Damien Mulley recounts a real life and personal example of sales by herd instinct that I was also involved in. 

Via Walter Higgin’s Twitter is the story of how Gordon Murray from eWrite brought along his Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to Open Coffee Cork. A quick showing around and with a pricetag of €100 ex VAT and Walter decided to buy two, Rory bought one and Diarmuid bought four apparently. Walter’s Twitter evangelising of it then got Conor, myself, Niall and Elly to buy one. So 24 hours later and 11 have been purchased, all as a result of one person at an event yesterday.

Damien's comments on this social phenomenon are well worth catching here "if a company can figure out how to make your friend a salesperson then their sales rates would go through the roof."   I especially enjoyed observing and participating in this buying experience with the guys because I originally set up RelevantM to create tools that will increase the opportunity for users of social tools to enjoy similar experiences more often.  My take on the sales buzz that can spread through group within trusted networks is that there is significant added value to be had from risk you take from running with the herd. And, significant pleasurable from engaging in a shared experience. And, at the end of the day, that's what's its all about ;-)  I've been banging on about this for a couple of years now. Take a trip to the cinema for a group of college students for example.   Conventional wisdom says that we as rational human beings consider which movies we would enjoy and then proceed to the cinema on that basis. The truth is that for most people, going to the cinema is as much about the social experience as it is about the movie itself. If the movie is tolerable and the social experience promises to be good then we are in or at least quite keen to avoid being the one that's left out.  We love shared social experiences. Good or bad we want to be able to share and reshare that experience.  That's the added value, that's what easily makes up for any amount of middle of the road predictable cinematic fodder.  The same goes for social experiences around sports, nightclubs, restaurants etc and many other industries. And as we have seen, can even be extended quite easily into the purchasing of gadgets. If you want to put your sales through the roof then the way to do it is through tapping into that desire for shared social experiences.