Word of Mouth

In learning about networks and the small world phenomenon and observing the in-class activity with the passing of the ball from one student to another, it is clear that we can only find the shortest distance in a network if we know enough about the network and what it is composed of.

Information like this can spread very rapidly (as noted with the calls people received about the Conficker worm), and there is an interesting article discussing "word of mouth" advertising and its relation to a students' choice of college:

http://www.acu.ac.uk/prnetwork/pdfs/word_of_mouth.pdf

It makes you wonder why you chose what school to attend and what you heard and how you heard it. The article discusses using social networks and harnessing the power of the internet to advertise schools and increase enrollment.

The power of word of mouth is amazing as we see on a regular basis. But it brings to question what part of ideas like the 6 degrees of separation are true for all networks or only for those that have some sort of physical connection. We see for the most part that the six degrees of separation is applicable to the class, a group of people who would be easily susceptible to word of mouth styled marketing, but as reported in other blog posts the Millgram experiments only got about 30% of the envelopes to their destination while traveling through a network of people who were not necessarily exposed and interested in the same information.

"We’ve even started to harness the power of word of mouth marketing to attract more Aboriginal students to study at the University, asking our enrolled students to return to their communities to talk about their experiences."
This made me think of how important it is for the right person to be the spreader of the news, NU is also doing something similar where minority students go back to their high school and try to get people to apply. I would have loved to have something like this when i was in high school as a minority with low means to see that someone very much like me was able to attend northwestern/how awesome it was rather than just hearing it from counselors or magazines.
Hopefully we'll see in the future if this actually works, I think it will.

I agree with this. I know that personally, I was more likely to look into a college if someone of significance to me has mentioned that particular college. There are many colleges that I haven't heard of because I either didn't read about it somewhere or it wasn't recommended to me by anyone. This must also correlate to the number of applications that a college receives. For example, if a college is big in enrollment, that college is more likely to be talked about in the news and by others. A larger college means more alumni who will talk about their college to others and thus this social network is larger than that of smaller colleges. Although the size of a college does not depend solely on its current enrollment, it does have some effect on the number of students who do apply. I would like to know how much of an influence social networks have on the size or prominence a college has. Smaller colleges have fewer alumni and thus a smaller social network, but this doesn't prevent these smaller colleges from being well known.

What I find very surprising is how many people haven't heard about Northwestern outside mainly the midwest and to some top tier high schools around the US. I've talked to many people outside the MidWest that ask where I go to school and say "Oh where is that?" or "Is that some kind of state school on the west coast?". Being from Chicago, what I find even more surprising is how many people in the city don't know where Northwestern is or even heard about it. The same holds true for University of Chicago. When asked what school you attend, answering University of Chicago will get a response similar to "Oh you go to UIC", which is University of Illinois @ Chicago, and trust me, UChicago students don't like being mixed up with UIC students.

So even if larger, more prominent schools may have larger social networks, they may only communicate within their close group of friends or colleagues and not much may be known about these schools outside of those that actually care about or are interested in what school you attend. Many more people know of Stanford than Cal-Tech outside the west coast, yet both schools are very high caliber and well known by employers, etc.