I had been listening recently to an album for about a week or so that I thought my brother and sister-in-law would like. I had the album in MP3 format but I thought that if I sent it to them digitally, they might listen to it in a few weeks or months, with some prompting from me – they are busy people. So instead, I bought them a copy of the album and sent it to them and of course my brother put it in his car straight away, they both listened to it on their way out one weekend, called me there and then and said how great it was. Result!

Now there are a couple of interesting lessons here:

1. In this day and age where start-ups are encouraged (and rightly so) to make it easy for their users to spread the word, it is ironic that the people they are spreading the word to are most likely to pay attention when it is not so easy to spread the word. Basically, our knowledge of how easy an unsolicited recommendation was for the recommender, devalues the recommendation.
2. The ease with which a recommendation can be consumed is perhaps just as important, if not more so, as the ease/difficulty with which the recommendation is made. My brother didn’t have to download 12 MP3s to iTunes and sync to his iPod in order to consume the album I sent him, he just had to insert a CD into his car stereo.

Could there be a Facebook application idea or recommendations model lurking in these lessons I wonder. OK, so recommendations don’t have to cost money or be as hard as what I did in the above example, but what if an application existed (on Facebook perhaps) that issued a virtual currency of some sort. Users could be given a starting amount of the currency when they join. The currency would need to have some value e.g. for consuming premium content. In order to earn more of the currency, users would need to make recommendations . Doing this would cost them an amount of the currency but if the recipient consumed the recommendation , the recommender would earn their  virtual money back. If the recipient approved of the recommendation, the recommender would  have their ‘money’ doubled or something.