Idea diffusion and influence

I was prompted to think more about Duncan Watts’s ideas by Sarah Fraser’s comment on my post on influencer communities, and by her post on professor Watt’s theories.

In fact, I’ve just finished reading Watts’s Six Degrees, which was excellent and more accessible (I found) than Barabasi’s Linked. So Professor Watts is top of mind right now.

Here’s where I think the key difference between what Watts says and my practical experience. Watts talks about the role of influencers in the diffusion of ideas. As Seth says, use ‘sneezers’ with influence if you want to crack a market. Watts disagrees that you can predict what ideas diffuse, or even whether you can identify influencers that might make diffusion easier or more likely. It’s pretty much random, according to Watts.

I agree. If you’re trying to use influencers to spread ideas and concepts, then good luck but don’t bet the firm.

My own view is that influencers can be identified, and can assist greatly, in the decision-making process. That is, not whether an idea is spread or not, but whether an idea is adopted in the end. Idea diffusion is part of the process, but it’s just the start. A decision-making process is often a long and time-consuming activity. In the B2B world especially, a decision may take years to emerge. Idea diffusion is necessary, but not sufficient.

I explored this relationship between influence and the decision-making process in the book, and also posted on it (in summary form) here. Idea planting (as I called it) is right at the start of the process, but is relatively low down in the awareness of senior decision makers. Thus idea diffusers (connectors, sneezers, etc) may not be that influential in affecting the ultimate decision. There are a whole bunch of other influencers that intervene after ideas are sown.

Idea diffusion is also important in the process of deciding whether to do something. Do I adopt SOA? Do I need a Web2.0 strategy? Do I need a new car? But it plays less of a role in the subsequent decision of what to buy. Different influencers are in play at this more practical stage, like product reviewers or case studies or implementers.

The only problem I have with Professor Watts’s arguments is that when he doubts the role of influencers in any aspect of life, it doesn’t fit with real world experience and intuition. My guess is that we can all think of people who are influential in certain areas of life. Fitting this experience and intuition into a practical marketing approach is what Influencer Marketing is all about.

What constitutes quality in an influencer?

One of Influencer50’s criteria by which we score and rank influencers is Quality of Impact. But what is ‘quality’ in terms of influence?

Firstly, quality is not an all-or-nothing concept. It might be obvious if an individual has a lot of it, or none at all, but what about the large grey area in the middle?

We use Robert Cialdini’s book (bible?) on influence to provide the framework for our Quality measure. In his discussion on authority, Cialdini poses two questions:

1. Is this person truly an expert (measured by the person’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials to the matter in hand)?
2. How truthful can we expect the expert to be?

We simplify these to ‘Expertise’ and ‘Independence.’

In the book we discuss the relative importance of these two dimensions, and offered the following diagram:

The diagram implies that 100% expertise and 0% independence means that influence is severely constrained. Similarly, 0% expertise and 100% independence also represents low influence. But is this true in the real world?

There are many cases where people have 100% independence and 0% expertise. My own influence on the wine trade is a good example of this (never trust my wine suggestions), and it translates (intuitively) to low influence. But is the converse true? I think I’d rather buy wine from an expert who works for a wine producer, even if they recommend their own wine. In fact, I’d surprised if they didn’t. As long as they’ve declared their interest I know that the advice I’m getting is trustworthy, if qualified.

Back in the real world, can vendors be influence on the market? Absolutely. No-one expects them to be independent, but they can demonstrate their ample expertise, and be influential.

So the relationship between expertise and independence looks more like this:

In other words, you’ve got to have some minimum level of relevant expertise to be influential at all. Independence increases influence, but it is not a pre-requisite for it.

Why links don’t equate to influence

We write about the disconnect between links and influence in the book

But Hugh has a better way of saying the same thing:

I really must learn to draw cartoons…

Tekrati interviews Nick

In advance of Nick’s appearance at the New Communications Forum this week, he was interviewed by Barbara French at Tekrati on the subject of his debate with Paul Gillin. The link is here.

Nick at the New Communications Forum

Paul Gillin wrote a great review of the book, but noted that we were a tad critical of the role of bloggers in the world of influence. This is somewhat at odds with Paul’s stance in his book on The New Influencers.

Paul got in touch and invited us to debate the issue with him at the New Communications Forum
in Sonoma next week. Nick is representing us – should be a thought-provoking event for all involved.

SAP Industry and Influencer Relations blog

Just picked up on Don Bulmer’s blog, courtesy of ARmadgeddon. Don is VP of Industry and Influencer Relations at SAP, and is a welcome addition to the otherwise sell-side blogs promoting greater focus on influencers. That is, Don is a practitioner of what others (me included) are preaching*. We can all learn from his insights.

A couple of things occurred to me when reading his most recent post:

1. SAP has evolved its Industry and Influencer Relations group from its Analyst Relations team. That’s one way of getting there. But not the only way. Influencer50 has clients that have arrived at Influencer identification & engagement from marketing effectiveness, sales effectiveness, PR, product marketing, corporate marketing and a bunch of other activities. That’s not to say that it’s a solution to all problems. Just that Influencers can be useful in a variety of ways.
2. SAP isn’t the first firm to evolve in this manner – there are several others. For example, Wipro has been doing this kind of thing since 2006. We wrote a case study of Wipro for the book.
3. Don says that when SAP identified its business and IT influencers “We were surprised to find that a number of our assumptions on decision making authority and influence were challenged.” That’s completely normal for this exercise – influencers are not obvious, and take detailed and diligent research to identify and rank. IBM’s Information Management group was “shocked” to discover it didn’t know its influencers (again, a case study in the book). So don’t embark on influencer identification expecting it to confirm what you already know.

And thanks, Don, for the link back to this blog.

*Before anyway starts, yes, we do use our own approaches. I’d like to think the book is a good example of what I call Influencer-led collateral…

More on Duncan Watts’ theories

I suddenly remembered, after posting on Duncan Watts’s theories of idea spread and influence (or lack thereof), that Prof Watts currently works at Yahoo!.

Spookily, we included a case study of Yahoo!’s use of influencers in the book. I wonder how Prof Watts is getting on with Yahoo!’s influencer marketing team…

Duncan Watts – influence killer?

There’s a bit of a stir going on regarding Duncan J Watts and his theories on how ideas spread. In particular he’s becoming known as the influencer killer because he says that influencers have no catalyst effect on the spread of ideas. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

I’ve been following his research for about a year, since this was published. But the recent article in Fast Company magazine brings the issue to a head (and I think Clive Thompson has done a great job in raising the relevant issues).

As I see it, Prof Watts highlights some of the basic misunderstandings of influence. There is, frankly, a lot of nonsense and assumption talked about influence. Much of it stems from the Keller & Berry book The Influentials, which states that 10% of people tell the rest of us how to vote, where to eat and what to buy. I loved this book. I’ve read it three times. Nowhere does it say how Keller & Berry came up with the 10% number – why not 9% or 11%, or 1%. It is based on assertion, and the data in the book simply reasserts the 10% assumption. The Influentials is really useful in understanding how people gain influence in society. But it’s not useful in understanding who or where these people might be, or how to get them to influence markets on your behalf.

Another key misunderstanding on influence is that the people with influence are marked out through the roles they play, or the jobs they hold. Or worse, through the degree of celebrity status they hold. The consensus of research shows that we are more influenced by people with expertise than people with celebrity. And we are more likely to be influenced by people we know than by any other group.

Equally influencers don’t influence evenly through a decision process, as I wrote in this post and the book. And influencers aren’t influential in every category – influence is context-sensitive. So an influencer in buying a house may not have influence in buying a digital camera. This should be intuitive, but marketers sometimes get carried away by the promise of influencers that hold the keys to increased sales.

However, it’s clear that influence occurs in markets, and it’s attractive (I say essential) that firms understand how and what this influence is, and who are the conduits of it. So the final misunderstanding of influence is the assumption that it exists only within the consumers themselves. Clearly this is nonsense when you think about it (except marketers don’t tend to think about it). As consumers we are influenced by a host of people who are not (in the roles they play) consumers.

We’re clearly influenced by a range of people in different roles, some local, some national. What we do as decision-makers is to process the variety of influencers and then make a judgement. Not all influencers are successful in influencing every decision.

Consider the process of buying a house, something that most of us will be familiar with. You’ll be influenced by the house vendor and a real estate agent. Both have a vested interest in the transaction, so you do more checks. You’ll be influenced by any people that you know of within the area. You’ll be able to check out whether a ‘neighbourhood watch’ system is in place. You will consult published crime figures, possibly even calling the local police station for advice. You’ll refer to school inspection reports and league tables. Local councils will be quizzed for pending planning applications. The local head teacher may be critically important if the main attraction for the property is its proximity to good schools. Builders and other tradesmen may be asked for quotations for structural work you want to do.

I see this even more pronounced in B2B markets, where we can identify the individual people that influence a specific market segment. These are people that are not particularly obvious but undeniably carry influence in their area of expertise. B2B influence works in a different way to B2C, primary because B2B markets don’t have the word of mouth communication that B2C markets do.

But even in B2C markets we find that influencers in the supply chain and its ecosystem carry the majority of influence, with consumers having limited impact on the market as a whole.

I don’t believe that Prof Watts signals the death of influencers. But perhaps he has hastened the death of much of the nonsense that surrounds the notion of influence.

Book availability

I’m told that the book has sold out at Amazon.co.uk. Which means (lest my ego swell too much) that they only ordered half a box in the first place. Amazon UK is now citing 2-3 weeks’ delay in shipping on orders. (US is unaffected as it’s just launching there this week.)

If you’re desparately awaiting your shiny copy you might want to try Elsevier’s own site. If you quote offer code ASR4 when ordering you get 10% discount and free p&p.

Or you try the myriad of other sites, some of which are listed on the book web site (scroll to the bottom of the home page).

At one point the book was #1 in Amazon’s market research category, and #14 in the general sales & marketing category (just behind Meatball Sundae). But you know how I hate lists…

Marketing’s image problem

In prepping for the CMO Council talk some weeks ago, I centred on a theme based on marketing’s image problem. It struck me that most non-marketers have a pretty poor regard for marketing, somewhere in the region of estate agents, lawyers and car salesmen. 

What also struck me was the irony in the situation. Jeez – if marketers can’t fix their own image problem what chance do their employers/clients have.

When I met Hugh McLeod in 2006 he used this analogy for traditional marketing:

Imagine you’re at a party. A man comes up to you, but instead of introducing himself, he yanks your head back, pulls your jaw down and looks at your teeth. “I’M A DENTIST!” he explains.

(I’ve subsequently plagiarised this analogy in a White Paper and the book.) 

In a party context, most normal people would rather be offered some peanuts and engaged in polite, if trivial, conversation. Why can’t marketing be like this? Why not engage people in a conversation? If you are interesting then they will respond in kind. You can move to a business conversation later, once social niceties are satisfied.

Hugh recently revisited the subject even more succinctly:

(Full post is here.)

The real problem for marketers is the awful image they have within their own firms. At the CMO Council Summit in Berlin, I was amazed at how many of the speakers criticised marketing and marketers (i.e. the audience!) for their lack of ambition and poor perception. “Blowing up the balloons,” was how Malcolm MacDonald termed it. 

Marketing should be the second most important thing a firm does, after serving customers. If marketers are blowing up the balloons, then someone else has to do the effective, productive marketing, typically the sales teams and channel partners. Sales people can spend 40% of their time creating marketing collateral – 80% of “official” collateral created by marketers never gets used.

How are you perceived within your organisation? Are you a future board member or strategic thinker? Or do you blow up the balloons?