We can all be Influentials
“Influentials don’t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.”
-Duncan Watts, Yahoo! researcher and network-theory scientist
You might read this fascinating article from Fast Company on Watts’ theory of viral success that runs counter to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Ed Keller and Jon Berry’s The Influentials, and you might return to your tumblr Dashboard think about the work that’s being done at Davidville PARC and draw your own parallels. I’m just saying.
Further reading:
“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. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
