Are your marketing and social media efforts focused too much on influentials?
To continue the conversation about contagious behavior, I would like to talk about the ongoing focus directed at identifying the ‘influentials’ in your customer community, industry, or social network.
Although psychologists and mathematicians have been studying and writing about “opinion leaders” and their influence since the 1950’s and probably earlier, this phenomenon really took hold with Malcom Gladwell. In his book, The Tipping Point, he discusses the effect of connectors, mavens and salesmen have on creating contagious behavior and the spread of trends.
Gladwell refers to Stanley Milgram’s small world experiments from which the term ‘six degrees of separation’ was derived.
Since then a large group of marketing pundits and authorities have been laser focused on how important it is to identify the influentials and utilize them to instigate contagious behavior around your message, product or brand.
But the focus on influentials has recently been questioned.
Former Columbia University research fellow and current Yahoo principal research scientist, Duncan Watts, has conducted experiments on the premise of ‘six degrees’ with a much larger test group and his findings dispute the importance of key influencers. Individuals can start contagious behaviors whether they are the most connected or not. Watts’ studies and others, such as one recently discussed on the Physics arXiv blog, point to a variety of key components in the spread of ideas and contagious behavior.
These include an individual’s location in the network, their relationship to the information or activity being spread, how tight or close their connections are and the willingness of those around them to be influenced.
And recently, Edelman published survey data that shows a significant decline in the value consumers put on peer referrals or, in other words, the effectiveness of peer influence.
It is obvious that our understanding of how contagious behavior is created in social networks is rapidly evolving and will continue to evolve as more and more of us utilize mobile devices as our primary social networking tool.
This also means that both the definition and value of word-of-mouth will continue to evolve.
So, as marketers, it is imperative that we look at the full landscape of opportunities to engage all customers and potential customers. Being careful to not to make assumptions on how or where contagious behavior will happen but to always work to understand behavior based on measurement, analysis and results.
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