Word of Mouth Advertising: What About the Middle Guys?

CNET recently put out a study that may put to question the traditional notion "that there's a small group of hyper-connected, influential individuals marketers should go after to strike word-of-mouth gold." The findings argue that actually "85% or 90% of the population has significant potential to influence."

The study found that these super-influential individuals had just as many interests as the average user. Unfortunately, the entire study was not available for evaluation, but it seems that this is what that conclusion was based upon.

If there is no further analysis to prove this point, then CNET may not be fully familiar with the diffusion process. These hyper-connected, super-influential individuals are not important because their number of interests. Instead, they're often more valuable for having a less than average amount of interests. Why could this be? Because they are often opinion leaders and information brokers on those topics, and disseminate it with a passion. Because of that, they are simply more influential, and a touch from one of them may be more valuable. They also tend to have a further reach, as users will seek these experts to answer questions or to point them in the right direction. Seeking out information is (at least in part) what the Internet is all about.

So it is a bit naive to say that the middle guys are just as important as the key change agents in the diffusion process. However, the advice to have as far of a reach as possible is not bad advice, but let's not downplay the importance of these key player in word of mouth campaigns.