Six Degrees Of Separation

Six degrees of separation is the reason why the social media have so much weight, so important in generating opinion and creative trends. For less than a user who has followers, just Twitteo something, anything, that in the blink of an eye, the news reaches the end of the world. Thus, an accident on a reservoir of alcoholic beverages in Russia, tickles office in Reykjavik, or the complaint of an American Airlines passenger who broke a guitar with twelve hundred dollars Chilean convinces another passenger to choose another airline.

The theory of six degrees of separation says, basically, that through six contacts you can get to communicate a novelty to all human beings in the world. For example, imagine that you know 100 people, which sends them a message. Those hundred people, in turn, know another hundred. We have, in the third degree of the equation to 10,000 people. These in turn transmit the message to another hundred, we've a million people involved in the message. At the end of six degrees of separation, we arrived with our message to one billion people, the world's population connected to the Internet.

Perhaps it difficult to personally deliver the message a hundred people, but online, in the twinkling of an eye, and fulfill our part of the chain. Microsoft took the bet one step further and found, through analysis of 30,000 million messages sent by the Messenger, we are actually separated by 6.6 degrees of separation. In other words, it's really possible to cover the world's population with six to seven contacts. Imagine then what social media can do for your product or service. And besides, it's free.

But, participate in social media without a medium-term strategic plan, an effort will only sterile, or at least not yield the desired fruits. The key here is not simply remove a user account and start interacting. Failure to provide quality content, a value added service a plus, certainly, our interactions lack the weight and impact desired.