Viral Marketing for Smart Cities: Influencers in Social Network Communities

Abstract

Social networks are used by cities primarily for announcing local-area events, but also for increasing engagement of citizens in votes and elections. Given the current plethora of heterogeneous social networks, city administrators can benefit from social networks to promote initiatives, which are important to a current smart city as well use them to discover future needs in order to manage resources more efficiently. Our focus in this paper is how we can adapt commercial and viral marketing techniques to smart city systems to influence the behavior, opinion and choices of citizens in order to improve their well being and that of the whole society as well as predicting future trends and events.