Finding influential ebay buyers for viral marketing - a conceptual model of BuyerRank

Abstract

User Generated Content (UGC) plays a key role in the current and future e-commence at the era of Web 2.0. As an important form of UGC, the online auction site eBay has enjoyed tremendous growth rates since its inception. Many social networks emerge across different communities on eBay. The notion of viral marketing has been proposed in both literature and practice. However, in order to find the "opinion leader" in the social network, marketers need to have a sound analytic tool to rank potential buyers. In order to tackle this issue, this paper propose a BuyerRank, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) model that assists marketers to rank potential buyers based on their future influence estimated from their past auction/purchase behaviour on eBay. The paper also provides a detailed state-of-the-art review of recent work on SNA and viral marketing in the light of the Web 2.0 e-commerce context.