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.

I seem to remember this topic in regards to social contagion, but I do not remember the original source for the ideas - maybe it was Watts himself, discussing “percolation”. I will have to look it up later.

The basic principle is that each member of a network has a threshhold that must be overcome in order for them to adopt an innovation. The threshhold is loosely defined as the percentage of connections who need to have adopted the idea for that member to also adopt it.

So, if the threshhold of adoption of an idea 50% and you have three friends, only one of whom has adopted an idea(33%), you would not adopt the idea. However, if two of your friends have adopted the idea(66%) then you are likely to as well.

This implies that well-connected individuals would be more resistant to adopting new ideas - in general. Also, that a well-connected individual might not be able to influence his or her connections if there is not a broad basis for support between those connections for the ideas brought forward by Influentials.

My take is that the well-connected individuals could more accurately be described as diffusers with the potential to put many people over the threshhold, but with little influencing ability of their own.

Plus, with everyone else trying to get the Influentials to peddle their ideas, their attention would be at a premium. However, if a large number of the friends of Influentials adopted an idea, then the Influentials might take notice. And at that point you might get a little percolation going.

Intel2.0 also touches on some of these ideas and links to a number of other resources as well that relate to the topic. I’m looking forward to seeing what Duncan Watts discovers about this phenomenon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.