you have a methodology to visualise influence in a given network, this new emphasis on location should affect where you concentrate your communication and reach out effort (read: tactical insertions.

Go read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24748/?ref=rss&a=f

And the complete research piece: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.5285.