• Are we all connected or are we all independant entities living our own lives withour being linked to each other?
• How does information travel from one person to another?
• Is word-of-mouth as important as ever or is it even more important in this day and age?

These are very interesting questions when it comes to marketing and communication and especially word-of-mouth. According to the six degrees of separation theory, everybody is at most six steps away from any other person on the whole world. This is a fascinating concept: it means that a random chinese farmer is only six connections away from Barack Obama for example.

This level of connectivity gets even more important with the Internet. I don’t think that word-of-mouth has become more important because it’s always been important but with the Internet, information can travel much faster and a lot more people get in touch with that information. The interconnectedness between humans is more important than ever with social networks like Facebook, blogs, etc. We can get in touch with many more people than ever before in a short period of time. Without the Internet, this just wouldn’t be possible.

There have been a lot of interesting experiments about how we’re connected and the trail between people: just type the names Stanley Milgrim, John Guare or actor Kevin Bacon in combination with the phrase “six degrees of separation” into Google. The biggest group on Facebook is also called six degrees of separation and calculates the number of people between person A and person B.