It’s a small world!

Milgram’s „Small World” experiment in the 70’s was one of the most controversial of its time: Milgram showed that the human society is a network and everybody is on average 6 people away from anybody else through his/her connections.

Since Facebook was not invented at that time, to prove his theory, Milgram used a chain correspondence system: individuals were asked to send a letter to other  randomly selected individual living cities away. If the senders did not know the „targeted person”, they were asked to send the letter to somebody else they thought might know the target and so on. Milgram measured how many nods were necessary until the letters reached the destination and concluded that the people in US are separated on average by about 6 people, thus the wide spread expression "six degrees of separation" between people.

In today’s explosion of social networks, the above experiment does not seem so implausible anymore and depending of the business/industry the average number of connections between people is probably far lower than 6: social networks have made it visible for us all how interconnected we really are and how close we are to anybody through our connections.  Just type in the name of a person on Linkedin and you will get instant access to the information on how you can reach that person through 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

How do we use this information available on social networks?  How do we take advantage of the visibility of our extended network? Most of us have done it at some point, usually when we have asked for an introduction or recommendation from our connections to certain targeted prospects, clients, suppliers, employers, employees, potential business partners and investor.

At Clintelica we have based our business idea on the above: we have incorporated the information from social networks in the CRM system we offer.  Connections of all employees become visible to companies in the CRM system, thus creating at company level a huge pull of shared contacts to be used for facilitating the sales process. A sales person can now more easily bypass the barrier of cold calling, if he/she is priory introduced to the prospect by a colleague or can refer to his/her colleague, when approaching the prospect for a business meeting. Read more at: www.clintelica.com