Can Friends Seed More Buzz and Adoption?

A critical element of word of mouth (WOM) marketing (aka buzz marketing) is to identify central actors with high degree in the social network to serve as seeds. However, seed identification typically requires data on the full network structure, which is often unavailable. We examine WOM seeding strategies motivated by the friendship paradox to get higher degree nodes without knowing network structure. But whether the higher degree nodes generate as much WOM as lower degree nodes and overall greater adoption is an empirical question. We develop and estimate a model of WOM and adoption using data on microfinance adoption across 49 villages in India for which we know the complete social networks. Counterfactuals show that the proposed seeding strategies are about 15% more e↵ective than random seeding in increasing adoption. Remarkably, they are also about 6-7% more e↵ective than opinion leader seeding.