Hitting the Critical Mass
In lecture, we learnt that when there exists network effects, we would expect to see a product having two equilibrium points for its demand. One of the equilibrium is also known as the tipping point, at which once you get so many usages of the product, the product would have reached a critical mass that helps the product to have the tendency to rapidly expand its user base until the next equilibrium point. However, how come there are different sizes of critical mass for different new social networks products? What are some factors to consider when predicting what critical mass a social networks product needs? An interesting article, “Social network marketing: Getting from zero to critical mass” by Andrew Chen explores the possible answers to these question.
Instead of suggesting that a product initially attracts people to use through marketing techniques, hit the critical mass point and simply continue to grow into a huge stable product network, Chen proposed to break down the whole product demand in various different phases. First, user gets to know the product through public relations or advertisements, but all the users would stick to the product. Yet, each user acquired would have some chance of creating some contributions to the current networks by creating some profiles, some pictures, or videos… Eventually, new users have enough content to consume and they would have a good reason for themselves to become a loyal user of the social networks. These users would also connect the old users and persuade the old users back to using the social network product.
With the analysis, Chen suggested that the key point here is that the new users re-engage the old users until everyone returns to the product on a regular basis. In order to achieve this, not only the number of users is important, the scale of the networks also has a deterministic role in the process. To illustrate, having 1,000,000 users may look good on the surface. However, if the each user created one page on the social networks that has no cross-visiting, it can imply that the users are not interested in the site’s content and would not be interested future use of the social networks, not to say to connect the old users back to the social networks.. This would prevent a product from reaching the critical mass. In order to prevent this problem, the product should have a clear sense of what scales the networks rely on and promote accordingly such that they can gather the critical mass. For example, a product can have a target networks of online friends who share common interests. Once it is carefully figured out what the network the product is really built on, one should consider the minimal level of product adoption within the network. This means the smallest number of users needed to make the product useful. For example, a video-chat platform would require at least two user to make it useful at a local level. Once the product realizes how to aggregate various small groups into a large group, they would be able to define the networks scale such as having 1,000,000 users composed of 100 people in 10,000 different groups. The aggregation of small groups would ensure there are enough content on the platform to engage different users and each group would see the benefit to use the product even without the presence of the larger group.
It is very interesting to see how we can view the gathering of critical mass is not a single process, but a multi-phase process. Reflecting on the idea that depending on the purpose of the tool and the minimum social group required, different products may have different size of critical mass, I would want to suggest that social networks products should not use marketing techniques that may target individuals within certain group. To acquire the critical mass that can be built from the minimum social group, bulk marketing strategies that can be applied to a whole group should be used. For example, when developing a homework discussion app for Cornell students, one should not just pinned a flyer on the bulletin board. Rather, the marketing team can try leaving flyers in conference room, discussions or places that involve target users who would be exposed to the product as a group. By introducing the product to the users as a group, it can perhaps more likely help construct the minimum social group, which could then later on be aggregated into the larger critical mass.
Social network marketing: Getting from zero to critical mass