The cartoon above displays a group of six interconnected individuals transferring a message based on
shared personal relationships, hobbies, schools, etc - what Facebook would denote a social graph. Friends of friends help spread messages about brands (or "Halle Berry" in this example) with varying degrees of success.
Recent developments from British Social Networking PerfSpot and CA based human-powered search company Mechanical Zoo are attempting to remove some of the uncertainty attributed to Word-of-Mouth by relying on customers social graph.
PerfSpot's Friendvouch rewards users for subscribing to advertisement feeds and introducing friends to the message. Mechanical Zoo's Aardvark chat application provides a more passive (and imho useful) method for receiving recommendations. Aardvark distributes questions among your social contacts based on your contacts existing knowledge. The result is hopefully a timely and informed recommendation from a trusted friend (Applying this to the cartoon, maybe Josh would be replaced from the chain due to his preoccupation with female movie stars).
Both solutions seem harmless, but are susceptible to abuse and message disruption if popularity rises. Will be interesting to learn whether Digital Word-of-Mouth is successful when mechanically routed through your social graph for efficiency. Thoughts?
Recent developments from British Social Networking PerfSpot and CA based human-powered search company Mechanical Zoo are attempting to remove some of the uncertainty attributed to Word-of-Mouth by relying on customers social graph.
PerfSpot's Friendvouch rewards users for subscribing to advertisement feeds and introducing friends to the message. Mechanical Zoo's Aardvark chat application provides a more passive (and imho useful) method for receiving recommendations. Aardvark distributes questions among your social contacts based on your contacts existing knowledge. The result is hopefully a timely and informed recommendation from a trusted friend (Applying this to the cartoon, maybe Josh would be replaced from the chain due to his preoccupation with female movie stars).
Both solutions seem harmless, but are susceptible to abuse and message disruption if popularity rises. Will be interesting to learn whether Digital Word-of-Mouth is successful when mechanically routed through your social graph for efficiency. Thoughts?
