product, they could instead build enthusiasm from the ground up.
‘The whole thing that made it interesting to people in the marketing
world was that they could get Oprah-like impact from small budgets,’
said Watts, who is now based at the University of Pennsylvania.[3]
The idea of such influencers was inspired by psychologist Stanley
Milgram’s famous ‘small-world’ experiment. In 1967, Milgram set
three hundred people the task of getting a message to a specific
stockbroker who lived in the town of Sharon, near Boston.[4] In the
end, sixty-four of the messages would find their target. Of these, a
quarter flowed through the same one person, who was a local
clothing merchant. Milgram said it came as a shock to the
stockbroker to find out that this merchant was apparently his biggest
link to the wider world. If an innocuous merchant could be this
important for the spread of a message, perhaps there were other,
similarly influential people out there too?
Watts has pointed out that there are actually multiple versions of
the influencer hypothesis. ‘There’s an interesting but not true version,’
he said, ‘and then there’s a true but not interesting version.’ The
interesting version is that there are specific people – like Milgram’s
clothing merchant – who play a massively disproportionate role in
social contagion. And if you can identify them, you can make things
spread without huge marketing budgets and celebrity endorsements.
It’s an appealing idea, but one that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. In
2003, Watts and his colleagues at Columbia re-ran Milgram’s
experiment, this time with e-mails and on a much larger scale.[5]
Picking eighteen different target individuals across thirteen countries,
the team started almost 25,000 e-mail chains, asking each participant
to get their message to a specific target. In Milgram’s smaller study,
the clothing merchant had appeared to be a vital link, but this wasn’t
the case for the e-mail chains. The messages in each chain flowed
through a range of different people, rather than the same ‘influencers’
cropping up again and again. What’s more, the Columbia researchers
asked participants why they forwarded the e-mail to the people they
did. Rather than sending the message to contacts who were
especially popular or well connected, people tended to pick based on
characteristics like location or occupation.