In my younger days, whenever I met an American and started chatting, somewhere along the line I would get asked where I was from.
Quite often, when I answered that I was from Liverpool, the next question would be: do you know The Beatles? Now I didn't know any of The Beatles, but The Searchers, who were also a very famous pop group at the time, actually came not only from my home town, but from the same area as me, and so too did the singer Billy J Kramer (William Howard Ashton).
I remember going with a friend to Mike Pender's house after he became famous to get his autograph and we also went to Billy J's house to get his autograph too.
Although I did not know any of The Beatles personally, it turned out that, as Mike Pender and Billy J Kramer both did, I actually knew someone who knew them.
I'm not saying that I was a friend of either person, but if I had wanted to get a personal message to The Beatles, I at least knew of a route that I might take.
Anyone who knew me, therefore, might also have a way of reaching The Beatles.
They would be separated by only three 'hops', and any friend of a friend would be separated by only four hops and so on.
So here is a question for you: do you know The Queen of England? I imagine that you probably don't.
But it might surprise you to learn that you are likely to be separated by only about six hops according to a famous experiment.
Stanley Milgram conducted his Small World Experiment in the 1960s.
He concluded that, on average, people are socially separated by just six hops (5.
5 actually) hence the phrase that subsequently emerged and is often used to describe the phenomenon, 'six degrees of separation'.
So I don't know whether or not The Queen has a Facebook account, but if so, you could be just 6 hops away from the guest list for her annual summer garden party;).
In the context of reaching a tipping point within a viral marketing context, the above should help you understand how it is possible for the world to be reached with a well-constructed viral message.
Naturally, messages that are viral in nature are not always faithfully reproduced and distributed to everyone known by every recipient, but a world epidemic could certainly be started in just six hops.
So, if you run your own website or blog, have you got a Tell a Friend link installed? If not, you could be missing out on a lot of social traffic that is completely independent of our good friend Google.
Does that make you think?