What should everyone know about the network effect?

Users will loss part of their privacy in way or another. suggested edits to this answer:Users will loss lose part of their privacy in one way or another.Suggest edits to the author of this answer:       Users will lose part of their privacy in one way or another. Link to Questions, Topics, Blogs and People Explain Your Suggestion:

This question is conflating three separate and distinct concepts. Social media marketing is using social media tools (blogs, tweets, videos, check-ins, etc.) to raise awareness of a product or service. One desirable tactic in this strategy is to create messages (or message carriers) that are passed from one person to another, ideally at an exponentially increasing [viral] rate. A viral business model is one in which the very operation of the underlying business results in new customer acquisition at an increasing rate. An example would be http://Gust.com, where startup companies invite all of their prospective investors, who in turn invite all the companies with whom they are dealing, who in turn invite *their* investors, and so on. The Network Effect is characterized by Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes. So that each person who gets a telephone, for example, gives ALL other telephone owners increased value of their phones. Now, let's discuss which of these you're trying to understand!

Sounds like you're asking about a media strategy. Some businesses cant handle viral growth/massive short term inflows. Being a quality service is a way to get good buzz. After some good work you'll start to get some brand ambassadors. From wikipedia: A brand advocate is a marketing term for "highly satisfied customers and others who go out of their way to actively promote the products they love and care about, they are a different breed altogether.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_ambassador#cite_note-15 " Further, he states that they are 50% more influential than an average customer. Often a positive experience with a brand, successful customer-service relationship motivates a brand advocate to express their positive feelings towards a brand. Traditionally, a brand advocate would sing praises of a brand and this would circulate through 'word of mouth' or other similar channels. However, in the digital age social media tools have allowed brand advocates to express themselves on forums such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook by 'tweeting' about a brand experience or 'liking' the brand itself. It highlights the point that the client needs to have experienced something exceptional about your service that they want to share with others. Ways to trigger this can be exciting designs, emotive language and creating personal alignment with the clients by supporting or sharing ideas/concepts/charities that they are aligned to. Some retail brands have done this really well by having an aspirational person who is the personification of their target customer - this is set on a local/regional basis by drawing up "influencer" maps.

I will focus on one aspect of your question, which is the potential negative consequences of a network effect. I honestly don't believe the negative impact of network effect is worth considering. IT infrastructure is now effectively unlimited (I wrote about it here: ). You can hire customer service for a lot less than the cost of engineers. One thing that astounds me is the speed of billing response at one of the online games I play. They take 24-48 hours to resolve a billing ticket and are only available during business hours. Only a tiny portion of players who play such games spend money on them. Thus, it boggles my mind that they have not scaled their billing team to respond to tickets within 15 minutes. Each such ticket represents lost revenue. You can hire a scalability expert for about $500/hr for a week or two and solve most of your scalability technical challenges. Yes, an expert can do that in such a short amount of time. These challenges tend to be database queries related, and optimizing queries as well as setting up a system of multiple database servers and caching systems along with their associated monitoring solution is a solved problem. The business must realize at a certain point that their systems are no longer adequate and bring in additional customer service and technical experts quickly. If this is not done, we have this... or this

Network effects are the ways in which a platform’s consumer base impacts the value of the platform itself; in essence, the more people who are engaged with a platform, the more useful and valuable it is. To create a successful network effect a platform must follow the 5 C's, these 5 C's consist of 1) Connection, 2) Communication, 3) Curation, and 4) Community. These 5 C's are essential as they dictate the quality of the Network effect. To find out more about this content visit our website and read:https://www.applicoinc.com/blog/network-effects/ andhttps://www.applicoinc.com/blog/network-effects-the-5-cs-to-building-a-succesful-platform/