I think its best to target both if possible, then assess the results and adapt as you go along.

Thanks for the article, I trust you as an authoritive source about online marketing and always look forward to your newsletters.

Lots of good content on email contact targeting, newsletter creation and direction, marketing tips and content creation at http://www.massmailsoftware.com/blog/

To help spread a message, I believe the other two components rise in importantance, that the message fits within the Context of the social group I’m targeting and that the message is Sticky (easy-to-understand, easy-to-believe & easy-to-tell). If I can do these two well, relying solely on the influencers becomes less important.

My take on buyer behaviour has always been that different people buy different things at different times in different places for different reasons – it’s what makes practicing marketing hard.

Applying this to the influencer argument : no one person can influence all folk on every product, on every occasion, on every puchase. Therefore the influencer’s influence is limited to limited situations [there must be a name for that type of sentence?].

Putting too much reliance on influencers is to take a chance on their sphere of authority – but then again, isn’t that segmentation?

Yet, I’m finding a huge flaw in Watts’s thinking. Take the following passage:

“Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

‘If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,’ Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood.”

Isn’t it blindingly obvious to most people that influential people are not influential because they reach more people but because they are more persuasive with the people they do reach. In terms of the study you would have to model this by making your simulated people more susceptible to imitate trends that are passed onto them by influentials than they would be for trends started by non-influentials. This is loosely analogous to Roy William’s idea of frequency vs. reach: do you want to reach 40 times more people or do you want to be 40 times more successful at influencing the people you do reach?

This far more accurately models how people actually behave. If a dork does something new or weird, it’s likely to be seen as dorky. But if a cool person does something new or weird, it’s more likely to be seen as cool. Of course, if the idea or new thing is blindingly and obviously cool, then even a dork could start it and everyone would follow (eventually). At that point, it’s not a matter of influentials increasing the reach of the trend per se, but of speeding up the adoption cycle.

Now take this passage:

“No researcher, he points out–including Keller–ever analyzes interactions between specific Influentials and the friends they’re supposedly influencing; no one observes influence in action.”

That’s really not true. For one, Aristotle did a fabulous job at detailing exactly what makes influential people influential.

-Jeff

But if he supposing a chaotic system, as seems the case, then he may end up proving what he initially appeared to have disproven: that in fact there are Influencers — just not the ones we might pre-characterize that way — and that it’s not a finite discrete set of them but more of “straw that broke the camel’s back” approach (that is, that there’s some point — possibly indeterminable — at which the effect kicks in but no way to know a priori what the point is and that it changes in a structure unpredictable way. That’s classic Chaos theory.