Читать книгу Digital Marketing - Annmarie Hanlon - Страница 87

In 1969, Harvard professor Stanley Milgram and his student Jeffrey Travers conducted an experiment (Travers and Milgram, 1969) where they handed out 296 letters to people in Boston and Omaha, Nebraska with an instruction to deliver them to one person – a stockbroker in a place called Sharon, Massachusetts. They had to send the letter to someone they knew, close to the target person, to see how many people the letter had to go through to get there. There was no address on the envelope, just the name of the target person and the town. The participants were given a pack of information and told to send back a postcard to the researchers every time the letter was passed on. Eventually 64 letters reached the target person.

The average number of postcards received was 5.2, so the number of degrees of separation between one random person and many other random people was said to be six. ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ was later the title of a play in 1990 by an American playwright and later a movie. It quickly became a meme, as in an online world, we're all connected.

The idea of six degrees of separation is based on the concept of living in a small world where everyone knows someone who knows that person. Social networks like LinkedIn facilitate these connections. As an example, on LinkedIn I'm connected to John Horsley, the founder of the Digital Doughnut which is a digital marketing community – that's one degree of separation. John is connected to Barack Obama – so this means that I'm two degrees of separation from Barack Obama, former President of the United States!

The first online social network was called Six Degrees, founded by Andrew Weinrich, but it failed due to the technology and infrastructure back in 1997 (Heidemann et al., 2012).