Social Proof -Your Network Marketing Business

Robert Scoble · Top Commenter · Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace Managed Hosting · 72,351 subscribers
When people ask me "try my photo sharing app" I ask them "get my 16,000 followers to move over first." Many entrepreneurs don't get this. Even at Microsoft I remember having arguments when I worked there and Digg first came on scene. I told people that we should buy Digg. They said "we could built that in a week." Um, no, you can't. Why? Because your copy wouldn't come with social proof. Thank you for laying it out. By the way, check out Facebook's little "social proof" right on my comment here. :-) 66,000 subscribers can't be wrong. :-)
Reply · 35 · · November 27 at 1:23pm

Justin Card · Top Commenter
I'm sure Microsoft *deeply* regrets not buying Digg.
Reply · 10 · · November 27 at 3:31pm

Giovanni Gallucci
That's probably the single reason why I've all but abandoned tech-startups in my work. It's difficult to say the least when entrepreneurs can't remove themselves from their bubbles and look at their product with a little more objectivity. They'd do themselves a favor if they tried it...
Reply · 4 · · November 27 at 4:47pm

Sa Ma · Top Commenter · San Francisco, California
Robert, I agree with what you are saying, but I disagree with your analogy. Digg biggest feature wasn't the algorithm, but it was its loyal users-in social products, the social is the product. If 10 of my friends started using a MS version of reddit, I wouldn't use it, even though there was some social proof to its value. Digg at the time, and Reddit now, has a strong group of people who post interesting stuff, which makes reddit interesting. That's the biggest value of Digg or reddit. It's not just social proof that I should use it.
Reply · · Monday at 1:06am
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Josh Constine · Writer at TechCrunch · 844 subscribers
What do you mean William Shatner isn't a travel expert? He flew a spaceship and boldly went where no man had gone before.
Reply · 19 · · Monday at 6:19am

Aileen Lee · Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
ok good point. i stand corrected.
Reply · 2 · · Tuesday at 4:52pm

Max Woolf · Top Commenter · Carnegie Mellon University · 477 subscribers
So, marketing relies on who you know, rather than whether a product is good or not. That's why I've been somewhat disenfranchised with startups in 2011: sure, your product can be the most innovative thing ever, but without the right connections, your startup will be a needle in a haystack of other startups.

See About.me: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/17/about-mes-ceo-on-how-to-hit-a-million-users-in-300-days-figure-out-who-your-entourage-is/. I'm not saying About.me is bad, but it's clear that the "entourage" was the driving force in the success of the company.
Reply · 10 · · November 27 at 12:49pm

JC Webb
Max, I agree, but this is the way the world works. We are just getting ready to come out the gates ourselves with limited connections. Interested in your thoughts. www.mistash.com Tag me back on twitter.
Reply · · Monday at 12:04am

Srini Kumar · Top Commenter · Los Angeles, California
Max, are you abandoning the humor thing for a deep wisdom thing ? Pretty amazing pivot :D
Reply · · Monday at 12:03pm

Max Woolf · Top Commenter · Carnegie Mellon University · 477 subscribers
Srini Kumar I mix both. Deep wisdom gets boring after awhile. :P
Reply · · Monday at 12:05pm

Sa Ma · Top Commenter · San Francisco, California
Let me rephrase this post: People are sheep. They follow each other. If there is a line, most people just stand behind that line...
Reply · 6 · · Monday at 12:58am

Mark Malone
see above.
Reply · 1 · · Monday at 6:36am

Hugh Guiney · Developer at Bionic Hippo
Please don't use the term "mom-commerce" (or "mompreneur", or any related term). Apart from sounding cheesy, it has a sexist connotation. Commerce targeting mothers is no different from plain commerce.
Reply · 6 · · November 27 at 12:56pm

Justin Card · Top Commenter
Please don't use the term "please don't use the term". Apart from sounding smug, it has a dictatorial prick connotation.
Reply · 18 · · November 27 at 3:39pm

Hugh Guiney · Developer at Bionic Hippo
Justin Card That's not a term, it's a phrase.

Sincerely,
Smug Dictatorial Prick Who Struck A Nerve With the Misogynist
Reply · 8 · · November 27 at 6:12pm

Lee Brillhart · Seattle, Washington
Wow. I had thought we had reached the limits of radical political correctness, but clearly we have not. To argue that mothers don't have specific interests with respect to being a mother is pretty hard to support. And to label someone who believes such targeting is not only possible but something that makes sense from a business perspective a misogynist is beyond absurd.
Reply · 10 · · November 27 at 8:58pm
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M. Nicole Siobal · Maryland
Great article. I am a firm believer of this. I always say that we live in a society full of followers. It's like high school, everyone wants to do what the cool kids are doing. Thanks for this.
Reply · 5 · · November 27 at 6:40pm

Mark Malone
eh sorry we live in a society of instituional inequality
Reply · 1 · · Monday at 6:36am

Jan Smith · Torquay, Queensland, Australia
An interesting article Aileen and well written. Also some of the comments have been thought provoking too. To my way of thinking, the best example of "social proof" would have to be the levels of debt that exist around the world today and the outcome is the difficulties that sovereign debt now represents.

I remember a time when 'owing someone money' was a shameful character trait. It was considered a character flaw but then in the mid-seventies when "credit" was made available to most people who asked for it, and many people did...."credit" appeared to be a "good" thing and people quickly forgot that credit equaled debt and owing someone money.

This is the biggest example I know of that social-proof works and works extremely well.It has been used as a tool against people who blindly follow just because "everyone is doing it".
Reply · 4 · · Monday at 11:25am

Arie Goldshlager · Atlanta, Georgia
Aileen,

Thanks for a very insightful article. I substantially agree but would like to add:

Social Proof, in some cases, could have the opposite impact:
...See More
Reply · 4 · · November 27 at 3:54pm

JC Webb
Curious about the effect that the highly connected users have on sales of new items when they adopt them. Celebrity endorsements for the most part seem to be a helpful thing for businesses.
Reply · · Monday at 12:09am

Josh Barkin · Top Commenter · CEO at Stagename
Great article. Although the Viral Co-efficient which is arguably the MOST important metric for social proof wasn't really defined here. It's not what percentage of your daily visitors share, but of users that share, how many users do you acquire as a result. For example, if every new user you acquire brings in, on average, 2 new users, than your viral coefficient would be 2. If your viral coefficient is greater than 1 you will see growth and effectively reduce your cost of customer acquisition to zero. This is why "viral growth" is so coveted for consumer internet/mobile products. There is a simple mathematical forumla for calculating your "K-Factor" (otherwise known as your Viral Co-efficient).
Reply · 3 · · November 27 at 2:58pm

Aileen Lee · Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
good point josh - thanks for clarifying, agree that is key to measure. was just trying to be brief on that point as the post was already pretty long.
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 9:15pm

Josh Barkin · Top Commenter · CEO at Stagename
Aileen Lee I think you got social proof indicated by the number of tweets for this article that this is a great source of info for entrepreneurs :)
Reply · 1 · · Monday at 8:31am

Bruno Tuzzolo · Gerente BI at Predicta
"If your viral coefficient is greater than 1 you will see growth". Not really... If: Viral Coefficient > 0 you see growth. If Viral Coefficient > 1, it grows exponentially....
Reply · · Tuesday at 12:26pm

Shankar Saikia · Stanford University
NOTHING ORIGINAL

While it is good to be reminded of the concept of social proof, the author cited something that we have always known. Most of us have gone for the "inside the velvet" rope nightclub. The only purpose this article served is to introduce us to the author and the companies cited in the article.
Reply · 3 · · Monday at 8:03am

Lee Blaylock
Social proof can be helpful but also misleading in some instances and more valuable in others. Just because 100 people like something on Yelp or Amazon doesn't mean you will like it too. But that is about taste and not trust. ebay ratings are about trust.

It is far more valuable to have folks you know and share a common interest/perspective than 100 random people who may or may not share your tastes. If a friend of mine who is a foodie and has similar tastes as I tells me to try some restaurant, then I'm much more interested than if the "crowd" likes it. Same for a friend who shares my tastes in movies. Food and Movie critics are a form of institutionalized social proof and, if the critic has displayed similar tastes as you have in the past, they can be a good indicator for you as well.

What isn't mentioned is also the...See More
Reply · 2 · · November 27 at 6:35pm

Lee Brillhart · Seattle, Washington
Aileen, this is an excellent framework and starting point for diving deeper on the different aspects of social proof that may be relevant for a business, whether marketing B2B, B2C, or both. We have found, in our disruptive healthcare business, that social proof at a pretty granular level is required to pry customers away from "doing what we have always done" to doing something new, even when, objectively, the new approach is clearly better. We have been fortunate that so many customers who have decided to jump into the pool without actually holding someone's hand have been willing to climb back out and help usher into the pool the next customer from the same vertical. This is painstaking, to be sure, but we could very easily be blowing boatloads of $$$$ shouting into the wind and getting nowhere, because social proof is a necessary condition to 85% of our sales right now. We have no doubt that with volume and more general visibility we will need to rely less on actual personnel recommendations than we do now, but getting to critical mass, I am convinced, would not have been possible had we simply relied on a standard marketing tool set, regardless of how much money we had thrown at the problem.
Reply · 2 · · November 27 at 9:19pm

Ben Kendall · Wilfrid Laurier
Social isn't new at all - but tracking and monitoring is a lot easier today with platforms like Facebook, twitter, google+, etc.

Also I cringed when I read "Wikipedia describes social proof as...". Eek.
Reply · 2 · · November 27 at 6:48pm

Justin Card · Top Commenter
"Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth."

If by despite, you mean because.

/pump-pump-pump
Reply · 2 · · November 27 at 3:54pm

Yves Di Maria · London, United Kingdom
Very good article Aileen! Thank you for reminding us some basics!
Reply · 2 · · Monday at 11:03am

Steve Ardire · Top Commenter
And here I was waiting to see the 'social proof graph' to layer into the 'interest graph', the 'taste graph' ( that Hunch just got $80M for from eBay ) and so on....

Rather than beating around the bush why not just simply say Social proof is just another cliche for reputation + influence + trust.

How to you accurately measure this? By your Klout score and other methods? LOL
...See More
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 12:57pm

Shantanu Deshmukh · Marketing consultant at Intuit
Josh Kaufman has done an important work on distilling key business mental models in his phenomenal book The Personal MBA. Here is the link to the mental model "Social Proof" http://bit.ly/rVnmC3 If you are looking for a "definitive" guide on "ALL" the critical business mental models for running your business, pick up the copy of the book.
Reply · 1 · · Monday at 3:53am

Roger Huitt · Top Commenter
2 current of the biggest examples of social proof - Justin Beiber and Twilight. More like group hysteria.
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 1:03pm

Max Woolf · Top Commenter · Carnegie Mellon University · 477 subscribers
That's not social proof. That's proof that being social can make you insane.
Reply · 4 · · November 27 at 1:04pm

Rob Phillips · Top Commenter · Founder at Brevidy
Very well written! Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 8:15pm

Erkan Taş · Istanbul Bilgi University
Great article...
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 6:31pm

Albert Hahn · Seoul, Korea
I think the best take away from this article is not that "social proof" itself is important (we know that), or that in the end the product has to be good, but that traditional pay, plug and play marketing is becoming that much less effective. people nowadays have developed an incredible distaste for (and thus, iimmunity) to advertising in all its various ingenious forms. in short, the best marketing is marketing that does not seem like marketing at all. and the greatest benefit of wom marketing, or more broadly "social proof" marketing, is that it seems like it's not paid for at all.
Reply · · November 27 at 6:42pm

Jesse Honig · New York, New York
Aileen, thanks for a great article. Now I understand the massive line at the sample sale store I pass everyday on the way to work (and by extension Gilt Groupe and Rent The Runway). Having just lived through another Black Friday online, I can see how real the social proof phenomenon really is. The question is, once everyone starts using social phenomenon strategies to an extreme extent does it then render the strategy irrelevant (since it starts to lose its credibility)?
Reply · · November 27 at 5:43pm

Isaiah Weddle · Top Commenter · Account Manager at Tiny Chivalry
Wait, marketing through word of mouth and effective me-too self promotion? HOW HAS ANYONE NOT THOUGHT OF THAT LOL.
Reply · · November 27 at 12:46pm

Kevin Munoru · Managing Director & CEO at Limtless International Technology Group
Check this blog out! https://afrinerds.wordpress.com

Awesome!
Reply · · November 27 at 12:53pm

Moba Benzaid
yes
Reply · 1 · · November 27 at 2:00pm

Sarah Fraikue · Bremen, Germany
Sorry, but social proof is the core concept of social media and that peer groups have a higher influence on consumers than marketing has been even known before social media...so what was the new brilliant concept here? or are we just making up terms again to outsmart each other???
Reply · 1 · · Monday at 12:58pm

Andres Alba · University of the Savannah
One thing is social proof, another is obedience to authority, and other different thing is psychological reactance. Please do not mix the persuasion principles if you want to fully undestand the consumer's motivation. Say that everything is social proof is create a persuasion principle taxonomie that is not scientifically based and it can create a phenomenon called back-fire and is make the consumer behave in the exact opposite way.
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 18:33

Dan Keldsen · Boston, Massachusetts
Agree - Cialdini breaks persuasion into six principles of persuasion, and while I agree social proof can be more fine-grained, and some of the examples here nicely divide into smaller categories, authority is what's behind "Celebrity Social Proof" for certain. Authority in one area (acting) can be easily transplanted into another (tv doctor, priceline pitchman, etc.).
Yanıtla · · Salı, 11:27

Lars Pallesen · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · DJH
So, Mr.venture firm dude, you've just realized why Facebook has a "Like" button, huh?
Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr. Lee.
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 16:55

Martin Crampton · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Newbrain - Founder'de çalışıyor
Lara: Do you know something 'extra' about Aileen Lee who, if yr correct, wld be on my list to persuade me to 'change sides'/start kicking with the other boot / climb the fence / etc It's a Nordic thing, right? *L*
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 22:23

Jie Li · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · 华夏科技'da 编辑
must read article for social developers.
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 14:06

Sarit Shmulevitz · New York, New York
Very interesting analysis and great insight for a startup looking to grow.
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 17:38

Mira Mar · Miri, Sarawak
enlightening
Yanıtla · · 27 Kasım, 15:29

Ciarán Norris · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Dublin, Ireland
Interesting post, but the idea that this is untapped seems either naive, or an attempt to justify the headline. As the author says, McDonalds have been doing this for over half a century, cinema advertising is built on it, whilst a million & ten businesses use some sort of recommendation as their main way of demonstrating their product's value. Apart from anything else, Facebook's whol ad system is built on it, though they call it social context.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 01:34

JC Webb
Our company Mistash is a social product catalog that allows for all examples of the types of social proof you explain here. I'm really excited about it and invite feedback: www.mistash.com.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 00:29

Brian Broadbent · The University of Texas at Austin
Social proofing is very important, but I would argue that "perceived value" is more important than social validation. In my experience, triggering "perceived value" can drive massive consumer response. For example, when Linens N Things went bankrupt, they were able to sell substantially all of the inventory at 20% off even though consumers could walk in every day and purchase the same merchandise with the 20% off coupons we receive in the mail. The "Liquidation Sale" banner drove massive traffic even though the deals were not that good. Look at what perceived value causes at Wal-Mart on Black Friday. Match.com has all the social proof it can get, but there is a huge percentage of the market that will not buy a subscription because they don't see value in it. For some consumers, social proof is more important (perhaps the early adopters). For many other consumers, price and value are more important. The trick is finding a way to market to both segments of the market if it works for your business.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 05:16

Mehmet Subasi · Vodaco Agency'de Partner
Simply put: "The role of influencers are increasing due to increased ease and usage of social media". Article is good, but most people ignore to understand this fact, unless they see it explained with a new phenomenon / buzz word or when they see on a TechCrunch article.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 01:45

Joshua Ledgard
Great post. Despite having business plans for 5 other ideas we realized that no business plan came with social proof.

The only thing that really mattered was wether or not people would pay us their attention for something we wanted to build. If enough people paid us with their attention we had more social proof that people would pay us with real money.

This was exactly the motivation behind our startup ( http://www.kickofflabs.com ).
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 09:29

Reed Pankratz · Kansas State University'de Campus Tour Guide
While I found the article interesting and informative, some of the comments offered some great learning value as well. Thanks to everyone for sharing.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 08:07

Matthew Popke
Little fact check. Shatner does not have $600 million worth of Priceline shares. He has repeatedly debunked that claim.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 08:30

Simon O'Shaughnessy · Bristol
I've been doing 'Tribal Leadership' (the John King course form NY Times bestseller) - I think the clue is in the name 'Tribal' - we do this naturally as we are humans - aka Seths Godin's 'Tribes' - Just because we have grown up we still look closely at what others do.. its just a new playground.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 13:25

Dan Keldsen · Boston, Massachusetts
Simon - I find that "tribal" language is a great conversation starter as well. My partners, Ed Moran and Francois Gossieaux published the book, The Hyper-Social Organization last year, published by McGraw-Hill, and much of the findings are based on (at this point), 4 years of research into the Tribalization of Business, done in partnership with Deloitte. We've found tremendous interest in understanding tribes, social proof, reciprocity, and more, in both enterprise tribes (employees, etc.) and in market-facing tribes. We aren't the "market segments" of yesteryear, which were never terribly accurate - and a return undertstanding tribal behavior (hard-wired into all of us), is very specifically our focus at www.human1.com.
Yanıtla · · Salı, 11:22

Dan Keldsen · Boston, Massachusetts
And to the references to Cialdini's work in this article, I'm a devotee of Dr. Cialdini - and took the time off this year to attend his absolutely incredible, and by far, most professionally done 2-day workshop I've ever attended or put on, in the roughly 20 years of my career. I suspect you'd find that workshop to be very useful as well. I'd love to hear about your experiences with the Tribal Leadership course from John King.
Yanıtla · · Salı, 11:23

Devon MacDonald · Toronto, Ontario
A great categorization / conceptualization of an age old problem and phenomenon.
Yanıtla · · Pazartesi, 11:03

Barbie Marsh Burke · NSCC
Interesting article from Robert Scoble · Top Commenter · Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace Managed Hosting · 70,455 subscribers".

"So, marketing relies on who you know, rather than whether a product is good or not. That's why I've been somewhat disenfranchised with startups in 2011: sure, your product can be the most innovative thing ever, but without the right connections, your startup will be a needle in a haystack of other startups."

When people ask me "try my photo sharing app" I ask them "get my 16,000 followers to move over first." Many entrepreneurs don't get this. Even at Microsoft I remember having arguments when I worked there and Digg first came on scene. I told people that we should buy Digg. They said "we could built that in a week." Um, no, you can't. Why? Because your copy wouldn't come with social proof. Thank you for laying it out. By the way, check out Facebook's little "social proof" right on my comment here. :-) 66,000 subscribers can't be wrong. :-)

Digg biggest feature wasn't the algorithm, but it was its loyal users-in social products, the social is the product. If 10 of my friends started using a MS version of reddit, I wouldn't use it, even though there was some social proof to its value. Digg at the time, and Reddit now, has a strong group of people who post interesting stuff, which makes reddit interesting. That's the biggest value of Digg or reddit. It's not just social proof that I should use it."

Srini Kumar · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Los Angeles, California
Conform or be cast out. Subdivisions.

John Grohol · Nova Southeastern University
I'm not sure if the examples were just poor or what, but there were a couple of problems with the examples given.

For example, an "expert" in "luxury" certainly has no special expertise to test an Audi A8. We also all know that just because I have 10,000 followers on Twitter, I haven't "reached" them if I tweet something out to them. (If you believe otherwise, you're either in denial, or completely misunderstand how most people use Twitter.)

Yelp is primarily an example of the wisdom of the crowds, not "user social proof." People care about the overall rating of the service or restaurant more so than reading hundreds of individual reviews on a review site like Yelp.

Ramesh Kumar · NetArgument'te Owner
Excellent Article. In the online world, where you have little means of verifying, what the person says, social proof does add credibility to what you speak.

Jean-Luc Cesar · HEC Montréal
Great artcile, very, very instructive. Thank you

Edmond Qenani · Edidante.com'da Co-Founder and Owner
Great Article - In our nature we are continuously curious to know what others are doing. Twitter: @edimontecristo

Simon J Richardson
I agree social proof is the psychological principle of accepting something because others accept it, of doing something because others are doing it. Social Proof is what psychologists call a “decision heuristic” — a shortcut for making decisions.

"Life is too complicated to carefully evaluate every element of every situation, so we learn to take shortcuts to help us make what are usually reasonable and reliable decisions. The more people who do something, the more likely it is correct — or at least relatively safe. Not always, but for most things it works with a high degree of reliability."[Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., titled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.]

LinkedIn has social proof built in, in the form of Recommendations. Before social networks wasn't it common practice to list 'references' on your resume so prospec...

Demian Farnworth · The CopyBot'ta Chief Web Writer and Blogger
Superb article. My first advertising boss handed me Cialdini's "Influence." Because I was a freshly minted English Lit grad, I turned my nose up to it. I reluctantly read it, but fell instantly in love and have never looked back. His book should be required reading for anyone in the business. Thanks again.

Gurnard Perch · Gurnard Perch Sophisticated Technologies'te Founder
You can check also special project for social proof - yotru.com. It is something like a widget on site, it shows to new visitor, what his freinds have already bought here something or used this site.

Hoby Van Hoose · Doyenz'de Usability Designer
It looks like most of your examples are about the use a "mavens", not social proof, by companies. They are related but by the definition you gave, not the same.

Gulrez Singh Arora · Maryland
great article and concise examples..thanks!

Muhammad Asim Shehzad · Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology
Aileen Lee! All you said is obvious and almost everyone knows it.Yes, people are building great companies around this concept.More important questions is:How greater "social proof " companies can be made now or in future based on current approaches.

Jennifer Brannon Barhorst · Euro MBA
After reading several of the comments here, I just wanted to come back and say how much I enjoyed the article. To those of you criticising Aileen for what you perceive as coining new terms from old marketing norms - well, yes, that's what's occurred and it's brilliant! She has successfully articulated how to obtain customers in today's marketplace so that others can understand. This adds tremendous value for many practitioners and speaks to the calibre of writer/researcher that Aileen is. Well done Aileen and thank you for sharing with us. :)