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.