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Quick Summary: Duncan Watts debunks The Influentials and The Tipping Point, but word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing practitioners will do well to continue to focus on the tipping point potential of influentials.

Here’s a potential game changer for word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing.

Word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing is based on the premise, best captured in bestsellers like The Influentials and The Tipping Point, that a small cadre of well-connected people can trigger, or tip, trends. Reach the influentials and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.

Now, based on his new research, network theory scientist Duncan Watts, who is working at Yahoo! on sabbatical from Columbia University, says that this simple premise is wrong. While I’m still trying to fully understand what Watts own premise is, here is my three sentence summary of what he seems to be saying –

- Even supper-connected influentials don’t have the power to start a trend, unless the social context is anyways susceptible to the trend.

- The key, therefore, lies not in identifying influentials who will tip a trend, but in identifying trends that are ready to be tipped.

- It’s virtually impossible to artificially/ virally start off trends because the network effects in society are too complex and random.

Based on his research, Watts has developed a social marketing approach called Big Seed Marketing, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign. The idea is that you build a word-of-mouth into the ad campaign, but aim the ad at as broad a market as possible and not waste money chasing influentials.

The buzz around Duncan Watts is amazing after Clive Thompson profiled him in Fast Company. While I’ll spend most of the evening reading the 200 odd posts linking to the Fast Company article, and updating this post, here are my three top of the mind thoughts on the article –

- Both Malcolm Gladwell and Duncan Watts agree that in order to spread, an idea needs to be sticky and appear in a conducive social context. In my understanding, the only disagreement is on the role influentials play in spreading the idea.

- Everybody agrees that ideas spread faster when they tap into the power of word-of-mouth. In my understanding, the only disagreement again is on the dominant role of influentials in driving word-of-mouth.

- Everybody, even Duncan Watts, agrees that influentials spread ideas faster than others. In my understanding, the only disagreement is on the cost effectiveness of targeting influentials.

So, unless I’m way off the mark here, and correct me if I am, the Gladwell vs Watts debate is basically about whether you should spend your marketing dollars targeting your ads at a lower number of influentials or reaching a broader market. This is a debate about cost trade-offs, not the fundamental nature of social networks.

Given that the objective of most marketers is to spread a given idea in the most cost-efficient manner (and it is), given that improvements in technology will make it more cost-efficient to identify and target influentials (and it will), and given that influentials themselves will become more connected via social media tools (and they will), word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing practitioners will do well to continue to focus on the tipping point potential of influentials.

Here are some other interesting perspectives on the issue — Mike Masnick, Scott Karp, Mathew Ingram, Gavin Heaton, Karl Long, David Armano, Guy Kawasaki, David Reich, Noah Brier and Valeria Maltoni.

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