[MITSloan] AN MIT PROFESSOR TRIES TO GET A FOLLOW FROM TAYLOR SWIFT AND ENDS UP WITH A NEW TOOL FOR INFORMATION WARFARE.
WHY IT MATTERS
To influence someone on social media, first you need them to follow you. New research uncovers the behavioral and network features that make that happen.
It was 2014. Taylor Swift had recently released her single “Shake It Off.” She was now a certifiable pop star and Tauhid Zaman, associate professor of operations at MIT Sloan, wondered if he could get her to follow him on Twitter. Swift had about 60 million followers; he had fewer than 1,000. She represented a global empire; he was an academic. A long shot, yes, but these odds were precisely what motivated the question.
“I wanted to know what makes people follow you back,” Zaman said. “Celebrities have a wall around them, but their weaknesses on social media are the people they follow.”
Could he somehow use a celebrity’s friends on Twitter — Swift’s hair stylist or sound engineer — to open the gates to her inner circle? He dubbed this the “follow-back problem,” and he solved it with his students at MIT.
| Head to the link to see how. |
By the time he and his team got to work on this, though, “Shake it Off” had become much less interesting than the world’s most famous Twitter user, President Donald Trump. What, he wondered, would be the most promising path to get a follow from @realDonaldTrump?
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| Donald Trump | | |
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