Introduction to statistical physics of media processes: Mediaphysics
  Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its relation with sociophysics. A new statistical physics approach to analyze these phenomena is proposed. A keystone of the approach is an analysis of population distribution between two or many alternatives: brands, political affiliations, or opinions. Relative distances between a state of a "person's mind" and the alternatives are measures of propensity to buy (to affiliate, or to have a certain opinion). The distribution of population by those relative distances is time dependent and affected by external (economic, social, marketing, natural) and internal (mean-field influential propagation of opinions, synergy effects, etc.) factors, considered as fields. Specifically, the interaction and opinion-influence field can be generalized to incorporate important elements of Ising-spin based sociophysical models and kinetic-equation ones. The distributions were described by a Schrodinger-type equation in terms of Green's functions. The developed approach has been applied to a real mass-media efficiency problem for a large company and generally demonstrated very good results despite low initial correlations of factors and the target variable. 
Dmitri V. Kuznetsov (1) and Igor Mandel (2) ((1) Media Planning Group,   Boston, MA, USA and Institute of Biochemical Physic...