The sociogram

In the book "The Entrepreneurial Web" mention was made of the sociogram. It was explained like this:

A drug manufacturing company had been spending quite considerable sums of money mailing out expensive literature, sales packs and samples to thousands of doctors on its mailing list and was getting very disappointing results.

Using a questionnaire to try to discover what influenced doctors in their decisions to prescribe particular drugs, the drug manufacturing company discovered by far the most influential factor was advice or recommendations from other doctors.

To investigate this clue, the drug company picked an area in the country and sent a team of investigators to call on every single doctor there. These investigators were instructed to try to find out who was speaking to who. When these result were obtained, the marketing department took a map of the area and drew a small circle on the map to mark the geographic location of each doctor, then drew a straight line between any doctors where a communication link had been established. Such a diagram is known as a sociogram.

What they discovered, when they completed the map, was that the lines radiating out from the doctors varied immensely. Some doctors had lines connecting them with many others, some with only one or two. Looking at the overall picture it was clear that if peer to peer communication was a strong influence then the influence was concentrated around a relatively small number of doctors.

Changing their marketing strategy in this particular area, the drug company found that concentrating all of the marketing effort onto only these highly communicative nodes, produced far better results than if the marketing effort was spread equally over all doctors.

The computer enhanced communication environment of the Internet suggests that such a marketing strategy could be effectively and efficiently employed for all manner of products and services. Again, this is a solution involving communication between people and involves very little technological knowledge at all.

In all communities, large or small, there is always the information guru who knows where to get the best products, the best services and the best prices.Whether these are the mean types, who tell you where you've gone wrong after the event, or the type you can go to for advice before you make a purchase decision, they are always there, influencing buying patterns.

To maintain their position as the reliable information gurus, they will have to be constantly investigating and searching the market places. What better field for their research and investigation than the Web, the news groups and the list serves? In light of the small-world cluster principle, this makes sense, so, what effect will in-your-face advertising and marketing have on these influential local communicators? Will they just want to regurgitate readily available information to their local group? It is more likely that they'll relay information they'd gleaned from an obscure discussion forum that none of their neighbours would know about.

It is also quite common for people who use their computers to hunt for bargains to tell their neighbours about their successes. Their neighbours then ask them to buy or look for particular bargains on their behalf. In this way a single person with a computer can act as the Internet link for a whole neighbourhood of non computer users to shop on-line.

It is unlikely that anyone could specifically target these local information gurus. They will be feeding off of their own network of contacts and will be seeking out recommended product and services rather than looking at advertising or marketing presentations. In short they will be relying on word of mouth rather than simply information.

It also makes you have a double think about search engines. As was covered in an earlier chapter, these are not particularly efficient and are sometimes confusing to use. Wouldn't people be more inclined to seek advice from a knowledgeable friend who frequents to on-line discussion forums? With such a small number of links needed to connect any kind of expert to a non expert, word of mouth by way of the small world cluster effect is going to be a far more efficient way to get information than any kind of directory or search engine. More importantly, this word of mouth is far more likely to be driven by excellent value, reliability and efficient service than by targeted advertising.