On The Harvard Business Review’s List of Breakthrough Ideas for 2009, is thedynamics of personal influence. Nicholas A. Christakis has been studying how much influence you have over people, based on degrees of separation.
Thanks to Kevin Bacon we know that he’s connected to every actor by no more than 6 degrees of separation -but does that mean he has influence over everyone in Hollywood? Um, no.
It turns out that your influence over people you know can be profound; your influence over a friends’ friends is noticeable, but your friends’ friends’ friends hardly notice you at all. What does this mean for sales and marketing?
Pharmaceutical companies might target physicians more efficiently by exploiting their tendency to be influenced by other physicians to whom they are connected. Workplace-safety initiatives might benefit from the understanding that one person who adopts safer practices influences others to do so. Efforts to foster creativity or innovation might depend on the degree of separation of the relevant parties. And groups of customers – including customers who have online connections – might be strategically targeted so as to take advantage of their influence on one another.
If your company is trying to reach anyone who could be a customer, you would do better in this economy by looking at the people your clients know for the next big opportunity.
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