I have been writing a lot about about this topic recently, and did not realize I was missing a debate that was raging in this arena until I read the MediaPost Online Spin article: Peers vs. Influencers: What Marketers Need to Know.
Writer Joe Marchese said:
On one side is the idea that there are sets of people who exert a significantly greater amount of influence over others, typified by Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” argument. On the other side is a far more chaotic theory that rejects the concept of “influentials,” stating instead that no one person has any more influence over creating a trend than any other person, put forth by Duncan Watts. If you are a marketer, the outcome of this debate should have you sleepless at night. How can you plan your campaign if you don’t know whom to target?
In the Tipping Point, Gladwell categorized different types of hyper connected people, and describes the effect each can have in starting and spreading trends.
I have not read Duncan Watts, but I did allude to the roles of peers and chaos theory in influencing what songs catch on and become hits, for example in my post Welcome to the New, User generated, Nonstop Media Whipsaw. In a nutshell my post said that peers interacting in complex systems make it difficult to predict which songs will become hits (this was proved in an experiment). Given the same selection of songs, different ones emerged as hits over a number of trials based on how the first listeners voted in each.
Marchese cited a recent Fast Company article on the topic that prompted his post. He concludes:
What marketers need to do is operate in a world that is somewhere in between Duncan’s chaos theory and Gladwell’s influencer model. Keep in mind that everyone has influence, but not all influence is created equal — and it’s impossible to buy enough influence to create a trend that society isn’t ready for.
Like Marchese, I think influencers and peers can both be important. The tricky part is that social media and all types of online applications and websites are adding to the complexity of determining influence, and what will catch on and spread.
First, not all peers are created equal and some are becoming influenecers in their own right in the online world.
Areas as diverse as Digg, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and many different types of social networks give people ways to interact and build reputations and profiles – i.e. exert influence. The WSJ article Wizards of Buzz awhile back described the phenomena pretty well for the social news sites.
Each system has its own rules, population of users and nuances, making it more difficult for the marketer and PR person to determine where to focus efforts and who to target.
One thing is for certain: with all its challenges and complexity, the changing nature of influence represents one of the most exciting frontiers in marketing today, and I look forward to coming back to this topic and exploring it further.
