I meant to comment earlier on this Fast Company article featuring Duncan Watts(author of “Six Degrees”) disputing the role that Influentials play in driving innovation:

He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Valdis Krebs goes on to point out that it is not necessarily the most highly connected individuals who are the most influential. Rather, in order for influence to spread, a large number of people within a network cluster need to adopt an idea, rather than one powerful one.
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