  As compared to the traditional advertising, the word-of-mouth (WOM)
communications have striking advantages such as significantly lower cost and
rapid delivery; this is especially the case with the popularity of online
social networks. This paper addresses the issue of maximizing the overall
profit of a WOM marketing campaign. A marketing process with both positive and
negative WOM is modeled as a dynamical model knwn as the SIPNS model, and the
profit maximization problem is modeled as a constrained optimization problem.
The influence of different factors on the dynamics of the SIPNS model is
revealed experimentally. Also, the impact of different factors on the expected
overall profit of a WOM marketing campaign is uncovered experimentally. On this
basis, some promotion strategies are suggested. To our knowledge, this is the
first time a WOM marketing campaign is treated this way.
