Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller, "The Tipping Point," tells stories of how trends get started, often by a small group of highly-influential people he calls connectors.

Interpreting past trends, however, can be a little like Whig history. It is too tempting to look for the people who were involved in the early days of a trend and give them special status as trend setters. Much of marketing focuses on identifying potentially influential people and attempting to have them wear your shoes, listen to your music, or drink your vodka. In reality, it doesn't take influential people to start trends.

NPR's On the Media recently featured an interview of journalist Clive Thompson, author of "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" published in the February 2008 issue of Fast Company magazine. Thompson describes that the science behind some of the early studies of networking is somewhat shaky and doesn't hold up to current research.

For example, in the famous Stanley Milgram small world experiment conducted in the late 1960s, letters were sent to individuals in the Midwest directing them to forward similar letters through friends so that they end being delivered to a stockbroker in Boston. Milgram discovered that the average path length for social networks in the United States was about 6 individuals (to which the phrase six degrees of separation is attributed). Milgram also discovered that most of the letters that got to the stockbroker were sent via only 3 friends. These people are what is what Gladwell calls connectors -- individuals with very large social networks. Marketers believe that influencing this small group of people can lead to successful trends.

Duncan Watts, a network scientist at Columbia University currently on leave with Yahoo! recreated this experiment, only with email and not paper mail, and extended it to thousands of individuals around the world. While he was able to replicate the six-degree path length, he could not replicate Milgram's notion of connectors. Only 5% of the email messages were sent through these kind of individuals.

The notion that only a small number of highly-influential individuals can start trends is being revised by the notion that we are all capable of starting trends. What matters most is whether society is ready for a trend, and less on the persuasive ability of influential individuals.

If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can.

Using a metaphor to illustrate his point, Watts describes that when conditions are right (hot, dry, and windy) almost any lit match, spark, or lightning bolt can start a forest fire. It makes little sense investigating the properties of the first spark.

As a result, the traditional approach of mass advertising may be just as effective as selective (or viral) advertising when the conditions of the market are right.

Forest fires start and stop all the time. There are thousands of forest fires every year. Only a few of them become the monster forest fires we see on TV consuming homes and acreage in vast quantities. How are these few mega-fires different from the thousands of small ones? Is it because they started from a really "special" tree? (An influential tree perhaps??)

No. The mega-fires started in a place and at a time where fuel, weather and other conditions were precisely right, and continued to be precisely right to grow into a TV-worthy blaze.

What does that have to do with viral marketing? Well, do you think the Coke-Mentos phenomenon was planned by an agency? Do you think the Blend-Tec videos were planned by an agency? NO, they just happened to appear in the right place at the right time with the right content. And they took off.

Viral marketing is like a baseball team trying to win all their games with home runs.

TO'B

Figure 1: Credit - Exp. Flickr

For more than fifty years, advertising and marketing experts have conceptualized trend setting with the “Influentials” frame, based on the research of Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, and colleagues. Proponents claim that highly connected individuals facilitate a “two-step information flow” (see left) between message-generators and the general public. Further propagating this thesis, Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book “The Tipping Point” claimed that “some of us count more than others” in developing trends. This conceptualization is part of the foundation for the concept of “viral marketing” in which advertisers target the most effective “carriers” for their viral message. In many ways, Progressive advocates have cast themselves in the role of “Influentials” in propagating a national “trend” that results the recognition of human rights and true opportunity for all.

Recent research by Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds refutes the idea of “Influentials” and claims that trends are started much more randomly, much like wildfires (see left). Watts and Dodds argue that we do not discuss the quality of a match in starting a fire but whether or not the conditions are right to make a fire spread quickly and broadly. Certainly Nativists and others are capitalizing on national conditions (i.e. fear over terrorism/crime and economic decline) that permit their messages to be disseminated effectively. In order to create a reverse “progressive” trend, it seems to me that we need to engage fully with new forms of collaboration. Watts calls his approach the Big Seed, which is basically mass marketing with a word of mouth component. I wonder if it's about creating the right sort of platform where the conditions are created for a human rights wildfire.

In "Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?" Watts discusses his recent study at Columbia, which owes much to the theory of (you guessed it) cumulative advantage, or the "rich get richer" effect. In this model, there are at first two nearly identical goods, with one being favored slightly more than the other by actors in the marketplace. Like the butterfly that flaps its wings on one side of the globe, this slight variation can have overwhelming "box office smash" effects, unforeseen by investors and producers everywhere, like the volcano erupting in the other hemisphere.

To test it, Watts & Co. created an artificial market that consumers could visit online, where they rated and downloaded songs by unknown bands. Some bands were part of isolated "social influence worlds" where you could see only the number of downloads of the one band, while others could be measured against each other. Because there was such a divergence between the most popular songs (downloads could be measured against those of other bands), and those that were slightly less popular (isolated "social influence" control groups), cumulative advantage supposedly reigns.

Sounds like basic Keynesian economics to me. Okay kids, whip out your trusty copy of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and open to Chapter 12, which concerns the unpredictability of prices in equity markets:

... professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole ... We have a reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees. (156)

As Keynes would have it, the stock market is a constant guessing game of who thinks who thinks who thinks who will make a move and prompt change in price (and in what magnitude). It's not about the beauty contest; it's about who has the best handle on the public perception of beauty. How ironic that the evaluation of beauty is often what's at the center of our pop culture consumption habits.

Keynes' observations are great for explaining the complexity of stock markets, and via the beauty contest analogy, so too for explaining what has always been perplexing about cultural markets. But as Watts and the others show, it doesn't solve the original problem: how do we predict the cultural icons of the future? Watts makes the false assumption that all actors in the market for a particular band are homogenous, looking for the same product, and moreover, that the band in question offers the same homogenous & culturally symbolic good for all actors:

... if people do not make decisions independently - if even in part they like things because other people like them - then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes. 

There's more to be done in this study, and it's currently being done. Check out the work of Wilfred Dolfsma. In his not-quite-smash-hit Institutional Economics and the Framework of Preferences: The Advent of Pop Music, Dolfsma explicates the unpredictability of cultural markets, and attributes their follies to an ignorance on the part of economists of socio-cultural values, based on differing views on justice, beauty, love, freedom of will, rightful ways of government and governance, social standing and behavior, and personal identity (48). Here not all consumers are out to express the same thing. Some want to experience unity with the larger group while others want to demonstrate autonomy from it, or from an older order (maybe their parents).

Dolfsma creates a social value "nexus" which inserts an institutional setting between the forces of socio-cultural values and other mechanistic, price-determining values. In all cases, the consumer expresses identity through consumption patterns, institutions always moderate the two notions of value, but energy moves freely between them and in more than one direction.

Dolfsma's work draws on other institutional economists as well as sociologists like Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons. Instead of ruling out the possibility of predicting future shocks to cultural markets altogether, as Watts does, maybe we're experiencing a transition, a movement towards a new interdisciplinary study with more to say. And dare I say it, one that doesn't rely so much on the quantifiable.

1. Kelly Mooney from RI gave a great talk about the Open Imperative – the thought and philosophy behind her (and Nita Rollins) recent book The Open Brand. Best quote from Kelly – "the internet is your Chief Opening Officer".
2. Graphic facilitation from Jim Oswald – just plain cool – and a nice, really smart guy. He "graphed" the entire conference on 4 x 8 sheets of paper – the image above is one of hundreds he created during the two days of meetings. Nice to see something not on a screen for once.
3. Doc Searls – sure, he's one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto – the book directly responsible for me having the idea for MotiveQuest – and a true visionary – but did you know he has at least 7 electronic devices running at all times? I was sitting behind him watching and that guy can multitask! Great presentation (we tipped sacred cows in Ohio) and I especially appreciated the part about project VRM – which will change how we consumer stuff – and move us from a marketing based economy to a relationship/intention based economy. Thanks to his simple visual – the Relbutton – I finally understand the concept behind Project VRM!
4. Joel Levinson: Joel has travelled the world and apparently supported himself solely with his internet endeavors and his talent for writing jingles. I am a sucker for stories about people with the energy, wit and guts to just go for it and make a living in a completely unconventional way. Joel is certainly living the life. His next gig? Taking a blind date on a week's cruise to Alaska that he won in an online jingle writing contest for Nature's Valley .
5. Duncan Watts: Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research and distinguished academic, author and thinker in the field network theory and social media. It was delightful to hear him skewer both the "influentials" and " viral" approaches to marketing in one talk. Best quote "Do you think the really, really big forest fires are started by a particularly influential tree?"
   
6. Joe Jaffe
   (OK, you're right, he did just get a Top 5 citation at WOMMA-U – but it was interesting to see the different reactions of the two audiences.) At WOMMA-U he was preaching to a room full of of social media firebrands – and it goes down well. At this conference, well there were a few more blue chip marketers from RI's impressive roster of clients – and I sensed a different energy. What Jaffe has to say is definitely more challenging to someone holding a billion dollar advertising budget in their hands.

Thanks to Kelly Mooney, Nancy Kramer and the entire HARD WORKING Resource Interactive team for putting on a first class event. (I never snacked so well . . .)

TO'B

In Sunday's NYT Business Section there is an article that highlights the delicate dance between inventor and investor. Doug Hall, CEO of Eureka Ranch Technology, is developing a database, to be launched in 2009, that will help connect inventors with businesses looking for innovations.

You might also want to check out the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. Gladwell takes one of his trademark looks, this time into how conventional wisdom assumes ideas are generated. It's become fashionable in 2008 to bash Gladwell a bit; first there was the Fast Company story about Duncan Watts and his challenge to Gladwell's "Influentials." Then, Slate gave Gladwell a poke for some truthiness regarding tales of his time at the Washington Post. But when Gladwell is on his game, as he is with this piece, he really is a pleasure to read. He can make seemingly dry topics come to life and provide a human insight that is truly illuminating.

I haven't got a name for it. I'm hesitating between the diablo or the eggtimer.

This is not a model for everyone, it is a model for brands that have a point of view or something interesting to say. It is not completely finished, so I'd love any (constructive) input you may have. It may also be totally useless! Sorry for the ugliness, it is in these situation I wish I'd know how to use PhotoShop.

It is shaped by reach and engagement. The first phase is communication from the brand to the consumer, obviously reaching a lot of people. The second phase from consumers to consumers, but leveraged by you, reaching less people but continuously increasing their engagement with the campaign.

I like this model because:

a/ It forces you to have a strong idea at the heart, something interesting, something with legs. If you don't have a strong idea, you just can't fill the model in its entirity. Simple.

b/ Has the PR element built inside of it (the whole write me the press release thing)

c/ Doesn't rely on channels but use them to the best of their abilities

d/ Doesn't rely on one execution but leverage each channel's force

e/ Does not start by targetting a selected few influencers but is a model that finds the right influencers for your brand.

The examples mentioned below are just examples for the said step, not for the whole campaign. Only Nike Joga Bonito and Dove Campaign for real beauty came close to perfectly fitting it.

Step 1: Provoke.

Here the goal is to create an emotional connection by introducing your philosophy / point of view / what you stand for, to as much people as possible as quickly as possible. I'm starting to agree with good old Duncan. The hipsters and pseudo-influentials are totally ignored from that plan. The point is to create pull and to find the people who might be interested in your message rather than paying to get some to do the job for you. It's also kickstarting the whole project so it's the most important phase. If it's not done well, the whole thing collapses. The most easy way to achieve this is still through the use of a spot, which just doesn't have to be put only on TV. (The second model below).

Examples doing it well:

- Evolution and Onslaught for Dove's campaign for real beauty.

- Nike Joga Bonito, Eric Cantona's introduction.

Step 2: Inspire

This step is about getting people to believe your point of view / philosphy / issue is a valid one. It is mainly done through the use of a manifesto, basically describing what you mean by step 1 in more details. There is a risk of creating content for the sake of it here. Every piece of comm developed should always serve a purpose, in this case, reinforce the provocation / intrigue of step 1 and get people thinking about your issue or point more seriously. Joga TV is a good example of that.

It's also good to support this point with tactical PR. Again if you have a research that says that 78% of women feel pressurised by the media, then you've got a story supporting your ad in step 1 (Dove).

Insurance companies are also quite strong at that step, releasing statements that we have a lot more valuables than we think in our house... so we should get insured with them...

Step 3: Demonstrate.

I'm a fervent supporter of demonstration. As cynicism is on the increase (no pun intended), there is a big need to demonstrate whatever it is we are claiming in the real world. Even if most people won't see it, it's a way to get PR and word of mouth and essentially credibility, which is what really matters these days. These could be events, stunts, exhibitions...

Examples: Tournaments where you have to play beautiful for Nike Joga Bonito, RedBull flying races, Nike Runners lounge in Vancouver.

Here you can also use your products as a demonstration of what your philosophy is about. Example, the Nike shoes help you play beautiful, here's why... Or Nike+ helps you running. Method products really clean...

Step 4: Participate

This is where it gets interesting and where most brands fail. You've switched from push to pull to participate. This is not a monologue from you to them anymore, this is a dialogue.

After all the efforts above, you've actually converted some people. And they want in. So you need to give them a place for them to congregate, a hub to what you stand for where they can go to fulfill their desire to participate. And where you will give them the solutions and tools (utilities) to support your communication. You are building yourself a little army of fans and they don't want to be disappointed.

It will ony be a small number who will participate and take action, but they will be the one starting the new phase. You've given them the tools to get out there and start spreading the word.

Its Nike running community, Dove forums and workshops for mums to know how to talk to their daughters, Diesel Wall, or Lynx Get in there, whether you like it or not, or Levi's world in HK.

Step 5: Recruit

They see you as the champion of your cause and they want to help you spread the word. You need to give them the tools to do so. Get them involved in your product creation, find ways for them to participate in your comms or be a proud part of your activities. By participating to these activities, they will become evangelists. You can also have a bit of co-creation if your brand / product allows it. Rewards are good but beware of trying to get some unstructured UGC.

You are trying to recruit more passive people, not the creators, but the critics here.

Examples: My Starbucks idea, Diesel preachers, Lynx Get in There challenges, MyVegas...

Step 6: Advocacy

You might want to go back to broadcast media to show the results of your actions and how participation from the community has created something extraordinary. This is how you complete the model.

You could create a viral or even go back on TV if budget allows it. It's not about you anymore, it's about how you've empowered people to do something great or how the situation has changed thanks to your support.

The argument also has implications for the ongoing debates about the nature of the networked public sphere. Watt's results suggest that there may be some merit to the position of folks like U Chicago's Cass Sunstein, who claims that big media has historically promoted civic virtues by exposing us to ideas we wouldn't encounter by googling alone. If, as Watts says, people's interests are over-determined by knowledge of what is popular, then search algorithms predicated on popularity (like "PageRank") could produce a feedback mechanism that stifles diversity in public debate. To adopt Matthew Hindman's phrase, we'd be left with "googlearchy."

Yochai Benkler has disagreed with both of these views for a while [full disclosure: I currently work as a research assistant for Benkler], in part because they both idealize the state of public discourse prior to the creation of the Internet. Watt's data could just as easily be turned around to make the claim that traditional print media and television - much like the recording industry - were giving us a false impression of popularity (or importance) that only reflected the prejudices of a handful of editors and industry executives. By disseminating these perspectives widely, the big media therefore imposed an elitist politics and outlook on the public as a whole.

I'll have to do some more thinking and reading to figure out where I fall on this issue - but for the moment, studies like Watts' shed important light on the complex nature of social networks and reputation on the role of information in society.

En dicha teoría, el sociólogo Duncan Watts plantea que toda la gente del planeta está conectada a través de no más de seis personas y que el número de conocidos crece de forma exponencial con el número de enlaces en la cadena.

Steve publicó un reporte donde explica los motivos por los cuales comenzó este proyecto y algunas opiniones.

Estos son los posts anteriores relacionados al experimento y a la teoría de los seis grados:

• Experimento en Facebook - Teoría de los Seis Grados de Separación
• La Teoría de los Seis Grados

Ahora, Steve Jackson, un londinense registrado en Facebook, se ha propuesto realizar un experimento para ver si es posible contactar a todos los usuarios registrados en Facebook. Para esto, ha creado un grupo llamado "Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment". Las instrucciones son muy sencillas: lo único que se requiere hacer es unirse a dicho grupo y reenviar la invitación a todos los amigos.

Veamos que sucede en un par de meses.

Lo que sí es seguro, es que si Steve logra su objetivo, tendrá en su grupo a ¡toda la Base de Datos de usuarios de Facebook en su grupo! (o por lo menos una buena parte)

"Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money."

Duncan Watts doesn't believe in Malcom Gladwell's Tipping point theory that a few influencers 'create' or dictacte succesful trends.

He believes these super-connected people turn out to have little influence and trying to identify them and encourage them to start new trend is just a waste of money.

I would say fair enough, if only he was proposing an alternative model to launching new trends.

The article concludes:

"The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing."

I don't know. It just seems to be a lot of hot air to me.

Yes, having a few super-influencers to try your products and endorse them is not a guarantee for mass-market adaption. I was actually reading the book 'influencers' that claim the opposite. If you aim to introduce a product to the mainstream, you should stay away from innovators and super-trendy people because they put off the mainstream from adopting your product. Instead you should aim for the 'early adopters' who although less connected, still have a huge impact on their social circle.

But that raises a question which is, where do 'early adopters' look for inspiration, if not from these innovators in the first place?

I can't agree that targetting influencers is a waste of money but agree that relying only on it is like playing russian roulette. That's why we have marketing plan targetting different audiences with different messages on different channels. To maximise the chances of mass-market adoption.

So it's just a question of not putting all your eggs in the same basket I guess.

Duncan Watts takes on the concept of 'influencers' in this month's Fast Company. He's got some great observations.

The idea of 'influencers' - highly connected people who are the Typhoid Marys of cultural zeitgeists - has always seemed suspect to me. Sure, you can identify influencers in a post-hoc fashion. But that's a statement about a role they played. Marketers would like it to be a statement about the kind of person they are.

The whole Gladwellian scheme has achieved traction in the Marketing world because it fits in with the way marketers are trained. We segment people into groups (like mavens, influencers and connectors) and choose a target segment (as viral marketers seek out black-clad, irony-laden hipsters to carry their message). Like all marketing, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Here's what marketers don't like to hear: that success or failure has more to do with the message or product than with the targeted messengers.

If you study viral marketing you've heard of Blendtec - David Meerman Scott was touting them long before I'd heard of them. They get 3-4MM views on Youtube for many of their 'Will It Blend' videos. Why?

Typical Marketing response: Because they've identified the key influencers who can quickly make an idea spread until it reaches a tipping point

The Egghead response: Because they put a freakin' iPHONE in a freakin' BLENDER! Who doesn't want to see THAT?

Disclaimers: I have no interest in bashing Gladwell and find value in 'The Tipping Point'. I just think that compelling content or product wins over smart targeting every time. And I know full well that in using the dated word 'hipster' I identify myself as anything-but-hip.

I mentioned this discussion at brunch with a friend today, and she pulled out her copy of Fast Company, which this month has a contrarian view of the Influential theory. It explores Duncan Watts's theory that the average Joe is more likely to set off a trend than an Influential. Watts believes that for a trend to be a success, what matters more is whether society is susceptible to it.

I think this contradiction gets at the heart of the larger issue we'll be discussing: How do we incorporate Watts's and Gladwell's theories into our campaign strategy? What do we need to learn from our research to construct a successful campaign? Is it more effective to target the many or the few?

Ultimately, the article says, Watts says the best way to influence others is to pitch your idea as widely as possible, given that you don't know who is really going to start the trend. Thus, mass marketing still works.

The irony that I'm pondering this conundrum tonight is not lost on me, as I settle down to watch the premier mass marketing event of the year - the Super Bowl.

*Amazon buys Audible for $300M. Apple has the best mp3 player, Amazon has the best store for mp3 players. [digital music news]

*Indiana could soon have a digital download tax on music. [hypebot]

*Normatism: A new digital music venture from a founder of video site Vimeo. Looks, ahem, hip. [listening post]

*Rolling Stone collects video of musician-centric Super Bowl commercials. [getty images]

*Duncan Watts' anti-Tipping Point push (encapsulated here in a Fast Company article) is predicated partly on experiments using digital music markets.

*Hannah Montana has a 3-D movie?

*RealNetworks lays off 10 music employees.

There has been a lot of buzz today surrounding the release of Fastcompany's article on Duncan Watts and his new theory of how trends disseminate through society. It is being characterised as a sharp reaction to Gladwell's notion of the Tipping Point and Keller's 'Influentials' theory. Whereas those two argue that trends operate in society like infections that start with a few, key carriers able to influence people, Watts suggests that trends are far more random - that their success has more to do with the conditions of their spreading that who does the spreading itself. From the article:

"Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

It's brilliant, paradigm-shifting stuff and I love it for its refusal to deny the maddening, almost anarchic complexity of modern social systems. What Watts pays particular attention to is the lack of data on interactions between 'influentials' and the people they influence. When he asks how exactly do people influence others, people are left gasping for answers and I think that insistence on concrete evidence is great. But the difficulty I have with Watts is the relative fluidity of how he uses the term 'social conditions'. If Watts argues that social trends are generally quite random and respond to particular social contexts, we would do well to ask what historical, economic and social conditions produce those contexts?

It seems there is something to be said for positive feedback loops. Look at my favourite example of the iPod: how can we characterise its rise? If we take Watts to heart and diminish the idea of hipster influence, what then paved the way for the wildfire that was and is iPod-mania? Well, one factor would be the increasing cultural import placed on technology as a marker of success - the now well-known transition of tech from domain of the geek to domain of the cool kid - what I always call techno-fetishism (sorry, been reading Freud). Second was the broad proliferation of musical genres and tastes: the iPod's massive capacity meant all of those genres that were previously distinct were now aesthetically and literally all together at the same place. Tech had created new forms of music and tech was also the new home for them. But I think the thing we need to look out is what broader systems in society disseminated these ideas through society. What is key here is not the popularity of the iPod; rather, it is the propagation of the system of values that facilitated and led to the explosion of the iPod. Hipsters may have not controlled the iPod phenomenon - but they may have had a hand in popularizing the values that made the iPod seem so cool.

So even though Watts suggests trends are too complex to pin down to a few, influential people, I still think the tipping point model has value here, specifically in why people start to desire certain things. Often it is because they are trying to either become or emulate particular models of success or savviness - I desire an iPhone or a hot body because people who appear to 'have it all' have those things. And who dictates those ideals? Representations of 'ideal people' in the public sphere - celebrities, hipsters, tastemakers - basically, people with cultural capital to burn. No, they don't create 'trends' per se - what they do is encourage the value systems that allow for the dissemination of particular trends.

Le magasine Fast Company a publié un article très intéressant sur réel potentiel viral des influenceurs : Is the Tipping Point Toast?. A l’origine de cet article, les travaux de Duncan Watts, un chercheur spécialisé dans la théorie des réseaux qui travaille maintenant pour le Yahoo! Research.

Les résultats de ces travaux mènent ainsi la vie dure aux théories selon lesquelles la prolifération virale repose sur quelques influenceurs qui ont la faculté d’amorcer des tendances et d’initier des phénomènes de propagation au sein de populations beaucoup plus larges (ex. le livre The Tipping Point de Malcolm Gladwell).

Selon Duncan Watts, les phénomènes de propagation virale seraient le fruit du pur hasard et ne pourraient pas être amorcés à la demande. Illustration avec le schéma suivant :

Lien vers un schéma explicatif des deux théories : propagation virale et propagation anarchique

A gauche, le schéma de propagation virale par cercles concentriques : les influenceurs sont les premiers destinataires et assurent un rôle de relais. Tandis qu’à droite, la propagation est anarchique.

Pour illustrer ses propos, l’auteur utilise la métaphore du feu de forêt : c’est la combinaison de nombreux paramètres aléatoires (pluviométrie, type de bois et de sous-bois, temps de réaction des équipes de pompiers…) qui déterminent l’ampleur de la catastrophe. Comprenez par là que si les conditions sont réunies, une simple allumette suffit à provoquer un incendie gigantesque. Et inversement : s’il vient de pleuvoir, même une bombe incendiaire au phosphore ne pourra pas provoquer grand chose.

Pour celles et ceux qui travaillent dans le domaine du buzz marketing, ces travaux sont lourds de conséquences : ils remettent en question le marketing communautaire reposant sur les influenceurs. Pire : Duncan Watts précise que le meilleur moyen d’améliorer les chances d’une campagne virale est de multiplier le nombre de points d’amorçage. En d’autres termes : le marketing de masse viendrait au secours du marketing de niche. Gloups !

J’avoue nourrir des sentiments ambivalents vis à vis de cet article. En fait je ne sais pas trop où me situer… En tout cas je suis persuadé d’une chose : le temps est un facteur critique. Plus vous voulez aller vite et plus vous avez de chances d’échouer. A contrario : si vous avez le temps de bien observer le marché et d’attendre que les conditions soient réunies alors vous augmentez considérablement les chances de succès.

Heu… suis-je le seul à avoir l’impression d’enfoncer des portes ouvertes ?

Article source : Magazine Fast Company, Is the tipping point toast ? [en]
February 2008

Background: "6 degrees of separation" got its conception from a study by Stanley Milgram in the 1950s testing how many links it took to connect a random mid-Westerner from Omaha or Wichita with a random person from Boston. The study seemed to show that subjects were on average 6 path links away from each other. [Each recipient of a letter was supposed to send to the target recipient if he/she knew the target directly, or forward on the person who the subject thought would be most likely to know the target; this procedure was iterated and the number of links were totaled.] The Milgram methodlogy has been criticized by some. This has been generalized into the claim that any two people in the world are 6 degrees separated, although Milgram never used the phrase 'degrees of separation.] . The '6 degrees notion' was recently tested in a Small World experiment by Duncan Watts at Columbia which has found an average path length of worldwide volunteers of five, although there are some problems with their methodology (since they only took volunteers who might have volunteered because they wanted to test whether they were as cosmopolitan and as well-connected as they believed).

Kleinfeld, in trying to digitally recreat Milgram's experiment, found problems with the experiment (detailed in the current issue of Discover magazine with the wonderful title "If Osama's only 6 degrees of separation away, why can't we find him?") Among them were that Milgram only counted the path length of the letters that actually reached their recipients, not the majority of letters that never reached them.  (Kleinfeld notes that only 3 of 60 letters reached their target in Milgram's original study and the following study had a completion rate of only 29%.) Strogatz admits that this was a problem that Milgram was aware of and observed  that it is challenging to figure out how to interpret the letters that didn't make it to the final person since it could be that one of the intervening links simply didn't forward on the letter rather than the fact that the path length would have been much longer if completed.  [Kleinfeld in the article suggests that the fact that Milgram recruited participants by buying mailing lists skewed the partiicpants to be more high-income.  Because most American friendships are same-class, it is easier sociologically much easier for high-income subjects to find high-income targets than if the experimenta; subject  had to locate a target of a different economic class.]

The low completion rates also mirror some results Duncan Watts got in his Small World experiment. Recruiting volunteers on the web globally to see how many links separated them, Watts et al. began 24,163 "degree of separation" experiments. Only 384 of these were completed (or about 1.5%), and those completed had an average path length of slightly over 4 links.  Watts surveyed respondents who dropped out of the experiment and fewer than one in 200 respondents indicated that they didn't continue the chain because they didn’t know whom to send it to.  This tends to support the notion that the completed links may not be different than the uncompleted ones in total path length but in the interest of the intervening links to complete the experiment.

Strogatz notes that this research really raises 3 interesting questions. First, "given two people, is there a short path connecting them? That is a question of existence. Does a chain exist? The second question has to do with search. Can people find these short paths if they exist? And a third question is, ... even if the paths did exist and people could find them, could they use them to exert any influence on a person at the distant end?" Strogatz notes that regardless of any imperfections in Milgram's approach, short paths definitely do exist, and people if motivated can find these paths. But he said that the issue of one's leverage at six degrees of separation is much more doubtful.

Strogatz also discussed evidence of this "small world" in other settings and some ideas of how this might be used.

As to the answer about finding Osama bin Laden, Watts indicates that agents in the CIA probably are less than 6 degrees separated from Osama bin Laden, but because of tribal loyalties or threats of being killed, the last two links that could connect us to Osama, are not cooperative.

For the full NPR program, click here.

Fast Company, in its February 2008 issue, highlighted the new research and the ensuing debate among marketers in an article Is the Tipping Point Toast?by Clive Thompson.  The theory of "influentials" had its origins in the 1950's with the work of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld (authors of Personal Influence).  Its latest  proponents include Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) and Ed Keller and Jon Berry (authors of .Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy).    The influentials theory goes like this.  Target a sophisticated minority of  highly connected consumers (the "influentials") and motivate them to talk up / recommend your product or service.  They will convince others to use the product or service and get a viral buzz going.

Duncan Watts, a noted network theorist and author of Six Degrees, has challenged these long held beliefs with some new studies he has conducted while on sabbatical from Columbia University at Yahoo Research   His conclusion?  He finds that viral buzz is as likely to be started by poorly connected ordinary Joe's and Jane's, as by in-the-know hipsters.  What matters, he argues, is the readiness of the environment to accept the messages delivered, not the messenger.  In a receptive environment, a weakly connected individual can spread a trend as easily as someone with a large Rolodex.  Without that receptivity, even those highly connected hubs of society may be ineffective in a viral campaign.

His findings were based on research that reproduced some of the original work of Stanley Milgram- arguably the father of the notion of six degrees of separation - except on a much larger scale.  Milgram had 160 individuals in Nebraska attempt to get a letter to a stockbroker in Boston by sending it to a colleague who they thought could get it one step closer to its final destination.  Only a small percentage of the letters made it to the stockbroker and these made the final step through the same three friends of the target.  Milgram concluded that the separation between strangers is generally 6 degrees or less.  Marketers concluded that the fact that the same three individuals appeared to act as gatekeepers proved that influentials were a critical part of communication among strangers. 

Watts' study increased the size of the study by two orders of magnitude (61,000 participants) and used e-mail instead of postal mail.  He confirmed the six degrees, but showed that only 5% of the e-mails passed through hyper-connected individuals.  The bulk went through weakly connected participants.  He concluded that the apparent gatekeepers in Milgram's study were a statistical artifact because of the extremely small sample size.  Watts has studied all sorts of human networks, from disease patterns to how rock bands become popular. 

So what's the big deal?  Two things:

• Advertisers and marketers are spending billions of dollars annually targeting so called influentials who they hope will spark viral campaigns
• All of this money, time and effort may be wasted if what really matters is the receptivity of the general public to a new product, service or idea

One has only to think about the current presidential campaign in the U.S. to see how important Watts' ideas could be.  In the world of book publishing, it may mean that we should find ways to gauge the receptivity of a market to a new author or title rather than hoping that some well placed book reviews will make the difference between failure and success.  Watts is the first to admit that some will find his conclusions counter-intuitive, but the science of networks and his carefully organized experiments appear to support them.  Relativity and quantum mechanics are counter-intuitive, but modern science and all the benefits it has bestowed would be impossible without these "unnatural" theories. 

Our intuition can be powerful, but it can be seduced and canalized by appealing ideas that don't stand p under closer examination. 

Related Posts

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• Thoughts about Building a Blog Network
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• The Importance of Being Authoritative

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El autor, Carlos Vargas, nos dice: "Las redes sociales son una propuesta de negocios importante y un factor capital para tener éxito en los negocios con los clientes del siglo XXI. Hay un fenómeno mundial en aspectos políticos, sociales, comerciales y humanos, el cual se refiere a cómo todos nosotros, clientes y/o ciudadanos súper comunicados y sensibilizados en el siglo XXI, exigimos participar en las grandes decisiones que afecten nuestras vidas."

Seis Grados

"El software germinal de las redes sociales parte de la teoría de los seis grados de separación, según la cual toda la gente del planeta está conectada a través de no más de seis personas y que el número de conocidos crece de forma exponencial con el número de enlaces en la cadena: sólo un pequeño número de enlaces son necesarios para que el conjunto de conocidos se convierta en la población humana entera."

"Existe una patente en Estados Unidos conocida como six degrees patent, por la que ya han pagado Tribe y LinkedIn. Hay otras muchas patentes que protegen la tecnología para automatizar la creación de redes y las aplicaciones relacionadas con éstas."

"Podemos profundizar en el concepto con el libro: Seis grados de separación: la ciencia de las redes en la era del acceso, del sociólogo Duncan Watts."

An interesting Op-Ed in the NYT by Mark Mellman and Michael Bloomfield, "Loose Lips Win Elections" (1/6/08) discussed fact that Huckabee's victory over Mitt Romney last week in the Iowa Caucuses demonstrated that conversations (social capital) are more effective than advertising in getting individuals elected. Mellman and Bloomfield noted that Romney outspent Huckabee on advertising by a 6:1 ratio, but Huckabee's campaign motivated lots of more efficacious parishioner-to-parishioner conversations through church networks urging fellow congregants to vote for Huckabee.

And "Why Iowa? Sociologist says it's groupthink ; Voters elsewhere play follow the leader" (Jonathan Tilove, Times-Pacyune, 1/5/08) notes that Obama's bounce post Iowa exhibits a social dimension. The press post-Iowa tell a revisionist story that makes Barack seem like the invincible and wise candidate, and then, assuming he wins NH (and the polls now show Obama with a recent double digit lead over Hillary Clinton), this story becomes all the more compelling and believable. "Why? Because ultimately, for all the talk about voting being a private act, it is in fact a social act in which individual behavior is hugely dependent on the thinking and actions of others....Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, has studied the phenomenon. As he explains, sooner or later in the primary process voters find themselves thinking less and responding to the cues of others more, under the assumption that 'all these other people can't be wrong.'..."

This social cascade overwhelms individual judgment and consideration. And history shows that the candidate that has won NH and Iowa, while they may not have won the general election, have never failed to win their party's nomination.

That's one reason why the NYT and others have been calling for a regional primary where the first states in a region would be rotated so that Iowa and NH don't take on this disproportionate influence.

Watts and colleagues have documented something I wrote about earlier (viral popularity). They showed in a 2006 study in Science that "early deciders -- like voters in Iowa and New Hampshire -- have a profound power to get the snowball rolling" and hence influence later voters. "Watts and his colleagues created a music Web site and asked 14,000 participants to listen to a series of songs and rate them. Some were asked to rate without knowing others' picks, while the rest were divided into discrete groups in which they knew the choices being made by others in their group. The groups that knew about other members' ratings came up with different choices, and in each the most popular songs were rated much higher overall because ratings were influenced by members who had chosen earlier." Part of this result, as was seen in Huckabee's Iowa vote is the results of a huge number of cascading conversations, where every NH conversation in a book group, or PTA meeting, or Rotary group starts to change some voters in favor of the Iowa victor (in this case Obama), and the power of that influence is magnified over the days.

Then I came across this post from Nigel Hollis at Millward Brown (the WPP-owned research outfit) recently, which almost made me change my mind again. Almost.

He was commenting on an article he’d read in Advertising Age about Professor Duncan Watts, an Australian who has conducted a lot of research into viral campaigns and concluded that ‘influencers’ are not as important as word of mouth marketers would have us believe. He therefore advocates that any viral campaign should be treated in the same way as any another piece of mass marketing, and supported on- and offline through advertising, PR etcetera etcetera.

Duncan said:

“[You] cannot predict what is going to happen… Things happen randomly. You want strategies that don’t depend on being right, but do depend on being able to measure things very well. You throw things out there, with as low cost as you can manage and with as great a diversity as you can stand and then you see what gets taken up.”

In response, Hollis wrote:

“Things happen randomly if you do not plan and test, and throwing things out there risks a potential backfire. The one factor that is not considered by Duncan’s analysis is the ‘stickiness’ of the idea behind a viral campaign, and that is certainly not immune to testing. There is no reason why you cannot pre-test a viral campaign. The objective would be to ascertain the likelihood that people would share the ad with others and it would reduce the chances of failure by ensuring people did find the content relevant, compelling and worth sharing."

I must confess I’d not considered pre-testing a piece of viral video in the way you would a TV ad. And I’m still not convinced it would work. Surely the web is too ‘random’ (to use that word in a highly unscientific way) for your typical survey sample to indicate whether a video will take flight and spread far and wide? Can such a survey really predict the subtleties of the network effects that are required for a video to go viral? Hollis thinks it can. I’m not so sure.

Online communities value spontaneity and serendipity. Sure, we sneaky PR and marketing people can do our bit to support a viral campaign and give it a shot at succeeding, but if you market research something to death before you unleash it online you may well squash the spark of creative genius that would have seen it go massively viral in the first place.

Admittedly Mr Hollis chooses his words carefully, and says that pre-testing can only “reduce the chances of failure”, which isn’t the same thing as predicting success of course. His post is well worth a read, and I’ve probably done him a huge disservice by pruning his argument so aggressively.

But the approach he favours still feels too clinical to me (and it may not be entirely co-incidental that Millward Brown offers such services as pre-campaign testing…)

I’m all for measuring what’s measurable in all forms of communication, but sometimes gut feeling must have a role to play.

Professor Watts is pretty much claiming that even if influencers may be particularly effective over otheer people, they are only able to do so to their immediate neighbourhood, and not much beyond.

This has spurred a wild controversy between supporters of buzz theories (namely Malcom Gladwell's Tipping point) and others who have been waiting a good decadeto call it well-marketed nonsense.

As to me, I'm surprised by how easily the web is being flooded by passionate, yet meaningless arguments (yes, I'm thinking at blogging vs planning...)

It's not a matter of qualitative theory vs math. It's a matter of common sense.

Throught human history word-of-mouth has always worked, and it has done so depending on the subject of communication, the cohesion of the community and the means of communication.

Today there's not doubt we have more means of communication. We can even pretend that we are more cohese.

So the subject of communication is key to how relevant buzz can be, because it implies how interesting the message is going to be, to how many and what people it will relate to, and how easily it can be transmitted from one to another.

Common sense tells us that a service like Skype can benefit greatly from viral, whereas in the case of goods with low involvment (toothpicks?), products aimed at little-networked consumers (dentures?) or complex messages it's a little less so.

And in general... Viral for niche marketing: very good. Viral for mass marketing: less good (but growing steadily).

Final Burp: Viral is pretty much like a side dish. There's cases in which it can be enough for a whole meal, but most times it needs to be served with a main course (even though the latter may be less tasty)