Social Networks: Fad or Fundamental?

This post from the New York Times is very appropriate for my current frame of mind. Lots of researchers with my background seem to be drawn to the broad area of marketing on social networks, ostensibly because of the intersection of interesting math, statistics, and computer science with a practical problem focus. It helps that a large body of recent research is emerging that aims specifically to improve our ability to solve large scale optimization and inference problems on an underlying network structure.

All that said, I wonder whether we are working on a set of problems that are really fundamental; in particular, given that success in viral marketing probably involves seeding a lot of experiments (i.e., that success probabilities are rare), is it likely that we can design algorithms that significantly leverage social data for marketing purposes?