Content Marketing Today

What Matters in Word of Mouth: It’s the Power of the Idea Not the Influencer

Don’t waste money going after influentials.  Get your idea to the masses.

I loved Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point.  His core thesis is that a small number of influential people can influence a trend that will impact millions. But, if you’re still thinking like Gladwell does, you’d better read the February 2008 issue of Fast Company.

In a powerful article, the magazine explains that a Yahoo research scientist, Duncan Watts, begs to differ, based on extensive and persuasive research. He concludes that the power and timeliness of the idea carries the day.

Gladwell and the mighty few

Gladwell offered a classic example of the power of ‘influentials’ in the reemergence of Hush Puppies–which had been relics of the 1950s and 60s until their rebound from near death in the mid-1990s. According to Gladwell, it was a few forward thinking fashionistas who sparked a retro trend that ultimately resulted in a 5000% increase in Hush Puppies’ sales.

It turns out that this ‘influentials’ theory just doesn’t hold water.  Billions of marketing dollars may have been wasted in attempt to get a few cool people to spread an idea virus.

The article summarizes Gladwell’s thinking,

But as The Tipping Point climbed the charts, marketers fixated on Gladwell’s Law of the Few, his suggestion that rare, highly connected people shape the world. For anyone involved in pitchmanship, it was an electrifying notion, one that took a highly complex phenomenon–the spread of memes through society–and made it simple. Reach the gatekeepers, and you reach the world.

Social network expert Duncan Watts contends that Gladwell has it all wrong.  Watts has done extensive work on the relative influence of these influentials compared to the overall influence of an idea and a very large network. In the Fast Company article, he debunks the theory:

“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.”

Watts is not just a theorist mind you.  He works for Yahoo as a network theory scientist.  His extensive research underlies a brand-new way of approaching social media marketing.  His work is controversial because it undercuts much of currently conventional wisdom.

More Chaos than Order in Watts’ Theory

A good sample of the kind of research he does was an extensive computer simulation of a virtual Sims like network with 10,000 virtual individuals.  He was unable to show any connection between the spread of an idea and the power of a relatively small number of influentials.  Rather he concludes that it’s the idea which is important:

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

One of his scary findings is that trends seem to start at random and may be kicked off by an unidentifiable set of people much like a forest fire is sparked unintentionally. 

To oversimplify his thinking, you pretty much need to make sure that you expose your idea, your product or your service to as many people as possible with the knowledge that you have a good likelihood of success if your exposure is broad enough.  He argues that trying to pick out the influentials is a waste of time and money.

Actually, this finding matches up pretty well with lot of thinking about the best way to pursue public relations and marketing in the Web 2.0 world.  You need to leverage the power of the Internet to blast your message out to the universe so that it will have the maximum chance of getting picked up often enough that word-of-mouth will build–and accelerating sales will follow.

In the world of content marketing, we know that a huge part of your success has to do with the quality of the content you provide and of the products that underlie that content. The key is to understand whether your offering is timed to coincide with the receptiveness of your prospective buyers. As a small to medium-sized company, you will not have a budget in the millions that would enable you to chase the elusive influentials anyway.  It’s more efficient and cost effective to use tools like Digg, and StumbleUpon to give you broad exposure and the likelihood of finding at least some individuals who will love what you have to say and what you have to sell.

So, if you have a great idea, make sure that you back it up with great content and open it up to the world on the web.  Of course, if the Wall Street Journal picks up your story, that wouldn’t hurt either. But, you’ll have a much better chance of that happening if your idea touches a receptive market and if your content has permeated the blogosphere.