This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

What Will I Tell the Others? That’s the second question. The first question is, “Why will I tell the others?” How will the network you’re building benefit me? Will it increase my status, enhance my social affiliation, or decrease my fear? The network effect powers us through this. It gives us a reason. And then the second question: Have we made it easy for you to tell the others? Plenty of project creators would like their project to scale. They see an advantage in the efficiencies and leverage that comes from more people being connected. Uber, for example, needs scale with respect to riders in order to recruit drivers (and vice versa). Without scale it fails. This is not the network effect. The network effect is empathic—it asks, “Why would someone invite a friend into this network?” They’re not going to do it because it makes your project work better. The fax machine created a network effect. You can’t send a fax to yourself (you’d get a busy signal). Instead, your fax machine works better if you have colleagues you can fax. So you recruit them. The network effect offers the person spreading the idea a benefit—social standing, perhaps, but often something more practical. If Sue gets Bob in sync with her tools or her ideas, her day gets better. It not only gives them a reason to spread the idea, but gives them something to say when they do so. When we offer utility, status, or affiliation to our users, they’re more likely to use the systems leverage they have to find us m...