Advertising Age’s “What’s Plaguing Viral Marketing” is an interesting counterpoint to the excitement about viral marketing. Based on conclusions of research that discounts the importance of “influencers”, the article presents the idea that marketers are headed in the wrong direction focusing on finding the few people with disproportionate influence that will transform a campaign into a phenomena. It is true that majority of such campaigns fail to catch on, and too many marketers try to catch lightning in a bottle with me-too tactics that have worked for others without considering that what worked for sneakers might not be right for pet care. But this article goes even farther based on what I am sure is a very elaborate computer model. Tom Hespos gives a good overview on why creative shortcomings might be responsible for most viral campaigns falling short, versus concluding that good ol’ mass marketing is what brands should consider (which is oddly enough what the article seems to suggest). I think there is an even bigger hole in this line of thinking, however, and it is based on the assumption that influencers are solely individuals that interact with one community.

Without knowing the ins and outs of Mr. Watts’ model, and drawing on the experience that we have from creating and planning campaigns that get picked up and spread by users all the time, I can say with confidence that it over-simplifies the real world landscape by a large margin. First, the idea that that an influential individual is “several times” more influential than an average consumer is bizarre, considering that an “ordinary” person may or may not blog, and if they do, their average readership is usually less than 10. Most of the bloggers that marketers target have audiences in the tens of thousands or even millions, which would seem to indicate there is a large magnitude of difference between the model and reality. If this difference is because the research uses a flat, peer-to-peer network as its basis, fine, but the article should have mentioned it. Also potentially misleading is the idea that marketers focus on finding individuals as opposed to groups or communities. A person who’s opinion carries weight in one community might be meaningless in another, or may be regarded as scripture in yet another. Knowing what to place where is often more important than who, and only by having a comprehensive understanding about how different communities (vs individuals) feed each other can marketers change viral from hit-or-miss to a key part of their strategy. Users will embrace great ideas, and the challenge is having them in the right format at the right time, not so much hitting up the same .1% of the population over and over again (or hiring a network of people to chase them, for that matter). I don’t know many people in marketing who really believed that if you found the 10 super-influencers you could collect your check and go home, but it is a stretch to apply an abstract model to a much more complicated environment.