Duncan Watts and spreading messages through networks

Cesar Brea was in our offices the other day. A former colleague, Cesar was most recently a Global Practice Leader at Marketspace Global (part of the Monitor Group). So what did we talk about? Social networks of course and more specifically Duncan Watts research on how trends spread.

Duncan contradicts some of the more traditional research arguing that how much an influencer a specific node is matters a lot less than earlier thought. It doesn't matter what the composition of the network is. Trends are just as likely to spread through networks full of random, everyday people as they are through networks sprinkled with "influencers." This flies in the face of some earlier research by Ed Keller and Jon Berry that they highlighted in their book, The Influentials. It also contradicts the The Tipping Point premise that Malcolm Gladwell outlined in his first book.

Analyzing email patterns, Duncan Watts discovered that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. His research shows that a slob is just as likely to start a huge trend as a well-connected person is. But that's not all. Duncan has developed a new technique for propagating advertisements virally. Apparently, this technique can quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people and ignoring the influentials. Called Big Seed Marketing, it combines viral and mass marketing into one strategy. You can read more about it in his Harvard Business Review article.

My take? Based on the research I've seen and been a part of, Duncan seems more right than the others. Just by looking at information sharing patterns on social networks, one can see how the centrality of the node matters more than who the actual node in a network is. For an interesting Duncan Watts paper, read The New Science of Networks which was published in the Annual Review of Sociology. Also read the recent Fast Company coverage.