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After seeing Vampire Weekend debut their album at the Virgin Mega Store last night, two friends and I ended up having a long conversation lasting into the wee hours. We were discussing the role that innovation plays in society, and specifically whether or not the value that innovation plays on our global economy is less than it was 100, or 300 years ago.
Our talk reminded me of a few articles I’ve come across recently dealing with brands, influence and social networks
First, Mindset Media recently performed a psychographic a study of Apple users, determining “[Mac users are] more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.” My friend Stowe Boyd, a great Mac evangelizer, has a great post about how his personality fits into this psychographic .
Anyone who works in technology, especially startups or groups innovating in tech, knows that Macs are ubiquitous. However the rise of the Mac as a staple among startups is an interesting phenomenon. Really the Mac (especially based on earlier Mac models) should ‘on paper’ not be as appealing to these demographics as it is. For example, Macs were and still are more expensive than PCs (for startups every penny counts!), also Macs traditionally are not representative/compatible with the computer population at large (most people use IE not Safari, Windows, not Leopard). So how did Apple transition from virtual non-existence, to dominate the tech scene and now begin to recapture major market share? I think it has a lot to do with key influencers, people like Steve Jobs. However, another interesting article found in a recent Fast Company contradicts this.
In, Is the Tipping Point Toast? Fast Company analyzes Duncan Watt’s recent findings around social network analysis. Watts’ suggests that “network influencersâ€� (think Malcolm Gladwell) are actually not important at all in terms of making something viral during a marketing effort. From the article:
“Actually, if you believe Watts, the world isn’t just complex–it’s practically anarchic. In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren’t merely hard to predict and engineer–they occur essentially at random.â€�
Regarding music and the popularity bands, he goes onto say:
“You cannot predict in advance whether a band gets a huge cascade of popularity, because the social network is liable to throw up almost any result…if you rewound the world to 1982, Madonna would likely remain a total unknown–and someone else would have slipped into her steel-tipped corsetâ€�
Hmm. I doubt that very much.
While I understand that Duncan Watts has conducted substantial research, I think he underestimates the role of key influencers, especially in early stages of traction. For example: the Mac has been aided by significant, influential early adopters that have helped to evangelize the product as a “tool for innovation.â€� Apple didn’t just ‘luck’ into it’s current demographic. Influencers like Jobs were instrumental in the branding of the Mac’s “think differentâ€� campaign and in its emphasis on design, an element of appeal to many creatives and people with money.
Even the band I saw, Vampire Weekend, is a great example of the benefits of key influencers. While they have great music, so do many other unknown bands. So how did this crew of four, recently graduated from Columbia University, end of debuting an album at the Virgin Store and selling out the Bowery Ballroom? How have they come to be featured in the New York Times and had reporters follow them on shopping trips to Lacoste? I can guarantee it was through connections first, and music second. They leveraged early key connections that helped get them to a point where PR and word-of-mouth will grow exponentially. Having very influential VCs loving them doesn’t hurt either.
I have been doing a lot of work with Facebook applications over the past few months. Apps are great study in virality. From what I’ve seen, whether or not an app gains traction is not at all random – despite Watts’ research suggesting it should be. For example, identifying key installers with hundreds of friends means an installer can send it to more people. When the same influential person becomes a fan of an app, a percentage of that person’s 500 friends see that they are ‘now a fan’. It’s a much larger reach for a call-to-action. Contrast that influence to a Facebook users who only has 20 friends total. Likewise, Facebook users who are power users are likely to have more people actually visit/see their profiles. Such persons obviously have more “influenceâ€� – it’s the reason Facebook won’t allow people to make money by advertising on their own profiles.
Bottom line: I’m still not sold on Watts’ position.