Social relations between people seldom follow regular lattice structures. In the Barabási–Albert model nodes link to the existing network structure with a probability proportional to the number of nodes previously attached. Here, we present an anthropologically motivated interpolation between Erdös–Rényi and Barabási–Albert rules, where people also prefer to help those who helped them in the past and explore some of its properties. The second part of the paper tackles the question how opinions spread through social networks. We restrict our analysis to one end of the spectrum: scale-free networks. We show for two different models how fast and how sustainable single individuals can influence an appreciable fraction of the population through social contacts.