The Tipping Point has tipped
February 2nd, 2008 by DavezillaDuncan Watts, a pioneer in the field of social network math modeling, has some little faith in the Tipping Point theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. As he writes in his latest article for Fast Company:
“We knew 50 years ago that this model was wrong. After the fact, and this is why Gladwell’s book is so beguiling, you see that crime rates dropped or Hush Puppies took off and then you can always find the people with whom it started. […] But if it’s something about them, why aren’t they driving all the other trends? What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the ‘influentials’ but the people who are easily influenced. You might have someone who influences five times as many people as the average, but the total numbers relative to a population are still very small. Almost all of the action is away from the center.”
Tags: influencers, social networking, viral
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
I find this argument intuitive. The question I have is what else those hipsters who “re-discovered” Hush Puppies were into that didn’t become insurgent trends.
Persuasive people + willing/receptive/gullible audience = success. The market to believe in something may be infinite, but it sure ain’t predictable.