 |
Business Solutions
Find, Help, Solutions... |
Computers
Desktops, Laptops, Peripherals... | Ecommerce
Commercial, Transfer, Advice... | Finance
Expenses, Loans, Investing... | Franchising
Start Up, Branding, Opportunities... |
Home Office
Furniature, Internet, Guides... |
Insurance
Health, Business, Home... | Management
Help, Manage, Run... |
| | Submit your site for FREE |
| Recent Articles |
SES - Actionable Social Media
Community-built web sites, the popular Wikipedia and new sites allowing content being shared through "tagging" can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic. This session looks at some social media services and strategies to tap into them...
SUsing Behavioral Targeting with Affiliate Marketing
Behavioral Targeting (BT) provides a great opportunity for Affiliate Marketers and Networks to reach the right customers and increase the conversion. What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing is way for advertisers...
Create & Share AdWords Campaign Templates
Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts. The Google help centre has...
Social Media Marketing - It’s Branding
Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things...
Fuel Business Success Through Personal Strengths
It’s been said that only the most egotistical of people could ever run for U.S. President. I believe that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing either.
New To PPC? Overcome These Challenges
As I'm working with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta on our Super Affiliate Accelerator project, I've stumbled on a number of challenges that new PPC marketers are going to face, and have developed some workarounds for...
|
|
12.10.07
Conditions for Word of Mouth Viral Outbreaks
 By
Gord Hotchkiss
We all want to be part of the next viral world of mouth success story. We want our product to be at the epicenter of a "buzz" storm that spreads like wildfire across the internet. But the conditions that lead to true word of mouth viral outbreaks dictate that these outbreaks are few and far between.
Jumping the Weak Ties
First of all, let’s look at what’s required for word of mouth to spread. The trick to a true viral outbreak is finding something that will jump the "weak ties". Mark Granovetter identified weak ties in a social network back in the 70’s. Basically, social networks are not uniform and even. They are "clumpy". They have dense clusters, comprised of people who tend to spend a lot of time together. These are family members, co workers, close friends, members of the same church or organization. Word spreads quickly throughout these clusters, because of the frequency of communication and the nature of the relationships between the members of the cluster. There’s an inherent trust there and people talk to each other a lot. This makes the social ties within the cluster strong ties. Given this, once one person in the cluster knows something, there’s a pretty good bet that everyone in the cluster will know it in a relatively short period of time.
But the challenge comes in getting a message to make the jump from cluster to cluster. How does word of mouth spread from one group of co workers to a church group in another town? To do this, we’re relying on social ties that are much weaker than strong ties. We’re counting on an acquaintance to pass word along. And for that to happen, some conditions have to be met first.
Lowering the Drawbridge
In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto followed up on Granovetter’s earlier work (Frenzen, Nakamoto: "Structure, Cooperation and the Flow of Market Information," The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1993) to see the conditions that had to be met before a message would jump across a weak tie. In their words,
"Instead of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of "drawbridges" that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth.
In their study, they looked at a number of factors, including the nature of the message itself, and the concept of moral hazard, or how it would impact the messenger. For the test, they used news about a sale. In one social network, they saw how fast word would spread about a 20% off sale. In the other social network, they used a sale where the discounts were a more remarkable 50 to 70% off. To introduce a moral hazard variable, they also altered the availability of sales items. In one case, quantities were very limited, and in the other, quantities were practically unlimited.
What they found was that amongst strong ties, word of the sales spread fairly quickly in most instances. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties.
Mexican Vacation Sale
Let’s use an example to make this a little clearer. Let’s imagine an airline is having a seat sale to Mexico. In the first example, it’s $50 off per seat, but it applies to every seat on the plane, on every flight. There is no limit on the inventory available. In the second instance, instead of $50 off per seat, the entire cost of a return flight to Mexico is just $50. That’s much more remarkable. And in the third instance, the sale is again $50 per person, but it’s limited to 10 seats on 2 flights, for one day only. Only 20 tickets are available at this price.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Gord Hotchkiss is the President and CEO of Enquiro, whose goal is to push the search engine optimization industry forward both in terms of measurable results and client satisfaction.
|
