Is facebook really a Malcolm Gladwell experiment?

So Gladwell has this bit in his book the tipping point where he talking about how your circle of friends is probably more like a pyramid thanks to the personality types he calls "connectors". A connectors is that person who brings people together, the girl at the party who says "oh you have to come meet my friend...", I'm sure you know the person I am talking about. From a marketing point of view connectors also serve a integral purpose of evangelising your business to others always introducing people to your products and services. If you want a better explanation, chapter 2 of The Tipping Point can sort you out.

So Facebook has the "how did you meet" function that I find to be a pretty interesting read. For the most people are linked by "they went to school together" or "they met randomly" but every so often when looking down a list of someones friends you find the recuring message "they met though [mutual friend]". This mutial friend is a connector, the more times they appear in this field the better connector they are. As much as I hate marketers invading social networking sites trying to turn the thing into an Amway-esque sales loop, I can certainly see the value that can be gained by marketers speaking directly to these people.

So someday someone will find a way to view the people on facebook who top the charts in the "they met through [mutual friend]" and marketers will realise they can just focus on these individuals and stop wasting money pitching their brand message to someone that will tell no one.

So banner ads are good?

So there was an article in Ars Technica the other day saying that people who were exposed to banner ads for a particular product had a slightly more positive attitude towards it (the product, not banner ads).

I wont go into detail about how the study was performed (if you want to get a better idea, read the article) but what I will say is that I am always a little sceptical of these types of studies. Why? Because after reading (well listening to the audio book of) Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" I have come to realise that what people SAY and what people actually THINK are often 2 very different things. Having done one or two market research surveys in my time, I know that when asked specific questions about "how you feel" about a brand the true answer is quite often "I don't FEEL anything about it" yet feeling obliged to answer the question I choose a random number somewhere between 1 (meaning poor) and 10 (meaning excellent).

In my opinion the proof is in the pudding and the statistics that can be gathered from said pudding. Statistical research of how your advertising campaign is extremely important but it tends to be something that only gives you true data after the fact. Asking people how they "feel" about a brand might not result in accurate data, looking at how many people bought your brand after a certain campaign will usually tell you everything you need to know