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Clive Thompson has a great breakdown of the debate titled "Is The Tipping Point Toast?" in Fast Company. While I find the argument interesting, it feels a little bit black and white, and I don't think it address the key issues faced by marketers in the 21st century.
What marketers need to do is operate in a world that is somewhere in between Duncan's chaos theory and Gladwell's influencer model. Keep in mind that everyone has influence, but not all influence is created equal -- and it's impossible to buy enough influence to create a trend that society isn't ready for. Before I get arguments that I am just avoiding picking a side, I did post on the need to measure what I called "Return On Influence" in social media over a year ago.
A year later and a little more to the point, here's what marketers can consider: Everyone has influence, but that influence has a couple of variables.
--People have a quantity of influence: the maximum number of other people they can reach with a message.
--People have a quality of influence: the amount of influence they exert over those that they reach.
--People have types of influence: categories of "expertise" that other people assign to an individual.
This is of course infinitely more complex when you consider that these variables can change for any given person, depending on the person they are influencing. The reason this theory lies somewhere between Watts and Gladwell, is that it does indeed argue that successful marketing campaigns will target larger, or even mass groupings of people, rather than a few super influencers, but that attracting certain people adds more value than others.
Quantity of influence is all too often mistaken for quality. A MediaPost article cites a report that highlights exactly this mistake done by Pollara. There is no proof that quantity of influence = quality of influence. This doesn't mean that quantity of influence isn't important, but it is just one variable to look at.
Quality of influence, conversely, seems much more likely to come from "peoples like me." As Steve Rubel writes in his post "Trust in Peers Trumps the 'A-List,' Study Finds," people are more likely to trust "someone like them" rather than a celebrity. Steve goes on to post some great data gathered by the Edelman Trust Barometer. What the Edelman does not define is what people are thinking when they say "someone like me" -- after all, they didn't say "anyone who is ordinary like me."
This brings us to type of influence. I am more likely to take advice on running shoes from someone I know who runs, over someone I know who does not run just because I know them. Now to the chaos theory: I could listen to my know-it-all friend who doesn't run, but claims to have read something on it --but why would I, when social media just lets me turn to anyone to get the feedback I am looking for in real time.
So what does a successful marketing campaign look like, given these variables? The new questions marketers have to ask themselves is that if a successful campaign will influence 1,000,000 people, how can they reach not the 10, or 100, or even 1,000 "super influencers," but how can they get the 10,000+ people with the right quantity, quality and type of influence to spread their message to their "peers"?
This is possible given social media technologies. It may mean reaching out to hundreds of thousands of people with a message and product that might appeal to them to get the right 10,000. It will certainly mean engaging, listening and adjusting a product and/or message until enough people are willing to actively pass along your message. You can't really buy influence, but you can buy the opportunity to engage with the influencers. All this while keeping in mind that it just might not be possible to achieve "success" if society doesn't like the product you have to offer. It is social media, after all.
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1) This is EXACTLY why sites like viewpoints.com have such a following. They capitalize on the quality of influence. Unless you've actually USED that immersion blender, I don't want to hear anything you have to say about it.
2) This goes back to the old argument of traditional media versus social media. Do you want to be in the WSJ (I've been on the cover of the business section) or do you want to be mentioned by name in Jeremiah Owyang's blog? (That's happened to me, too.) My money's on Jeremiah.
An example would be the experience of our client the UK confectionery manufacturer Cadbury in two separate 2007 campaigns. In one campaign we helped Cadbury communicate with nut allergy sufferers when they wished to announce a product recall of incorrectly-labelled product. We identified authorities (influencers) in that topic and PR agency Blue Rubicon contacted them individually. The negative coverage (which had been considerable) dropped from 30+ negative items a day to 1 in a week. In the second campaign Cadbury launched a video made by ad agency Fallon showing a gorilla performing the drum solo from the Phil Collins song "In the air tonight". For this they targeted high volume media bloggers inside and outside the "chocolate" conversation and made the video available for easy download. The resulting buzz included more than 100,000 separate blog and messageboard posts and millions of online views of the video on YouTube and elsewhere. The campaign had 4 times the response of Sony Bravia's "bouncing balls.
I have blogged about this here: http://www.marketsentinel.com/blog/2008/04/targeting-influencers-with-virals-doesnt-work
Jan - So you are saying that influence is influence because society grants them that influence regardless of expertise?
Todd Parsons Co-founder BuzzLogic http://blogs.mediapost.com/omd_commentary/?p=686 http://www.buzzlogic.com/blog/2008/04/influencers_lack_cloutreally.html http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18328.asp
A current example (and not our work) is the Army TV campaign -- 'you make them strong, we make them Army strong' which I take as a mass-media approach to reach the influentials - parents.
Next up: measurement, and we've got a whiteboard full of ideas on ROI by either definition. Thanx Joe.
When we talk about recommendation (by influentials) in marketing it’s proven that those people who recommend a brand to their peers influence future marketshare. Their friends buy more. Or less …when the “recommendation� is negative. It’s a simple as that.
If a brand has more of these positive recommenders than negative recommenders you win marketshare. If the opposite happens, you lose.
In China older & higher educated males have a higher persuasion power. People tend to believe them more (although women communicate more). The persuasion power (trust, believability) of people who have/had experience with the product is also higher than those who just saw the ad or heard it from others.
And of course if these people have a strong network (they usually have) and talk very frequently about brands, they will have a huge influence.
We did some research in China and the evidence is clear! I can send you the file if you want.
Pop culture theories aside, I think everything ends up coming back to two things: "Do you have a great story that people want to spread" and "Do you plant the seed in the most fertile ground." No theory will ever abdicate creatives from the responsibility of coming up with compelling content.
Another provocative post. I want to expand on something mentioned - the Edelman Trust Study's "someone like me" definition.
One (large) part of social media land is conversational. Forums, newsgroups and discussion boards far outweigh blogs in terms of the number of conversaitons.
There are different participation modes in these communities - but the people who "belong" to the communities are there because they have "found their tribe". So, the community - for them - is "people like me".
On influence - we (MotiveQuest) have been tracking something else - advocacy. The willingness to make a recommendation to others. And this is co-related with sales. So it is a powerful metric.
This is an evergreen topic!
TO'B
Unless the marketer knows exactly point zero of the disseminated information and able to track it to the next levels and so on, then the blur gets blurrier and almost, if not totally impossible to target those influencers. Then again, some people can influence largely about one thing and suck at others and mediocre at others. So how many fairies can dance, do dance, will dance, have danced, would have danced on the end of a pin?
Great post. Looking forward to more.
David Alston Radian6
This idea is very aligned with Gladwells typology of mavens (highly people connected, thus more likely to become even more connected). A maven as a highly connected nodes is in the position to be highly influential in that they can spread messages very widely, the qualification is the perceived legitimacy as an authority concerning the message they transmit.
New information is much more likely to come through loose ties (associate) than strong ties (birds of a feather).
So my loose tie (associate type connection) says I know someone who is a professional runner and she wears...... is likely to have more influence than a close tie who simply states an opinion (unless it is related to local 'cool').
The idea is to get the super influencer linked with a credible, legitimate authority on the value in question so that the super influencer than infects the many connections with the message. This is completely consistent with Watts (as far as my own reading of Six Degrees is concerned).
The other issue involved with this is the Wisdom of Crowds and the perceived legitimacy of the message. For the wisdom of crowds to be effective (in providing the best answer) certain conditions have to be met. Contributers have to be independent and various. It seems what marketing wants is the opposite of the wisdom of crowds - which is the 'dumb' mob - a la tulip bulb mania. For that the conditions require more extreme interdependence and homogeneity.
Therefore in choosing the super influencers they should be involved so that they pass the messages to a critical mass of homogeneous connections, until the fad/mania kicks in. If the super influencers are not sensitive to the need for initial homegeniety then the variety and independence of the connections will likely cancel each other out.
$0.02 worth John Verdon