Social Networks and Word of Mouth (WoM) – a perfect marriage

Some history

A network is defined as a set of nodes and links. In the late 18th century Euler invented the field of network theory. For the following century and a half it remained in the realm of the abstract in mathematics departments. In the second half of the 20th century social scientist started studying social connectivity. Milgram’s famous six-degrees-of-separation experiment revealed how highly interconnected humans are. You can reach anyone else in the world following on average six links. Nevertheless, this average hides the fact that some people are “social hubs” and can link to anyone else in as few as 3 links and others are highly disconnected and need more than 100 links to reach anyone far away from their cluster. In the 90’s scientists started looking at digital networks. First they turned into the world wide web which is a highly tractable network where websites are the nodes and their links are the network’s links (a fact that Google uses in its search algorithm). More recently scientist turned their attention to digital social networks where people are the nodes and the friend connections are the links, Facebook being the largest social network today. In parallel, scientists have also studied the evolution of epidemics and spread of contagious diseases.

The connection to WoM

All this lines of research coupled with the internet revolution give rise to the opportunity to start studying Word of Mouth marketing in social networks. Network theory plus epidemics theory applied to WoM can provide huge insights on how messages (promotions, brands, product reviews, etc) spread in a social network (in the same way a contagious disease spreads). The first thing researches need is a map of the network (Facebook has it). Second, they need a way to track messages to analyze the “contagion effect”. Finally, researchers should follow the “touched” users to understand how they act on the message (e.g. do they talk about the product?, do they visit the brand’s website?, do they buy the product?) With this information marketers could leverage WoM much more effectively. In fact, current WoM services are based on artificial buzz generation (e.g. hired agents dropping messages) and sign-in communities that participate in WoM initiatives (e.g. SheSpeaks). The problem with the former is that the buzz is artificial and does not resemble the organic spread of messages. The problem with the latter is that it more a pool of people willing to participate in marketing activities and in that sense are more like a digital focus group instead of a real incubator of worth of mouth.

The opportunity

Given that the tools exist (network theory, social interaction theory, epidemics theory, and complex systems theory) and the current services for WoM do not capitalize on the full potential, there is an opportunity to study WoM on social networks like facebook and start offering a better service. For example, if you know which users are the “social hubs” for different products/services, so companies can know where to drop the message and what message to drop where.