Fast Company has a piece about a researcher at Yahoo! with interesting findings about online marketing and viral campaigns (including those faux grass-roots campaigns we like to call Astroturfing). Among other things, Duncan Watts is debunking evidence from The Tipping Point. In case you don't remember, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference was Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 book about trends that sold a gazillion copies, though I was completely underwhelmed by it (Pluses: Beautifully designed and blessedly short. Minuses: Too simplistic* and sometimes a bit condescending. ...or am I just blind with envy of Gladwell's astronomical book sales?). Supposedly, according to the book, Hush Puppies started selling like wildfire after a few ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") highly influential types began wearing them. This is the same kind of talk we hear about how Carrie Bradshaw (a/k/a Sarah Jessica Parker) singlehandedly started the 1990s luxury handbag explosion by carrying a Fendi baguette (but since she was on TV in millions of homes, at least it's more plausible).
In Is the Tipping Point Toast?, Clive Thompson explains that Watts "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." Watts claims to have hard evidence that his technique for propagating ads virally "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."
Well, this is cool: Reminds me of the time Lee Gomes debunked the Long Tail idea (although his investigation was a big less rigorous) -- a good reminder that we shouldn't treat these best-selling business books as gospel.
*Gladwell went on to write another book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking that glosses over other important stuff. And I'm not the only detractor: I once overheard a statistician call in to NPR's Science Friday during a visit by Gladwell to discuss Blink. The caller said "Let me get this right: You're saying that when people make split-second decisions, chances are they'll be right about half of the time and wrong the other half? Well, duh." Radio silence from Gladwell.
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