Sleeping Beauties in Meme Diffusion

TL;DR

This paper explores the phenomenon of 'sleeping beauties' in meme diffusion, revealing that memes often experience multiple dormant and active phases, with implications for understanding propagation dynamics across media.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of two consecutive sleeping beauties in meme diffusion and proposes an upgraded Bass model to describe this phenomenon.

Findings

Intervals between wake ups follow an exponential distribution

Second wake up peaks at a higher velocity

Higher initial volume leads to greater subsequent popularity

Abstract

A sleeping beauty in diffusion indicates that the information, can be ideas or innovations, will experience a hibernation before a sudden spike of popularity and it is widely found in citation history of scientific publications. However, in this study, we demonstrate that the sleeping beauty is an interesting and unexceptional phenomenon in information diffusion and even more inspiring, there exist two consecutive sleeping beauties in the entire lifetime of propagation, suggesting that the information, including scientific topics, search queries or Wikipedia entries, which we call memes, will go unnoticed for a period and suddenly attracts some attention, and then it falls asleep again and later wakes up with another unexpected popularity peak. Further explorations on this phenomenon show that intervals between two wake ups follow an exponential distribution and the second wake up generally reaches its peak at a higher velocity. In addition, higher volume of the first wake up will lead to even much higher popularity of the second wake up with great odds. Taking these findings into consideration, an upgraded Bass model is presented to well describe the diffusion dynamics of memes on different media. Our results can help understand the common mechanism behind propagation of different memes and are instructive to locate the tipping point in marketing or find innovative publications in science.