Informational – sometimes called “social recommendation”, this can be in the form of simply taking advice from another person. The more you trust this person’s knowledge in that particular area, the more influential this factor becomes.

Financial/mechanical – this refers to more functional or practical reasons for adopting an innovation and is related to Metcalfe’s law where “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system”. For example, ten years ago businesses did not necessarily require emails to operate, but as more began using email systems, it put greater pressure on those not yet decided. Organizations that don’t have email systems in place would find it difficult to communicate with many of their stakeholders.