3. Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at
Columbia University, argues that Malcolm
Gladwell’s theory of “social epidemics”•,
discussed in The Tipping Point sounds
intuitively correct, but is wrong.
4. Gladwell states that social influence stems from a two-step flow of
communication; from the media to influentials (a tiny minority of well-
connected, persuasive people), and from them to everyone else. If correct,
this theory means that marketers should search out and influence the
influentials.
5. However, Gladwell can only offer anecdotal evidence to
support his theory. What Watts has found, however, is that
with the exception of celebrities (like Oprah Winfrey), even
key influentials don’t interact with enough people to have
the impact Gladwell states that they have.
6. Watts has run computer simulations of the dynamics of social contagion.
What he has discovered is that – because of the number of people who need
to be”touched”•– in nearly all circumstances, these influentials don’t have the
significant impact we “hoped” they would to make our marketing job easier.
7. The key finding in their research (supported by other research as well), is that
the key way to create social contagion is to reach “easily influenced”
individuals and get them to influence others just like them. These findings
mean that, for us marketers, we should not focus on a few influentials, but
rather on leveraging Web-based social networking tools to reach large
numbers of ordinary people.
