I’m guessing you’ve all heard of the Six Degrees of seperation, yes? If not, have a quick read from Wikipedia here.
We are all connected in some way to many people around the world, some of whom we may never meet, but we have a relationship of sorts via all the Social Media tools at our disposal now. My guess now, with all the tools available, that we may have 4(ish) degrees of seperation, meaning that we are all more connected.
Let me give you a recent example that i had while using Twitter.
The other night my bedroom was a bit too humid, so got up at around 2am to open the window to get some fresh air in the room. To my amazement, about 1/2 mile away, i saw a huge fire. At first i thought it was me dreaming as the flames were so big. I phoned 999 and asked for Fire Brigade and was told that they were aware of the fire and Firefighters were on the scene.
As this was such a sight that i could hardly believe, i thought i would take a picture on my iPhone and tweeted it.
Within a minute, two people replied to my tweet, both who are local to me, one in Halesowen and one is Selly Oak, both whom i have never met.
I wasn’t expecting any replies at 2am and certainly not one to say he saw a number of Fire Engines on their way to the scene at Rubery.
Before i went back to bed, i took a few pictures on my Nikon P6000
To my surprise, the following morning i then got a tweet from B31Blog asking for pictures, which in turn they used on their local blog here.
So, from a random picture taken at 2am resulted in many connections and a Blog post, without any sign of a Marketing plan, Strategy or PR.
How is that?
There are all sorts of software and applications out there that can give you a myriad of facts and figures related to your online presence.
One of them is Klout, which uses algortithms to come up with a rating for you based on your Twitter account. You can check mine here.
So i guess, from these figures, i’m well connected, but more importantly, is it not about how influential you are?