The danger of narcissistic ideas.
There’s been a bunch written about the new research from Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds on the “viral” spread of ideas that now seems to contradict models laid out by people like Gladwell in the Tipping Point and in books like the Influentials by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. For those who haven’t seen this, Watts and Dodds claim that it’s not the actions of small groups of influentials that create movements, instead it’s the existence of a “critical mass of easily influenced individuals” that are instead more essential. You can read the whole report here, thanks to Partial Immortalization for the link.
As soon as I’d read about the research it intuitively made sense. I rarely listen to the opinion of any one person on anything – more often it’s the collective noise of hearing about something over and over again that spurs me to action.
Yet, I’d also had a similar reaction when I first read the above books. The difference is that the Watts/Dodds research rang true to me as a person, but the Gladwell/Berry/Keller framework rang true to me as a marketer. The seduction of the influencer model is that it is:
1.) Linear – a straightforward step by step process
2.) Contained – I can ignore 9 out of 10 people and focus my efforts
3.) Narcissistic – there are some people who are more powerful than others
In reading the Gladwell/Berry/Keller work, I (naturally as a marketer) put myself into the influencer camp – not the influenced camp, and so tacitly took away the message that I’m smarter, better, and less gullible than most of the people around me. In fact, at some level, both books were compliments. They enabled me to feel better AND in control of a situation. That feeling helped me sweep aside any doubts I had about the actual content.
The Watts/Dodds research doesn’t entirely crush the influencer model but does cast serious doubt on it. However, the truth is we didn’t need research to do that. It ought to have been obvious to us that the majority of people that we all know aren’t so easily influenced that they’ll bow to one opinion.