In the 1970s a Detroit car salesman named Joe Girard had a rule. Every person you meet knows roughly 250 other people they would invite to a wedding or a funeral. Treat one customer badly and you have not lost one sale. You have lost 250.
Today the average person has 400 to 800 Instagram followers. A casual TikTok user reaches 5,000 strangers.
That 250 has became 2,500 today. For anyone who actually posts, it's closer to 25,000.
Multiply that by the country.
If 10 million Americans each have a real reach of 2,500 people, that's 25 billion exposures before counting overlap. Even after stripping shared connections, a coordinated message reaches hundreds of millions of people in 72 hours.
This is just math. The same math social media companies use to value themselves.
People underestimate the power of coordination today.
Each person is a node. Each connection is an edge. The information doesn't travel through random people. It travels through clusters. Your friends know each other. Your community knows each other. Religious communities, immigrant diasporas, fan bases, industries, political tribes, they are all densely linked internally.
A clustered network passes information at the speed of light inside the cluster. It doesn't need to convince the rest of the country. It needs 5% of the country, sitting inside a particular brand's customer base, sustained for 6 months.
That's all it needs.
In April 2023, the conservative network coordinated against Bud Light.
$25 billion in market cap evaporated.
Bud Light loses its 20-year run as America's best-selling beer. Marketing executives are fired.
In October 2023, the pro-Palestine boycott of Starbucks dropped share price by 17% in 48 hours.
McDonald's followed the same pattern with a 6-month lag. Disney walked back its political marketing. Every consumer brand watched these companies bleed and learned the lesson.
The lost dollar originating from a boycott, shows up in same-store sales.
Two negative quarters and analysts downgrade the stock. Lenders demand higher interest to keep funding the business.
Cost of capital rises across the balance sheet. Marketing gets cut. Suppliers get squeezed. The reputation premium that made the stock worth 20 times earnings instead of 14 quietly evaporates.
Each step reinforces the next.
A corporation is not a moral actor. It is a profit-maximizing entity owned by passive index funds that only care about returns.
When a clustered community starts costing it money, the board does not debate whether the community is right.
The board calls the CEO and tells him to make the problem go away before the next earnings print.
The CEO fires the marketing chief. The marketing chief disowns the campaign. The product gets pulled. The company donates to the opposite cause.
Whatever it takes to break the cycle.
The whole loop runs in 30 days once damage crosses 10% of market cap.
The corporation has shareholders. Shareholders only care about returns. When the boycott damage shows up on the income statement, the company surrenders. That's how this always plays out.
If you think your individual choice doesn't matter, you are doing the math wrong.
You are a node. Your reach is 2,500 people. Your community is clustered around you. The coordination problem economists used to write papers about has been solved by the phone in your hand.
The corporation does not care about your opinion. It cares about your money.
Take it away and they will speak any language you want to hear.
@ibrahimamaiga@marcus_herve c’est bien normal qu’il agit ainsi car ils avaient où il avait (Diomaye) signé un deal avec les colons. bien sûr Diomaye etait optimiste mais ceux qui l’ont emmené au pouvoir savent ce qu’ils font. il était pas parti en France par hasard. il est obligé de trahir son frère.