Ryan MacMillan

The excellent Sean Lawson points me in the direction of this article from Fast Company magazine, “Is The Tipping Point Toast?”  (a question not to be confused with that raised in last month’s Apetizer’s Digest, “Any Top Tips on Toast Points?”), exploring the marketing heresy that maybe, just maybe, there’s no such thing as superinfluential people who marketers should be talking to. There are no ‘Influentials’ and there is no tipping point. And no Santa, to boot.

This unspeakable sin against communications orthodoxy is committed by one Duncan Watts who, according to FC:

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. “It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

For those of you still able to read through the haze of red mist rising, more after the jump.
Watts is a computer scientist who specializes in network theory and he has spent the past decade or so railing against Malcolm Gladwell’s notion that any trend requires the attention of Influentials (connectors) within a social network in order to ‘tip’ over and become widely popular. Gladwell co-opted Stanley Milgram’s 1967 ‘Six Degrees of Seperation’ experiment in support of his tipping point theory, writing that it was certain socially influential individuals who were central to the flow of new information and,

the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

Watts was unconvinced and thus co-opted Milgram himself:

In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that “hubs”–highly connected people–weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target.”

Academically and theoretically, Watts’ argument is strong: no-one had ever re-done the Milgram experiment because it should seemed so obvious. But when modelled scientifcally it simply doesn’t work (Milgram was a notoriously bad scientist, even if he was an excellent social theorist) , which is Watts’ ultimate problem with the Tipping Point and the Influentials:

“It sort of sounds cool… But it’s wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don’t think about it.”

Miaow.

At root, Watts argues for a far more democratic model of communications, one in which Word of Mouth (do please note the capitalisation) between peers is key, rather than just the lifestyle choices of a few cool people. This, as FC points out, leads us to the rather delicious irony that:

the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. “But that’s the thing about magic,” says Watts. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”‘

And yet… (you could just hear that coming, couldn’t you) things only appear to be magic if they are in fact a technology sufficiently advanced upon that familiar to the observer. Which is to say that niche marketing based on influence theory really is infinitely more complex, more difficult to do, than the sort of mass-marketing that Watts promulgates. His computer model experiments make communicating with a brand’s audience seem effortless precisely because the model really is just that: effortless. But his models, crucially, look only to the spread of one message. So of course one message spreads quickly between a network. But what happens when that message must compete with other, funnier, sexier, wittier, cleverer messages? There seems to be nothing in Watts models (and I may well be mistaken here, social modeling is not my thing) to anticipate competition and the marketplace of messages. It was precisely message overload in the marketplace that made those Madison Avenue execs turn to more tactically adaptable models of communicaitons.

So, a few general points to pick:

1) Watts’ model is predicated  on the notion that the only metric for marketing is volume.

2) Watts model does not seem to correct for competition

3) Even if it is practically true that one can achieve broad spectrum receipt of a message through mass-marketing techniques, it does not necessarily follow that such a technique should be adopted by a brand. Brands do not always want to talk to everyone. They have specialised audiences.

4) The experimental design of Watts model seems to ignore the fact that, in reality, it often is journalists and reviewers who see products first, and who then let others kow about them pre-launch. I just wonder if his model assumes that the information gets out into the network neutrally from the information source (the brand), because this simply never happens. Presumably what he is saying is that it should, and brands should stop trying to identify influential people - which is a weird thing for a guy to be saying in an interview with a trade magazine read by precisely the sort of people who will be in a position to influence their marketing firms to change the ways in which they operate.

Which, as CJ Cregg once said, is how I like my irony served.