check it out for yourself

http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2008/02/influencers-shminfluencers-podcast-wi

Assuming that this accurately reflects the study's methods, I don't find it very compelling at all. Here's teh thing: *everyone reports being uninfluenced by advertising, and they're clearly lying. I don't think we are very good judges of what influences us, and any research that relies on our ability to say what influences our buying decisions is deeply flawed.

There are research strategies that can track real behavior and real social networks (not just the online sort), but they're a lot messier than surveying people. But if you really want to look at how people make actual buying decisions -- and not what they believe about their own behavior -- you have to do that kind of tracking and forget about what people "report".

Dustin, you are a smart man. I bet *you're* not influenced by advertising or bloggers! :) No, totally good points you've made. The only thing less trustworthy than marketers or bloggers is survey data, perhaps! No, bloggers are much more trustworthy.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html

I suspect, as usual, the reality lies somewhere in between. :)

That aside, I think it's funny since I just blogged this morning about how I think Techcrunch might just be the Rainmaker of the online world :)

Simply put, there are two parts to making any purchase decision, one is awareness and second is the actual decision to purchase. Yes, the latter may be heavily influenced by friends and family.
However, even if high-profile bloggers don't influence the ultimate purchase, they are highly influential in creating visibility for a new product/site. You can't buy that kind of publicity and let's not kid ourselves, if there's no awareness, there ain't gonna be any buying.

People are a diverse bunch, and unpredictable. To say that certain CGM sources have influence is to discount the larger influencers of brand, mindshare or brand equity.

The new tools that try to out guess the guessers and provide guidance to brand owners have their work cut out for them once the honeymoon is over. But for determining influence? Next time you are at the supermarket shopping for food, ask those in line at the checkout , "excuse me, sir, madam, do you read blogs?"

Get ready for an eye opener. Not even on the public's radar.

We've known for quite some time that relevance is important to online communications. Birthday messages outperform broadcast specials in email conversions every time. This study has nothing to do with who the influencer might be and everything to do with who the preferred influencer is. Clearly, consumers are getting brand and action messages from a multitude of distributed sources. Where they claim the final blow confirming their decision to purchase came from is inconsequential in terms of Gladwell's "The Tipping Point."

To take it one step further, this research only further validates Gladwell's claims in his subsequent book "Blink." The decision to buy or not is already made. Does it matter where credit for the decision comes from in the consumer's mind? We all rationalize decisions in our own way. This study indicates that we have some shared rationalizations - not influencers.

The tipping point is not just about bloggers pushing products. It is a general phenomenon for a spread of things as diverse as wild fire or decease or products.

The fact is that many things in nature follow this dynamics, it has been studied extensively in all disciplines and most recently by complexity scientists.

In this system bloggers are hubs for products much like they are hubs for news dissemination and essentially are the amplifiers that ultimately lead to the tipping point in the system.

However, the tipping point does not occur because people are influenced by bloggers, it occurs because people process information and disseminate it through the human network. So while people might not feel like they are influenced by the bloggers, they are still acquiring and spreading information about popular products, causing the tipping points.

Alex

For some reasons, certain blogs are aggregated and distributed in amounts that are out of proportion to the value of their content. I guess they are considered "hot" but if you actually browse them, it's like the emperor's new clothes...there's nothing there.

Blah, blah, blah, all talk with no substance or originality. People reporting on other people's ideas and generating little content that can't be found a lot other "trendsetter's" blog, there is a lot of repackaging. Why not trust those you know, either in real life or virtually rather that some blogger who usually has mixed motives in promoting some product or idea?

Me, I see that as an opportunity.

And in all honesty, when non-hipsters see all us goofballs walking around in our skinny jeans and sneakers, you don't find them all of a sudden running to the nearest vintage shop trying to dress that way :-)

Same could be said about the online world. Rick-Rolling and LOL-Catz are good examples. It didn't take influencers to make that meme happen, it was just funny as hell and rose on its own merits, more or less organically.

Influencers might disseminate the information, but the trend rises more on its own merits than anything IMO...and probably would rise even if the influencers were nowhere to be found.

There is nothing that I can see in the data from this study that has been reported that says who starts things. All it says is who people heard it from. Since most of us hear most things from our family and friends it is an absolute certainty that we will be swayed by our friends more frequently. It's just simple probability at work.

And as for the headline that there is No Tipping Point, you are completely confusing the process of information spread and the role of "influencers". Nobody, not even Duncan Watts, is saying that there are not tipping points to a viral process. There are certainly tipping points in any viral process. At question is the the starting point and what role the influencer plays in the starting point.

Duncan's research suggests that bad stuff goes nowhere no matter who starts the process and that ANYONE can be the starting point of a trend or viral information spread when it perceived as great to share. Hence, the diminished role of influencers.

But his simulations assume that we all share stuff at the same rate, which is just not true.

Super Fans/Influencers share things with many more people many more times than the rest of us. The probabilities that they will be the origins of more trends follows straight from this.

To use Duncan Watt's analogy of a forest fire, any match is just as likely as any other match to start the fire. But when one person throws out 100 matches they are much more likely to start the fire than the person who just throws out one match.

It's the same with ideas, If you take 100 ideas with the same likelyhood of going viral, then the person who shares 50 ideas to 50 people will mostly likely start more viral information flows than someone who shares 1 idea with 10 people.

Alex
Digital Podcast

Blogs were thought of as the "last form of honest advertising." Of course, that's before marketers laid hold of it. Now...well, I guess the statistics bear out the fact that's no longer the case. What a shame.

Gladwell, on the other hand, is a writer. He writes very well, but he is not a researcher.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and far too much of it is done by other writers (like Fast Company) and bloggers who do their research with Google or by picking up the latest issue of Fast Company.

Here's the basic facts - influencers do exist, but they are not universal. They're specific to what you're trying to influence. Thus, listening to Terry Bradshaw talk about being a quarterback makes sense, but listening to Terry Bradshaw talk about stocks is a different matter. We cannot predict when a network effect will occur, but we can measure when it has occurred.

The problems with these studies (like the chain letter one) is they measure certain variables, and then researches draw broad conclusions that are picked up only in part by the reporters. It's one of the reasons that science reporting is so dismal. Headlines get you publicity, which get you grants and book deals. That's not the same as pure research that advances the theory.

What's really happening is marketers cling to theories that make it easy for them to make money by selling their services, as does everyone else.

As for that terrible idea of a study - bloggers are influential inside their blog communities, just as friends are influential with their friends. The problem is that an influential blogger shouldn't be measured by traffic or links. That more often than not measures the ability of the blogger to network, uh, socially.

If a blog gets only 200 uniques a day, but the visitors buy 50% of what he recommends, is he more or less influential than the blogger with 5,000 uniques, but only 1% of what he recommends, people buy?

A-list bloggers don't drive product buys except through anecdotal evidence. And the plural of anecdote isn't data.

Besides, if even 5% of the people out there trust a few bloggers for certain types of recommendations, and they tell two friends who trust them.... it is a carry forward sort of world in which word of mouth spreads. I think the challenge has been with the utopians who say stop everything else you are doing and focus all your efforts on bloggers. Blogs are only one way to garner awareness for what you are doing, making certain influentials more visible and more accesible.

I find the statement very misleading. It should be the other way around. The Wisdom of Crowds was published a few years later than The Tipping Point. And it has not made people think and debate as much as The Tipping Point has.