(2008-01-31) Watts Vs Tipping

Duncan Watts thinks the Tipping Point was wrong about Viral spreads. But Watts, for one, didn't think the Gate Keeper model was true. It certainly didn't match what he'd found studying Network-s. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Stanley Milgram experiment on a massive scale.... 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... 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... Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."... And even Watts, for all his bombast, can be quite self-critical. "My models might be totally wrong," he says cheerfully. "But at least I'm clear about what I'm saying. You can look at them, and tell me if you disagree. But none of these other thinkers are actually clear about what they're saying. You can't tell if they're wrong."... For his part, Malcolm Gladwell is diplomatic. "Duncan Watts is exceedingly clever, and I've learned a great deal from his research," he emailed me. "In the end, though, I suppose that I feel the same ways about his insights as I do about Steve Levitt's disagreements with me over the causes of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day--when we put all those pieces together--maybe we'll have a shot at the truth."... In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer--they occur essentially at random... The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing.

Guy Kawasaki agrees with him.

Others disagree. In focusing on these two, he denies the rich and admittedly more disciplined, decades-long research that has been conducted by EverettRogers, Geoffrey Moore, Keller & Fay, Emmanuel Rosen and more recently in practice through companies like Yahoo (ironically his own study sponsor), HP and Dell.

Jason Kottke has been following this work for awhile.

I think the meta-question is where this process fits into a relevant process (relevant to whom?). It's one thing to pass along messages that are just intrinsically funny/whatever: there's no cost or even action to consume, beyond consuming the message itself. Does "successful" Super Bowl Advertising sell more product? Even more important to me is how does someone with a relatively small amount of SmallCo money apply this idea in a profitable way? And what if your target audience is inherently small in the first place?

I've never seen the Forward Track tech (from Eye Beam) in use before.