Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

I attended a shareholders meeting last night for a small start-up.

The marketing manager mentioned their “viral coefficient”.

I had to raise my hand and ask what a viral coefficient actually is. The embarrassment was only slightly lessened when the majority of other people in the room confessed they’d never heard of it either.

Embarrassment quickly turned to shame once it was explained to me. It’s such a simple concept and one I really should have known.

I’m operating on the assumption that some readers of this blog may not be familiar with the concept either. So to save you embarrassment , here it is:

A viral co-efficient of 1 means each of your customers in turn brings you one more customer. It’s as simple as that. So a coefficient of 0.5 means every other customer brings you a new one. 0.1 would mean one in ten customers bring you a new customer.

So the goal is to achieve as high a number as possible. I’m told Facebook has a viral coefficient of 12. So each user brings in 12 others. A nice position to be in as once you pass 1, your users/customers grow exponentially.

On Monday I posted a blog entry with the title SEO is no substitute for a marketing plan.

It attracted quite a few interesting comments, but I felt one of the comments deserved to be highlighted.

The below was posted by Ian Hendry from WeCanDo.BIZ.

It’s interesting to note that if you ask someone in the generation below me to ring a doorbell, they use their thumb to do it. This seems weird to me as I use my index finger. But then I haven’t been brought up using my thumbs primarily for texting; if I had then my thumb might also have become to the dominant digit.

It goes to show how new technologies can change habits in a generation. And a new generation could see Google confined to the rubbish heap.

People are now increasingly asking the crowd for answers through Facebook and Twitter rather than combing through hundreds and thousands of pages of historical content on Google.

Stats are already showing how much more time new web users are spending on social networks compared to where we’ve spent our focus.

It makes sense as availability of social networks becomes, through mobiles, ubiquitous that they also ask questions and for recommendations that way too. Why go and sift through a library of answers other people got when I can just ask my followers?

People are asking real people for help rather than depending on a bot and a database, mainly because with real people come real answers.

It’s already happening. Just take a look at the opportunities for business that we’re unearthing through our Twitter Sales Leads tool. Most of the posters of those business needs probably never thought to go to Google.

There’s a chance that depending on Google will become as shortsighted as depending on Yellow Pages seems to our generation of business folk now.

Certainly thought provoking. I intend to test the “doorbell theory” on the next few teenagers I speak to. (Game of Knock-down Ginger anyone?)

So are we currently undergoing a big change in the way we search for information? A change that will be cemented in a few years when todays teenagers join the business world?

Googles Eric Schmidt certainly seems think so. In an article on Real Business he’s quoted as saying:

It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources

Assuming it’s a given that the way we (and therefore, our customers) search for information is changing forever, there are a few questions demanding answers.

1) Will Google change quickly enough to embrace this change and retain it’s dominant position? History says not.

2) If not, what new companies are going to rise to the top of the getting-eyes-to-your-site pile? Odds are there’s a sleeping giant in our midst already.

3) How do we, as business owners with products and services to promote, capitalise on this change? Answering this might help answer #2

I just noticed that the KashFlow fanclub page on Facebook has just reached the 100 member mark. This is without really promoting it very much.

I’ve still not worked out the best way to use Facebook to our advantage in spreading the word about KashFlow, but I’m sure getting a group together like this one is part of it.

My Facebook “friends” are an odd mix of real life friends, family, journos, business associates and KashFlow users.  It certainly blurs the line between what’s business and what’s personal. My brother-in-law surely has no interest in the latest KashFlow press release and I’m sure that KashFlow users aren’t too interested in how my wife’s pregnancy is progressing.

If anyone has any tips on how best to use Facebook to promote a small business, I’m all ears.