3. Who is Duncan Watts?
Duncan Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University.
He 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.
Source: http://crimsonmarketing.com/malcolm-gladwell-was-
wrong-a-better-theory-of-social-networks/
