Engineering Commons^™

Knowledge Flows And Influence In Online Social Networks: Proposing A Research Agenda, Charles M. Weber, Nitin V. Mayande

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Online social networks, which have been defined as aggregated organizations that emerge from the Internet when people carry on public discussions, are increasingly becoming the vehicle of influence in social, political and economic discourse. Yet, despite its increasing importance, the nature of influence in online social networks is not really understood. Practitioners openly admit that they lack the experience to make sense of the phenomenon, and extant theory of influence in networks, which extrapolates from observations of the real world, is demonstrably inadequate when it comes to explaining influence online. The paper introduces a novel approach to analyzing influence online, …