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30 Jan 08

Is the Tipping Point Toast? -- Duncan Watts -- Trendsetting

Article by FC's Clive Thompson on the latest work by Duncan Watts, who argues against the idea the trends are created by "influentials" who bring matters to a tipping point.

www.fastcompany.com/...s-the-tipping-point-toast.html - Preview

business duncan_watts economic_anthropology fast_company influentials malcolm_gladwell network_theory tipping_point trendsetting

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."

And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people--and ignoring Influentials altogether.
But a growing group of marketers believes Watts is radically altering the way companies attempt to produce trends.
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- Yet even as Watts was conducting his research, marketers were becoming increasingly convinced that trends were the product not of murky social forces, but of charismatic, connected social alphas. In truth, it was an old--even hoary--marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.
  
  Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."
- Gladwell's book laid out many other factors that can "tip" a trend. He described other influential types: Mavens, who love to collect information and help others make decisions, and suave Salesmen of ideas. In order to spread, an idea or product had to be "sticky," and appear in a fertile social context. 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.
- But Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true.
- So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. 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.
- Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all do.
- And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him:
  - - here's where the concept of "attention economy" might come in - on 2008-01-30
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- Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
  - - I think this again points to the ideas put forward in "attention economies" -- when you've primed the audience to *pay attention*, viral effects are more likely to occur : "...whether everyone else is easily persuaded..." -- which can only happen if you have their eyeballs in the first place - on 2008-01-30
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- Watts's computer models are "interesting," Keller admitted, but too academic to reflect reality. In contrast, Keller argues, his firm has studied tens of thousands of Influentials by identifying people highly active in their communities, an elite 10% that engage in advice-giving conversation up to five times more frequently than the average American. "They're fonts of word of mouth," Keller insists. And ahead of the curve, too: In the 20 years he has been polling them, Keller has found they began using computers, mobile phones, and the Internet years before the mainstream. What's more, his polls have found that more than two-thirds of people who get word-of-mouth product recommendations either buy something based on it, or plan to.
  - - and that this happens in contexts where the attention is already primed to some extent, possibly to focus on that person or on what s/he represents/ is discussing - on 2008-01-30
  - - perhaps it would be appropriate to say that some "influentials" can focus attention on a larger scale, due perhaps also to contextual factors? - on 2008-01-30
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- No researcher, he points out--including Keller--ever analyzes interactions between specific Influentials and the friends they're supposedly influencing; no one observes influence in action. In essence, Keller appeals to common sense--our intuitive sense of how the world works. Watts thinks common sense is misleading.
- Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn't think it's possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people.
- As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?
- "The whole reason why Duncan's work upsets people," Pilotta points out, "is that he demonstrates that the world is complex, that it's not that easy."
  
  Actually, if you believe Watts, the world isn't just complex--it's practically anarchic. In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer--they occur essentially at random.
- "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.
- Predictably, the music industry received the analysis--"Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market," published in Science in 2006--with a cocked eyebrow. When Watts presented his findings to executives at a major record label last spring, the younger among them were reasonably receptive. They're accustomed to the unpredictability of hit-making online, so they can grasp the terrifying randomness of success.
  
  But the older execs?
  
  Watts laughs. "They were all like, 'I think it's bullshit. I'm still going to go with my gut,'" he recalls. "And I'm like, Okay, good luck to you. You're going to need it."
- Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.
  
  The technique marries Watts's two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible--and not waste money chasing "important" people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign's ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.
- 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. 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."