Research by HP Labs into the social actions of internet users has revealed some surprising results that cast doubt on the effectiveness of viral marketing.

HP's Social Computing Lab (SCL) has been looking into the way web users communicate with in-depth studies into Facebook, YouTube and other sites. It has come up with a formula to show how internet sites gain or lose popularity and in how social networks interact.

The research seems to show that humans aren’t as social as they think they are, which could explain the spotty performance of many viral marketing campaigns.

“Viral marketing works in some cases but it doesn’t go through too many hops [into other groups]," Dr Bernardo Huberman told vnunet.com

“People have short attention spans. We were surprised by how ineffective viral marketing is.”

In Facebook, for example, the SCL analysed 95 million emails and pokes. The analysis showed that no matter how many friends one signs up it appears that users only regularly socialise within two or three subgroups.

The research also cast a few doubts on the so-called ‘Long Tail’ phenomenon, described by Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

This refers to the tail of the demand curve for products and claims that companies can be very profitable selling a wide range of products in low volume as they can meeting high volume demand that drops off quickly.

“A study of Amazon says the long tail isn’t going as far as it was,” Dr Huberman said.

The SCL has used these findings to come up with mathematical formulae that can be used to predict how popular websites or product can be, based on the first few days of its release. This could be vital for predicting long tail products and services.

SGL has also developed a social networking and blogging system dubbed Watercooler. This monitors all the blogs within the company’s firewall and can track important opinions as they develop.

In addition, it can display these findings in a variety of ways using a ‘Zeitgeist’ function. It has not yet been decided if this will be turned into a marketable product.