A few posts ago, I asked you to think about how much you would have been willing to pay for the very first fax machine had you been given the option to buy it. I argued that, absent any foreknowledge about how popular fax machines were going to become, you would have very little interest in acquiring a complicated but useless contraption – useless, because you couldn’t send faxes to anyone and no one could send them to you.

But what if you did have a suspicion that fax machines were going to become hugely popular, and that they would become indispensible tools for doing business through the early 2000s (when they started to be displaced by the wide availability of scanners, printers, and internet access)? Quite naturally, you would then be more interested in owning one.

This introduces an important wrinkle to the definition of network effects that I gave earlier. In networks with positive network effects, potential users’ interest in joining the network increases not with the size of the network, but rather with their perception of the size of the network and their expectations about its size in the future.

How can operators influence the perception of the size of their network? Well for one thing, they can share their customer adoption numbers, assuming they are good. Safaricom made regular announcements in the two years after M-PESA’s launch, and these updates were widely reported in the Kenyan press. Another tactic is to encourage, or even require, agents to advertise for the network they represent. Mobile network operators do an amazing job in many emerging markets achieving near-ubiquity for their brands-doing so for their mobile money offerings suggests to potential users that the service is widely used.

How can operators influence expectations about the future size of their network? (This will be particularly relevant when the actual, to-date uptake figures are not as large as hoped.) One technique is to make large investments to signal commitment. In the United States, each year advertisers spend millions of dollars to buy 30-second spots on the broadcast of the Superbowl, the most-watched sporting event in the country. What’s interesting is that in addition to the Coca-Colas of the world, which you would expect to have the massive marketing budgets to support such advertising, you’ll often see ads placed by small internet start-ups. Why? Well, many of those start-ups are platform-mediated networks, the value of which is a function of the size of their user bases-or, more specifically, expectations about the future size of their user bases. By spending big for a high-profile ad, those start-ups signal their commitment to do whatever it takes to develop the market.

The takeaways for operators are simple: to exploit network effects to your advantage, use your marketing and communication messages to suggest that the number of users in your network is large and signal that you are committed to developing the market for mobile money.