Is the Tipping Point Toast?

By: Clive ThompsonFebruary 1, 2008

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Order Versus Chaos
Duncan Watts's research tells advertising execs precisely what they don't want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.
Infographic: Order Versus Chaos

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Watts's journey into trend research began, improbably, with the snowy tree cricket. As a grad student in the mid-1990s, he was exploring the mystery of how crickets synchronize their chirping. Clearly, information about when to chirp spreads like a contagion through the cricket network; Watts began to wonder how information flowed through human networks.

So he began programming the first computer models of how influence spreads. Like a kid experimenting with The Sims, Watts created a virtual community of individuals, then "infected" one with a "virus"--a virtual disease, or contagious idea--to see how far it would spread. He fiddled with his models, varying the degree and frequency of "exposure" needed to pass along the virus. He noticed that the success of an epidemic varied dramatically with seemingly tiny changes in his virtual society.

Yet even as Watts was conducting his research, marketers were becoming increasingly convinced that trends were the product not of murky social forces, but of charismatic, connected social alphas. In truth, it was an old--even hoary--marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.

Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."

Gladwell's book laid out many other factors that can "tip" a trend. He described other influential types: Mavens, who love to collect information and help others make decisions, and suave Salesmen of ideas. In order to spread, an idea or product had to be "sticky," and appear in a fertile social context. But as The Tipping Point climbed the charts, marketers fixated on Gladwell's Law of the Few, his suggestion that rare, highly connected people shape the world. For anyone involved in pitchmanship, it was an electrifying notion, one that took a highly complex phenomenon--the spread of memes through society--and made it simple. Reach the gatekeepers, and you reach the world.

Marketers seized on Malcolm Gladwell's "Law of the Few," his suggestion That rare, highly connected people shape the world.

But Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn't match what he'd found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target.

Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it's simply because his sample was so small--only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. "And since Milgram's finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment," Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all do.

From Issue 122 | February 2008

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Recent Comments | 72 Total

February 9, 2008 at 3:12am by Achara M

Influentials as described by Watts seem to be only one-dimensional - they only need to more socially-connected than others to be thrown into the Influentials category.

Does his simulations take into account the characteristics of the Mavens (those who know alot) and Salesmen (charismatic, persuasive pple) put forth in 'The Tipping Point'? It doesn't sound like it.

His simulations would be most accurate to describe online viral effects, not the adoption of trends in products and services in the real world. When you're analyzing trends in real-life consumer behaviour you need to take into consideration the behaviour of the Keller's 'leading edge' influencers, as well as the social context, such economic health, and social and commercial patterns in that geographical location.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

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