Posted by This is not a post about when social media hits the Tipping Point; rather it’s some initial thoughts on part of Malcom Gladwell´s theory and who in social media it applies to.
Said from the beginning – I would like your comments and thoughts on this – so please while reading, prepare yourself to leave those valuable thoughts.
At Mindjumpers, we have for a while now been looking into the first part of the Tipping Point theory, the part of how things go viral, not through the quantity of people, but through the quality.
Malcolm Gladwell describes (in short) the three different types of people who individually and in with the right context at the right time make things go viral.
The Connecter – a great networking person, who is connected to a bunch of people, these types of people are the reason why we are all connected by six degrees of separation, according to Gladwell.
The Maven – the persons you just listen to, because you know they are experts on the area they are talking about, experts is actually not even the right word, they are beyond.
The Salesman – the person that with fire and enthusiasm can sell or convince you of anything.
Now Gladwell’s theory got published back in 2000, before the revolution of social media. And this is also what makes it so interesting to me – the theory must have changed in some ways, or made even more relevant than ever.
With social media, we see close to ordinary people on Twitter with 30,000 followers and celebs with more than 2,000,000 followers. On Facebook it varies from person profiles with 200 to 5,000 friends (the limit for a personal profile), but we also see people with less than interesting fan pages having more than a million members.
So the world is more connected than ever, the amount of ideas, sounds, videos, articles etc. is larger and spreading faster. Does the same theory apply, or has the long tail theory taken over?
Here’s What I Think
I think the same theory applies, I think social media have put a rocket up in the ass of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory. We see people on Twitter getting a shitload of followers, but do people listen or share? Some say that the average twitter can expect less than 5% of it followers to retweet your posts (if you’re lucky) – now that does not start something viral, only 1 out of a million times. But looking at my own little area of interest, social media, and looking at who can actually create viral spreading, the above mentioned theory still applies.
Take a guy like Chris Brogan – he is a great salesman, he is enthusiastic about his topics, but most importantly, he knows how to sell his messages. Take the bloggers from Mashable or TechCrunch, I would call them mavens – I instinctly trust what they write because they seem like people who live and breathe for what they write about.
For the connecters I am more in the dark, because a true connecter lives his life for building his network, he knows the people in his network and the person brings people together in the network. I do see people on Facebook and Twitter with a lot of friends or followers, but they often seem more like the collector of people than the genuine connecter types. Seth Godin is one of the people striking me as a connecter, if you get involved in his network, make contact with him, he (from his own writing) will reply you. He seems to have a genuine interest in the people he connects with.
Now when any of the above mentioned says something, writes an article or shares an idea, people spread it – it will go viral in some way or the other and it will do so incredibly fast. I read in ‘The Stories of Facebook, YouTube & Myspace – the people, the hype and the deals behind the giants of web 2.0” by Sarah Lacy, that the three guys behind YouTube, in the beginning were sitting in their basement, trying everything to get the word out about YouTube – even ads in the paper. But it was a combination of the the video “where the hell is Matt” (great content) and an article by the editor of TechCrunch that kick started the hype of YouTube.
I will do more research and work more on this subject, but first I would love if you would share your thoughts with us on the matter.
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It seems to me that most things that go viral do so on YouTube not Twitter or Facebook.
It also looks like it is the recommendation system not networks that decides when or if a clip goes viral .
Well, isn’t it just a matter of accelerating things? So, technology increased the numbers and speed; getting connected to a lot of people is easier for traditional non-connectors, getting access to mavens got a whole lot easier (I was befriended by Malcolm Gladwell, not the other way around – doubt that would be the case without social media…). The formal ways of getting acquainted informally with more – that is: social media – sure has done a lot to viral phenomena and in that sense followed the Tipping Point theory.
What strikes me however is that the assumptions have changed; does it any longer make sense to have networks of only 200, when examples show that by using apps like Facebook and Twitter people are capable of having increasingly larger networks? One could easily say that this kind of “network” is not having the same value as interpersonal ones before the advent of social media – but I beg to differ, as social media to a very large extent is able to grasp being interconnected in a different way than required in “the old days”.
@ rhrbjorn and Christian, thanks for your comments.
@rhrbjorn i think that the word viral is often misunderstood, just because a video gets a lot of views, does not make it viral. Viral is things (a lot more than films) spreading from people to people. A lot of views generated on youtube through placement on the front page of youtube, is just the same as pushing your video through a broadcasting channel. Looking at a site like http:/viralvideochart.com , you will see that the videos are not rated by number of views but rather number of tweets and blog posts about and with the video.
But its an interesting subject, and its a subject I will write a more thorough blog post about soon.
@ christian, I do agree on the first part, its what I call “social media is a rocket up the ass of the theory”.
Here in the beginning its hard to see how we ass individual can grasp that we can be connected through networks to a larger sum off people than ever before – its a very interesting subject.
Malcolm also befriended me, but I suspect that profile to be fake.
And for the last part of your comment I really agree
I’d say that the theory fixts very well to the long tail, since that tail suggest a smaller audience anyway – so yes, it’s not the masses but the right combo of people to spread the word.
But i think rethinking of the concept of spreading is needed, since we still think of that as to “spreading to the masses” – but what type of mass are we talking about when looking at the long tail?
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