In Consumer.ology I talk about how other people influence our own consumer behaviour.  From our unconscious desire to copy what we see other individuals doing, to fads that sweeps through lots of the people around us, we are social creatures who have evolved to follow other people.

Whilst we might all like the idea that we’re free spirits, charting our own path through the world, the reality is that we’ve evolved to play it safe; and that means doing the thing that is demonstrably ‘OK’ because everyone else is doing it.

Recently a study examined how social networking sites can drive the uptake of new items and, specifically, looked at what made the difference between something gaining widespread social acceptance and not getting that traction.

By analysing the installation of 100 million apps through Facebook (all with anonymous data in case you were starting to feel nervous) they were able to track the rate at which more than two and a half thousand apps were installed by approximately 50 million Facebook users.

In addition to seeing which apps their friends had installed (a feature that was present when the data was obtained in 2007), people could also see a list of the most popular apps.

The data showed that it was only once an app had achieved an installation rate of around 55 people per day that it took off and became popular.

I suspect that, in the process of unconsciously screening the world around us, our brains keep some kind of mental count. At some, presumably context dependent threshold, the next encounter is accompanied by a mechanism that causes us to engage with whatever that element is.

It has been known for some time that our senses process a vastly greater amount of environmental data each second than we’re capable of processing in awareness. This study suggests one of the mechanisms that might cause that all important shift from ‘screening out’ to ‘screening in’.

Unfortunately the research was unable to identify predictively which applications would be successful. As those of you who have read Consumer.ology will know, that’s not a surprise: there really isn’t a shortcut to live testing new products.

Source: J.-P. Onnela, F. Reed-Tsochas. Spontaneous emergence of social influence in online systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010

Image courtesy: Eduardo Amorim