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Pluck On Social Commerce and Customer Interaction

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Glen Ford, Director of Product
♫Come together, right now, over Reed♫
1/16/2013, 8:00 AM

Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet, famously postulated that a communication network grows in value exponentially as the number of members expands. This postulate, like Moore's Law, seems to have been predictive, since we're here on the Internet, and it made 3Com a lot of money to boot.

 
However, in a 2001 article in Harvard Business Review, David Reed proposed that in group-forming networks, the value of the network (or its "utility", to borrow a term from economics) grows much faster, because each new node can join the others in duets, trios, quartets, and so on. The expansion of potential sub-groups grows very quickly.
 
Reed didn't know he was advocating for the deployment of Pluck Groups—and in a product-centric world, category Forums—but he was. I'll come to that in a bit.
 
Not to get caught up in math, but just for reference, here are the two equations:
 
 
I should point out that these are just proxies for value—the best they can do is show maximum potential utility. (If you want some real math fun, check out Beckstrom's Law, which injects more sophistication by including the total net value of what in social networking terms are messages, rather than merely the number of community members.)
 
Two players can form one ensemble—a duet—so V = 1. Double that community, and they can group themselves into 6 different duos, 4 different trios, and one quartet. With 4 players, V goes to 11.
 
It's not hard to see that Reed's calculation will approach infinity very quickly. By the time we reach 10 members, the number of potential groups is 1,013. Since a picture is worth almost that many words, here's a plot of the two laws:
 
 
So what does that have to do with how you conduct the community you build on your site?
 
Reed's law clearly shows the importance of allowing social networks, including "owned social", to form sub-groups. Facilitating one-to-one member communication follows Metcalfe's law and is highly valuable; but facilitating many-to-many communication in social groupings is even more valuable. Pluck offers Private Messaging (and other forms of 1:1 interaction) for the former, and a Groups application that lets the community organize around topics, geographical areas, and anything else it wishes to.
 
In a purely eCommerce context, an even more compelling application of Reed's law comes in the form of "Category Forums". For instance, a forum about camera equipment quickly becomes a sub-group of shutterbugs and professional photographers eager to spread the word about their favorite (or least favorite) products. These discussions, centered around sub-groups rather than the broader community, greatly impact community cohesion, brand awareness, and ultimately, conversion.
 
Reed's Law is a nice idea in theory and helps justify the effort spent in building online communities, but seen in the context of smaller networks centered on your digital properties, it becomes a powerful argument for these specific features.
 
Don't delay in letting your users and your business start taking advantage of this fact.
 
P.S.) To be fair, there are objections to the optimism of both Metcalfe and Reed's laws (some suggest logarithmic scale instead). And Dunbar's Number suggests that utility will diminish as any one member crests around 150 connections. Suffice it to say the exponential growth will be tempered at some point.
Tags: notable-music-puns , science , GFN , networks
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