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Is the Tipping Point Toast? (Duncan Watts thinks Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about tipping points)

26 points by toffer 19y ago

ekanes 19y ago
The article isn't bad, but his counter-experiments aren't very persuasive. I would still argue that influencers are more influential than the average Joe, but I'd agree that hanging your marketing results on reaching them is so important. imho these "how to get the word out there" concepts all circle back to "just build a good product." Provide real value and you win. Most interesting paragraph I found: ""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."
gojomo 19y ago
Only skimmed the Fast Company article, but seems like Watts' research mostly calls into question only the idea of key "super-influencers". Though Gladwell emphasized "influencer" types in his book, the more general "tipping point" idea is that of "critical mass" -- a threshold beyond which a trend becomes self-sustaining. Think of the original context of "critical mass": nuclear reactions. No one fissible atom need be a "super-influencer" -- just getting enough identical atoms in the same space results in the desired chain reaction.
colortone 19y ago
Umair Haque has some good insights here that dovetail with Watts... (Here he is critiquing the assumed "90/10" nature of "user-generated content": that only 10% [or 1% or whatever] of people on a given web service will be active contributers [i.e. "prosumers"]: "The point is simple: assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality. "That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something. "Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future,everyone will prosume the things they love. "In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson. "That lesson is to build a deep enough, powerful enough, durable enough connection - an economic relationship driven by emotion, and nurtured by trust - to ignite the latent spark of prosumption, that as recent evidence tells us, lives within every consumer - whether they're a CEO or a C-grade Myspace chav."

26 points by toffer 19y ago

The article isn't bad, but his counter-experiments aren't very persuasive. I would still argue that influencers are more influential than the average Joe, but I'd agree that hanging your marketing results on reaching them is so important. imho these "how to get the word out there" concepts all circle back to "just build a good product." Provide real value and you win. Most interesting paragraph I found: ""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."

gojomo 19y ago

Only skimmed the Fast Company article, but seems like Watts' research mostly calls into question only the idea of key "super-influencers". Though Gladwell emphasized "influencer" types in his book, the more general "tipping point" idea is that of "critical mass" -- a threshold beyond which a trend becomes self-sustaining. Think of the original context of "critical mass": nuclear reactions. No one fissible atom need be a "super-influencer" -- just getting enough identical atoms in the same space results in the desired chain reaction.

colortone 19y ago

Umair Haque has some good insights here that dovetail with Watts... (Here he is critiquing the assumed "90/10" nature of "user-generated content": that only 10% [or 1% or whatever] of people on a given web service will be active contributers [i.e. "prosumers"]: "The point is simple: assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality. "That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something. "Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future,everyone will prosume the things they love. "In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson. "That lesson is to build a deep enough, powerful enough, durable enough connection - an economic relationship driven by emotion, and nurtured by trust - to ignite the latent spark of prosumption, that as recent evidence tells us, lives within every consumer - whether they're a CEO or a C-grade Myspace chav."