Working with some of our clients and with colleague organizations like Net Centric Campaigns, we've been looking closely at different aspects of network theory. Often, the planning and evaluation work we do includes analyzing a network and a strategy for disseminating information through a network. Because I quickly grow cynical about any concept that inspires zealous attention from marketeers, I have carried around healthy skepticism about the so-called marketing strategy of using Influential super-vectors to spread a key message to the widest number of people.

Malcolm Gladwell revived this old trope in his book "The Tipping Point," memorably referencing a handful of interesting incidents in which super-influential people -- tastemakers, you might say -- adopted a new fashion and in so doing lit the fuse on a massive, viral chain of events that any PR professional would dream about.

Fast Company recently published a quite good debunking of the myth of the Influentials, "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" Basically, an Australian researcher named Duncan Watts has built model after model to simulate the power of the influential over the ordinary schlub to spread some new viral piece of information.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

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.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."