Social Network

Marketing based on social networks refers to a collection of marketing activities that take advantage of social relationships between consumers to increase sales. There are different kinds of marketing using social networks like word-of-mouth marketing, diffusion of innovation, buzz marketing and viral marketing [1]. Between these instances of network-based marketing, Word-of-mouth marketing has more creditability [2], because there is no direct link between the sender and the merchant. As a result, information is considered independent and subjective. In recent years, many researches in word-of-mouth marketing investigate discovering influential nodes in a social network. These influential people are called opinion leaders in the literature. Organizations interested in e-commerce need to identify opinion leaders among their customers, also the place (web site) which they are going online. This is the place which they can market their product.

1.1. Social network analysis

Regarding the importance of interpersonal relationship, studies are looking for formal method to measures “who talks to whom” in a community. These methods are known as social network analysis [3, 4, 5, 6]. Social network analysis includes the study of the interpersonal relationships. It usually is more focused on the network itself, rather than on the attributes of the members [2]. Valente and Rogers [7], have described social network analysis from the point of view of interpersonal communication by “on formal methods of measuring who talks to whom within a community”. Social network analysis enables researchers to identify people who are more central in the network and so more influential. By using these central people or opinion leaders as seeds diffusion of...

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...eadership and employing social networks to improve the marketing response is done. In Section 2, the concept of opinion leadership as well as different titles (opinion leaders, influential people, market mavens and key players) that has been introduced by different studies for referring to the influential group in social networks is discussed. Then, regarding the similarity of these titles on concept and common identification factors, by considering all definition and characteristics proposed for opinion leaders, influential people, market mavens and key players, three comprehensive classifications including structural, relational and personal characteristics are proposed. In section three, methods of opinion leader identification and selection are reviewed and appropriate parameter for analyzing these methods are extracted and shown in a comprehensive diagram.