Would you like to meet Bill Gates?

Why the world is a lot smaller than you think

How well do you know Taylor Swift? Do you consider Bill Gates a buddy? What about Hillary Clinton?

According to the “small world” theory, you should be just six handshakes away from global CEOs, celebrities, and heads of state. But can anyone in the world really reach anyone else through a chain of only six people? The answer is a definite “Yes”.

The theory of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ was first proposed in 1929 by Hungarian author, Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains.” Since then, many studies have supported this theory. In the 1960s, U.S. social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a series of “small-world experiments” to estimate the average distance between individuals within a social network.

Recently, in 2003, researchers from Columbia University in New York published the first results of their “Small World Research Project” and came to the same conclusion. And, in 2006, Microsoft Research analyzed billions of electronic messages to prove that any two people in the world could connect in 6.6 steps or less.

The Six Degrees theory also famously inspired the early internet game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ in which every actor in Hollywood can be linked to Kevin Bacon via his movie performances.

But WHY are we so fascinated by the Six Degrees Theory? One reason is that we have an innate desire to see the world as smaller. We want to feel that we are connected to others. We have all had moments meeting a random stranger, only to find that they weren’t really that strange at all when a spontaneous conversation reveals that they are connected to someone we know. This desire may be related to Dunbar’s number, which is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It is said to lie between 100–250 and has a commonly understood value of 150, and is related to primate brain size and average social group size.

In the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, Ouisa Kittredge (played by actress Stockard Channing) was quoted saying:

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we’re so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection … I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

Although professional networking platforms like LinkedIn have existed since 2003, there has been a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting a truly warm introduction to someone outside your immediate network. The missing piece is being able to accurately measure relationship tie strength between two people — no easy task. If you want to meet someone (e.g. a prospective customer or investor) who is three degrees away, you would likely want to know who in your network has the strongest connection to that person.

At Influitive,we recognize that connections are closer than you think, and help companies leverage their customer advocates to refer new business. The warm introductions that your happy customers or users can provide are invaluable. A research report from Forrester, Advocate Marketing Creates B2B Customer Relations That Last A Lifetime, shows that peers and colleagues are the number one source (22%) for gathering information when considering a purchase decision. Further, 4 out of 5 B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

So, the challenge for brands is: how can you scale your efforts to create genuine advocacy on the part of your customers and generate more high quality referrals? If you’re providing a great customer experience but not yet engaging your advocates, you might miss out on meeting the next Bill Gates.