Highly connected does not mean highly influential

Influence is hard to measure

Over the last ten years, marketers have often focused on finding people who disproportionately impact how information is spread, often called “influentials.” Much of this thinking was driven by Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book, The Tipping Point, where he describes The Law of the Few. This law states that there are a small number of very influential people in society, and if you reach and influence them, they will influence hundreds, thousands, and even millions of others. Gladwell characterizes “influentials” as highly connected, highly persuasive, and viewed as credible in their field.¹

As we saw earlier, this focus on “influentials” is mostly based on a view of how we want the world to work versus how it actually works. The network in which word of mouth spreads, including all the people, interactions, and communication channels, is generally unobservable because it is so complex. In addition, when we do try to understand it, we only look at messages that did spread, and can’t observe the ones that did not. This complexity has led us to confuse coincidence and correlation with causality.^{2, 3} We look back after an event has occurred, see the most visible person, and assume they wielded the greatest influence.⁴ This is the problem with Gladwell’s Law of the Few. It’s easier to attribute success to an inspirational person, rather than try to understand the complex network in which they are situated.