Many of you, have no doubt heard all about the LinkedIn IPO last week.  As the first major social network to go public,  it’s focus on utility proved that social could provide real value to folks engaging in business.  And while there are many things that make LinkedIn’s product offering strong, one of the main pillars has been their deep use of a connection’s degree of separation. Now you’ve probably played the 6 degrees to kevin bacon game (and if you haven’t we recommend you give it a go), but you may not have thought about how he applies to business. This article will talk a bit about how LinkedIn uses the Kevin Bacon concept for contacts, and how we at SocialGuides use it for word of mouth promotions.

So how does the LinkedIn network work?

Well people who you are friends, colleagues or other direct contacts are in your 1st degree network.  People to whom you are not directly connected to, but are connected with your contacts, are in your 2nd degree network.  People your 2nd degree contacts know are in your 3rd degree network. Like a fancy Rolodex that connects to your contact’s fancy Rolodex, you use the people in your 1st degree network to get introduced to people in your 2nd degree network, and see who they might know in your 3rd degree network.  Pretty simple right? And if you lookup your LinkedIn stats, you might find your network reach might look something like this:

In the example above it’s impressive to see LinkedIn’s estimates that 159 connections means I’m only an intro away from roughly one hundred thousand contacts.  That’s pretty cool.  And if we follow their thinking further, those one hundred thousand contacts could get close to 5 million people.  Now of course I can’t practically get to 5 million people, but it shows how quickly your social reach blows up by just a few a degrees of separation.

SocialGuides uses a similar concept of degrees of separation with your businesses fans on Facebook and Twitter.

You see, conventional word of mouth reaches only a small number of people. But on Facebook & Twitter  each of an estimated 600 million active users is connected to an average of 130 friends - translation: your fans can get you to a heck of a lot of people. In fact this is just like LinkedIn’s first degree, because after all, anything a fan shares on the Facebook & Twitter can be (and often is) broadcast automatically to all of those person’s friends. As an example, let’s look at typical local business using the SocialGuides Dashboard.

socialguides 1 degree of seperation network reach

In the case of Game On Ladera, 191 Fans on Facebook, connects them to 46,670 people. So basically, if a small business like this one could offer a compelling enough promotion, where each fan simply shared the offer with each of their friends on Facebook - this small business could get the word out to nearly fifty thousand people. Which interestingly means, a social campaign has a potential reach that’s the size of a medium sized newspaper circulation or a small radio campaign, wow!  And if you take it one step farther, three degrees away from this business is again a few million people, which is essentially Facebook’s user base for orange county. Basically this is what everyone talks about when they say something “went viral” on social. Because a small retail business like the one above could in theory get to everyone in their entire town within 3 degrees.

Now of course, just as you, for all practical purposes, wouldn’t ever get intro’d to a hundred thousand contacts on LinkedIn (let alone 5M), you probably aren’t going to see the corner business get everyone within there fans reach to share their cool promotion. But even so, knowing how word of mouth operates in the social era is a key step in realizing that as a small business, you’re not just taking care of 2oo fans on Facebook, you are working for the opportunity to meet their friends - and well, there’s a lot of friends out there!

We love the space we work in (social media marketing & commerce) because we believe that as an industry it’s still very early and it’s already creating enormous value.

There has already been a fair amount of M&A activity going down this year, so we thought it would be fun to track it here and make it available below:
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We had a fun day with some unexpected media coverage from the good folks at ReadWriteWeb. While some of the information was a tad incorrect (funding) and it’s not quite the same as being the most interesting man in the world, we were excited to win the readers poll 5 Tech Companies That Raised Money Today: Which Interests You Most? We were next to some awesome companies so we were honored to get the nod.

For all of our new customers that have joined the SocialGuides family today, welcome.  We also want to thank ReadWriteWeb for giving us some love.

The fine hosts, Amanda Coolong and Mark Jeffrey over at This week in Android had Jeremy on the show to talk SocialGuides and all things related to android phones.  Give it a watch below or check out the full details (include how to get a early release copy of the SocialGuides android app) of episode 3 on thisweekin.com