Aristotle had once said, “Humans are social animals”. True, it is our basic nature. We can’t survive outside society. To fulfill our different needs, we have different people in our society? The role based arrangement is well constructed. We deal with colleagues at office while we share our emotions with our friends, families. We need [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Small World Experiment’
You Are Six Steps Away From Bill Gates
Posted By Nitesh Ambuj on November 10th, 2009
Human Web which is also known as six degrees of separation, refers to the concept which says, a person in one part of the world is connected to another person in another part of the world at max six levels of connections. It means a person A from India can reach to a person B in USA in just six steps. This cogitation sounds impressive. Malcolm Gladwell explains this concept in his book, “The Tipping Point”. He says, “Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few”. He further adds, “People who introduce us to our social circle – these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize – are connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together”.
The word “Six Degrees of Separation” is associated with an experiment of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a famous American social psychologist. When he was at Harvard, He conducted an experiment called “Small World Experiment”. This experiment was a combination of several small experiments of social networks across USA. Milgram’s experiment developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other. This was one way of looking at small world problem; other alternative view was to imagine the population as social network and try to find out the average path length between two nodes. Milgram’s experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.
There are many critiques of this experiment and there are several experiments done after this. Though, Milgram’s experiment still tops the list. When we see these experiments in the context of marketing we realize that connecting to people is not that though. We just need to learn few basics like –
How people are connected to each other?
Factors which influence people?
Who are connectors?
How to become a connector?
Difference between Marketer and Connector?
When we take these basic to social media we get few more question.
How Social Media operates?
How Social Media influences people?
Role of connectors in Social Media?
Social Media as a Marketing Tool?
I’ll try to touch each of these questions in my series of posts on Social Media & Connectors. Suggestions / Views / Comments are most welcome.
