Prof. Dr. Florian Stahl (University of Mannheim): 

“Building a social network for success”

Thursday, June, 23rd, 14:00 – 15:30 (WiSo Building, Room 410) 

Abstract:

This paper proposes a framework for studying how a brand, firm, or an individual can use networking activities to build up a social network and drive success. Using data from ego-networks of music artists, the paper models how artists can enhance their social networking presence and stimulate relationships between fans to achieve long-term benefits in terms of music plays. The authors use a Bayesian modeling framework to model the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of networking activities on network structure and on music popularity, while relying on instrumental variables from another online social network to handle potential endogeneity. The results imply that artists can shape network structure via marketing activities and can thereby achieve a long-term impact on success that far exceeds the direct and short-term impact in magnitude. Specifically, improving the density of ego-networks enables long-term effects over and above those that stem from growth in network size. Furthermore, the relative effectiveness of activities and the efficient allocation of scarce resources can differ between the short- and the long-term.