Are influencers overrated? New Study questions effectiveness of targeting “hubs”
gsb.stanford.edu
gsb.stanford.edu
This is an assumption - and I'd be interested to see what gets found when it is tested. Influencers are critical, but are they detectable in the degree of a social network graph?
I know a couple of people whos opinions would cause me to change my actions. I don't know if I'm friends with them on a social network, which I mainly use to keep in contact with close friends. The highly connected nodes in a social network could very easily be people who are the social equivalent of town criers rather than the social equivalent of the town mayor, or local matriarch/patriarch, who wield actual social power and validate or invalidate "what everyone knows". In that case, seeding them preferentially isn't all that different from seeding random people.
Societies can do an exceptional job of hiding who actually has final say on what are and are not the valid opinions. They are not the people who talk the loudest, or most frequently.
So on the one hand, one might expect that I have influence just due to network position; but really, I've just been talking to the people I figure would know the most among these networks' topics.
Now that we know it happens, having plausible deniability will only spread a culture of distrust on social media sites.
Then again, is that really a bad thing? Humans using their electronic presence as billboards really is some dystopian cyberpunk fodder.
I’m sure with a bit more effort one could compile a long list of social behaviors warned against by literature that social media sites directly implement.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stor...
DXracer chairs have heavily targeted twitch streamers and I think that’s the main reason behind their success, because they are really expensive and uncomfortable, yet every teenage room of every colleague of mine houses one.
Of course that’s completely anecdotal, I just couldn’t help laughing at my own daughter when she bought hers. Because it’s a really horrible product with an insane price tag that only sells because everyone has one.
Later on I saw one in a Twitch video and I just figured they also found it a nice chair. Funny that the directionality may have been reversed!
Interesting and I like it, though it conflicts some with previous studies I have seen where introducing new concepts through someone low in pecking order results in dramatically slower spread than if it starts with someone high in pecking order.
Also, there is a lot more to the article than that one point.
One study I recall seeing introduced something like gum drops to primate groups. If the alpha male was given them first and liked them, this became the hot new trend for the entire group in just two hours. When introduced via the lowest ranking member, after two years it had only gotten to about half the group.
I've read a bunch of stuff over the years and enjoyed the writings of Frans de Waal, among others.
Feels like its also why news/journalist hubs aren't required as they once were. Other than for attention mining which seems like a unsustainable temporary glitch in the system.
Also, context is everything. A social graph is not a flat structure. This work, for instance, https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03826, shows that how consensus is formed and spreads across an agent population depends heavily on how different network types overlap.
I also remembered this work on how rare scale-free networks are rare in the wild: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400
There is no way in hell I will get the message across as effectively as if I have an influencer spread it. This should not even be a question. If I have a story and I tell it to 7 people at random and convince them to spread it vs. convince Paul Graham to spread it - no contest.
We just did a test with one influencer (6M followers on Twitter) to promote our products - bang for buck way better than advertising.
The connection asymmetry (good influencer has magnitudes more connection) and trust/influence (I trust/believe information coming from PG) are important. It is however hard work finding good influencers, and just having a lot of followers does not mean a thing if they are not engaged etc... But worth it.