The algorithm comes courtesy of a fascinating paper [pdf] from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard’s HP Labs. The researchers Roja Bandari, Sitram Asur, and Bernardo Huberman teamed up to try to predict the popularity — which is to say, the spreadability — of news articles in the social space…
As the graph makes clear, the category of news involved in the article certainly made a difference to a tweeted story’s popularity…
Furthermore, emotional language doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to predictable sharing.
What’s remarkable about the HP paper and its algorithm is how back-to-the-future their results actually are. Online, the researchers are saying, the power of the brand is exactly what it has been since brands first emerged in the Middle Ages: It’s a vector of trust. And it’s a direct proxy for the ongoing transactional realities of the in-person human relationship.
