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Customers Are More Connected Than you Think
If you've played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that he's been in far too many movies. More importantly, you know that it's possible to connect him with almost anyone else in Hollywood within "six degrees." Thanks to Microsoft, we know Kevin Bacon isn't the only person with so many connections. Microsoft research tracked all interactions on MSN over a month and analyzed how far an average user was from every other average user in the world. The results? Like Kevin Bacon and Hollywood stars, MSN users are 6.6 "degrees" away from one another. Aside from being interesting (and cool to someone like me who enjoys useless factoids) why does it matter?
Because those people that are six steps away from each other are your customers, and if you learned anything about exponents in math class it's obvious how quickly information can spread among them. It means that, however unlikely, if someone has a bad experience with your company and tells everyone they know, who all tell everyone they know, and so on, pretty soon the whole world knows. And that's without the mass-media being involved. Given that people don't exclusively communicate through MSN messenger, the actual number of steps between people globally may be even less.
Take a look sometime at random MySpace or Facebook profiles and see how many connections exist on just those two social networks. Those users might not personally know every "friend" on the site, but every time they post new information it's fed out to their entire network of connections. Unlike with instant messaging, that information stays posted forever. So what happens when Johnny Customer doesn't like the way he's been treated by your company?
I had a bad airline experience recently. Initially only the people I work with and my family knew about it, but I also posted a note about it on Facebook, told a number of my friends, and even tagged some photos with a description of what happened. Altogether there are probably 100 people or so who heard/saw directly from me what happened. Had I mentioned the airline name and told the story on this blog, there would be 1000's more who could read about it. Chances are some people told their friends, who may have passed that information along to others, and the cycle goes on.
This isn't a new phenomenon; word-of-mouth marketing has been around for centuries in one form or another. What's new is how far one story can spread. If it only takes six steps to reach every person in the world who uses MSN messenger, it's even more important to prevent negative experiences from happening in the first place. Your customers may not all know each other, but they're more connected than you think.
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