I sometimes wonder why you would want to work anywhere else in marketing other than social media. It's new, it's exciting, it is online so you have lots of quick data and it's growing in rigour. And as the effectiveness of other channels declines, social media is attracting the attention of sharp research brains. Good stuff! We have discussed the ongoing debate that we (purely for convenience) call the 'Gladwell vs Watts' argument before. Simply put, Mr. Gladwell in 'The Tipping Point' proposed that popular trends are caused by particularly influential individuals who lead their social network's fashions and thinking. This influential idea has led to a continuing class of marketing that focusses on identifying and recruiting these 'Influentials' to spread marketing messages. Mr Watts, using computer models, demonstrated that the existence of a population ready to be influenced is more important to trend adoption and propogation than the presence of 'super influencers'. According to Mr Watts, any of us can be Influencers, given the right social network opportunity and subject. This is not just an academic  puzzle - if Mr Watts is correct the social media marketing challenge is different in kind. Rather than

1. Finding Salesmen or Mavens and moving products and trends 'through' them and their social networks, we must
2. Find or build a network ready to adopt a new trend and start them talking.

We have favoured 2. - admittedly with only intuition as the deciding factor. It now appears they may both be partly right. Life is like that. A recent paper by Paul Dwyer shines some empirical light on the subject; 'Measuring Interpersonal Influence in Online Conversations'. He took 2,165 posts by 15 authors and 23,414 comments from 7,465 commenters on the Unofficial Apple Weblog and; Classified participants by their ability / susceptibility to influence. This was done at the level of their creation or adoption of words used by preceding posts (word resonance) and at a higher level of abstraction, the creation and adoption of themes (theme resonance). This analysis revealed 6 clusters or participant 'types';

• Isolates - neither influencing or susceptible to influence
• Susceptibles - tend to adopt the words and themes of those who post before
• Swing - as in swing voters
• Respected - a large group of people with a good balance of influence and susceptibility
• Influencers
• Authors

(In the context of this particular blog of course. GI = 'General Inquirer' content analysis software) Mr Dwyer then looked at the sequence of participation in conversations as they developed within the blog, to gain insight into what types of participants are most active at different stages of conversation and theme development - what causes 'viral', sort of. He looked at conversations that were successful enough to get to at least 25 comments ... Susceptibles were strongly represented early in these conversations, but were quickly exhausted. Then... "The viral propogation of the initial themes seems carried by a rising proportion of Influencers and a steady proportion of those in the more populous Respected and Swing clusters... echoing Watts&Dodds (2007) speculation that Susceptibles are more important than Influencers in starting viral cascades... [BUT]... the Respected cluster does most of the work propogating new themes..."  (emphasis added). Influencers become increasingly important as new layers of themes emerge as the conversation develops - as concepts are refined by the people in conversation. And Authors are critical in their role of initiating the conversations. Lots to think about here as you set the strategy for your next social media campaign. Still need to find Influencers, but only if they come along with Susceptible and Respected friends? Time for the Susceptibles to be given some marketing respect?