The phenomenon described by the six degrees of separation is theoretically feasible, but it may not have practical significance in reality. The efficiency of social interaction and communication will be affected by each individual. To put it bluntly, even if you can contact Obama, why do you contact him? Why should he contact you?
As an e-commerce seller, of course, you have to market your products or services to him. As in the experiment above, it only reaches the goal, but whether it can effectively convey information and promote the final business behavior is not reflected in the six degrees of separation theory.
In real life, there is a cost to spread through this kind of social interpersonal network. No one will do boring communication without value output. Social communication must be purposeful. And spreading information with a purpose may lead to commercial behavior, or it may not lead to commercial behavior. The difference will be discussed in the following chapters, but this difference will lead to our profit or loss results from social marketing.
Because social communication has a cost. For example, in the six degrees of separation theory, there is a price to pay for information dissemination through relationships. In the above experiment, physical letters were transmitted, so the cost of delivering the letters between post offices, the time cost of waiting, and the cost of “troubling the participants in the middle” – similar to what we call the cost of “owing favors”, etc., constitute the most basic cost of communication.
If you want to increase the profitability of communication, the first thing to consider is how to greatly reduce the cost of social communication.