Sleeping beauties in meme diffusion

A sleeping beauty in diffusion indicates that certain information, whether an idea or innovation, will experience a hibernation period before it undergoes a sudden spike of popularity, and this pattern is found widely in the citation history of scientific publications. However, in this study, we demonstrate that the sleeping beauty is an interesting and unexceptional phenomenon in information diffusion; more inspiring is that there exists two consecutive sleeping beauties in the entire lifetime of a meme’s propagation, which suggests that the information, including scientific topics, search queries or Wikipedia entries, which we call memes, will go unnoticed for a period and suddenly attract some attention, and then it falls asleep again and later wakes up with another unexpected popularity peak. Further exploration of this phenomenon shows that the intervals between two wake-ups follow an exponential distributions, both the rising and falling stage lengths, follow power law distributions, and the second wake-up tends to reach its peak in a shorter period of time. In addition, the total volumes of the two wake-ups have positive correlations. Taking these findings into consideration, an upgraded Bass model is presented to well describe the diffusion dynamics of memes on different media. Our results can help understand the common mechanism behind the propagation of different memes and are instructive towards locating the tipping point in marketing or in finding innovative publications in science.