Evaluating Disseminators for Time-critical Information Diffusion on Social Networks

In recent years, information diffusion in social networks has received significant attention from the Internet research community driven by many potential applications such as viral marketing and sales promotions. One of the essential problems in information diffusion process is how to select a set of influential nodes as the initial nodes to disseminate the information through their social network. Most of the existing solutions aim at how to maximize the influence effectiveness of the initially selected "influential nodes", but pay little attention on how the influential nodes selection could minimize the cost of the diffusion. Diffusion effectiveness is important for the applications such as innovation and new technology diffusion. However, many applications, such as disseminating disaster information or product promotions, have the mission to deliver messages in a minimal time. In this paper, we design and implement an efficiently k-best social sites selected mechanism in such that the total diffusion “social cost” required for each user in this social network to receive the diffusion critical time information is minimized.