I had a meeting with Peeyoosh Chandra of Ogilvy yesterday to talk about Social Media and Social networking. The most interesting aspect of the conversation to me was the introduction of the magic number.
In Advertising agencies the magic number is 3. For every person we hit with our advertising we would expect that individual to influence and spread the message to 3 other people. Based upon this metric agencies decide which method or channel should be used to reach say 30,000 people. (I hope I have not lost anything in translation here)
I delivered a presentation to the NZ Software Association entitled “Collaboration and Social Networking” (pretty snazzy title eh!?) a couple of weeks ago and within that presentation I spoke about Measuring the Success of Social Networking implementations which sparked PC and I connecting. The initial stats show us that if we introduce a new funky feature into our website or social networking site we can dramatically effect the usage of the social networking site.
November 8th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
HI Chris,
The “number” was in relation to social networking websites and campaigns.
Different metrics apply to other media channels.
In context, the number becomes important when trying to assign a value to the impact a social media related campaign will have relative to a traditional media buy, as currently it is considered “free” media but requires very careful planning and execution.
In the example that I used, what we discovered was that based on the idea, we would get between 3 – 5 people engaging and forwarding the link on.
We are still working on what the number is for B2B related social media campaigns is.
Regards,
PC