David Ing's Library tagged influentials →  View Popular

Since the publication of Katz and Lazarsfeld's seminal work, Personal Influence (1955), the study of what they called opinion leaders -- or influentials as they have also become known (Merton 1968) -- has occupied an important place in the literatures of the diffusion of innovations [Coleman, Katz and Menzel 1966; Rogers 1995; Valente 1995; Burt 1999), communications research (Weimann 1994), and marketing science (Myers and Robertson 1972; Chan and Misra 1990; Coulter, Feick and Price 2002; Vernette 2004; Van den Bulte and Joshi 2007). [....]

(Watts and Dodds 2007) ... argued, in fact, that what we call the "lnfluentials Hypothesis” -- that a small minority of special individuals wields disproportionate influence over the majority—is not supported by systematic empirical evidence, nor does it follow from accepted theories of interpersonal influence or the diffusion of innovations. Furthermore, with the use of simulation models, we demonstrated that under many circumstances influentials were likely to have at most a modest impact on public opinion change, relative to ordinary individuals. When influence or information is propagated via word-of-mouth, we concluded,
most of what differentiates successful from unsuccessful diffusion, is related to the structural properties of the word-of-mouth network as a whole, not the properties of a small number of special individuals. [....] [p. 202]

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social network word of mouth diffusion watts influentials