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Do "influentials" drive The Tipping Point?
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
Here is the full article. Here is the home page of Duncan Watts. Thanks to John DePalma for the pointer.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 1, 2008 at 08:02 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
...Jesus would agree with Mr. Watts.
Posted by: shawn at Feb 1, 2008 8:24:37 AM
It is somewhat hard to believe that this is true, but the ramifications on so called "guerrilla marketing" would be huge.
Posted by: Steve J at Feb 1, 2008 9:53:04 AM
Watts, I believe, has two significant flaws in his analysis and conclusion:
1) It is the savant, not the connector who starts the trend; it is the connector who initially propogates the concept.
2) Trends must be sufficiently "contagious", the ideas sufficently "sticky" for the end-users, those whom the connector contacts, to act on the trend and begin the true viral spread. There is no way to create a computer simulation that adequately measures this "contagious factor" regardless of the sensitivity analysis that is applied; there is no way to model what it is that made Madonna contagious and Cindy Lauper a flash in the pan.
Posted by: bingo at Feb 1, 2008 9:54:17 AM
This actually fits with what a friend of mine, who used
to work in advertising, claims is a strongly-held
belief in advertising--"Great advertising kills bad
product." It does so because it induces product trials,
and trying a bad product leads you to say, "Never again",
and to tell all your friends.
It seems to me that the key here is that the "trend"--
the innovation, the new idea--must prove to be valuable
to the people who learn of it. If it is, they both
adopt and recommend. But it's the value of the innovation,
much more than the identity of the source of it, that
truly matters.
Or, in other words, consumer sovereignty once again.
Posted by: Donald A. Coffin at Feb 1, 2008 11:16:38 AM
Watts is doing some really cool work. I would say that "influentials" do matter, but that we just can't predict ex ante (yet) what events or person will set off a tipping point
Posted by: enrique at Feb 1, 2008 11:21:29 AM
Surely people with large audiences -- say, Oprah, or somebody with a widely-read blog -- are much more influential in spreading rumors and memes than an average slob like me. Unless I hijack the comments thread. Two words: purple shoelaces. Pass it on.
Posted by: at Feb 1, 2008 11:42:45 AM
A really funny social satire by sci-fi writer Connie Willis digs into the science of trend-spotting, chaos theory, and other issues. It's titled "Bellwether," after the sheep that leads the herd http://www.amazon.com/Bellwether-Connie-Willis/dp/0553562967
While light reading, think it has some important points about where trends are likely to come from.
Posted by: Francesca at Feb 1, 2008 11:46:35 AM
Cynical reactions:
1) Whoa whoa whoa, you mean some feel-good pop theory written up in a Malcom_Gladwell book *isn't* true?
Say it ain't so!
2) Isn't "someone who starts a trend" *by definition* an "Influential"? Sounds like we're counting
pinhead angels.
"I think you know, stuff gets really big when an influential person starts doing it."
"Nuh uh! I think a person starts doing it, then becomes influential, and then spreads it ... whatever
the hell we were talking about."
Posted by: Person at Feb 1, 2008 12:20:15 PM
I don't buy this as a problem amenable to simulation. There's so much we clearly don't understand about how trends catch fire -- and there's so many assumptions you have to put into a computer model -- if we understood the problem well enough to make good assumptions, we wouldn't need the model! Here, it seems like the risk of assuming the conclusion is too high.
Much as my pure-mathematician heart hates to say it, this is a problem that wants empirical study, which it sounds like the old-school people have; Watts, less so. (The six-degrees update, while cool, and important from a sample size perspective, doesn't convince me; how information spreads is, while prerequisite, not the same as how ideas get adopted. Being connected is not the same as being persuasive.)
(BTW, do you guys realize how wildly annoying your captcha system is? Sometimes it challenges me two, three times on the same comment. Why not akismet? Works for us.)
Posted by: Andromeda at Feb 1, 2008 7:05:30 PM
I was also going to recommend Bellwether, but Francesca beat me to it. A main part of the plot is that the central characters work for a company trying to determine where fads came from, partly so that they could make a buck from being in front. And, well, the plot of the book makes just as much sense of it as all the other stuff we've heard, at least Bellwether is funny.
Posted by: Peter at Feb 3, 2008 11:14:22 PM
The oligopoly of the search engine:
The search engine market is beginning to look more and more like the airline industry or the auto industry. In this case, the big 2. Google and Yahoo soon to be Microsoft will be taking on the leadership and virtually controlling the search engine world now with the muscle of there new parent.
What frightens me most is they will be controlling our searching capabilities and may be unduly influencing what it means to search. This industry is shrinking and consolidating and at some point does this eliminate competition? Will the government view this as anti-competivive as if this restricts competition more than Whole Foods purchasing Wild Oats does. Does this adversely affect the consumer and give too much pricing power?
I will argue this merger will go through easily, because unlike Microsofts problems in the past, the search engine world is an oligopoly and never will be a monopoly, not-atleast until google pays $100 billion to dominate the space.
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Posted by: baom at Feb 8, 2008 11:42:56 PM
Posted by: 深圳翻译公司 at Feb 23, 2008 9:10:02 AM
by the time it gets to oprah, it is already hit a different curve. what got it to oprah is the question.
Posted by: ventureblogalist at Mar 2, 2008 4:18:35 PM
