CEC Insider

According to Time, the best single guarantee of sales success—of any sort—is to get yourself booked on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Communicators will tend to agree, as they’ve spent years building relationships with their own Oprahs: journalists, industry experts, you name it. This approach made total sense in the old world of communication.   But I’m increasingly convinced that it’s not that cut and dry in today’s communication environment. Here’s why:

We live in a highly networked information environment—audiences can now seek out multiple opinions at the touch of a button before they make their own mind up, and they’re increasingly likely to believe “someone like them.”  Both trends we’ve seen for a few years in the Edelman Trust data.

In the past, our job has been to make sure the top of the communication hierarchy gets the right information.  In a network you can’t stop there—it’s all about enabling information “flows”—and that appears to have a whole different set of rules.

A recent article in Fast Company has really influenced my thinking on what those rules are. It tells the story of Duncan Watts—a network theory scientist currently working for Yahoo—who has run all sorts of intensive experiments to determine the factors that make information flow through social networks.  Here’s the background for one experiment where 10,000 people instructed to follow a basic social code:

“Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of ‘infecting’ another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The people in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability—some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe.”

In the end, Watts found that there was no meaningful correlation between the initiator of a message (whether an “influencer” or average joe) and its likelihood of flowing through the network. It was all about the audience, and two things specifically: 1) how susceptible people were to the content (how relevant it is to them?) and 2) how easy it was to persuade people about it (what are their levels of resistance to the information?).

These aren’t new concepts to communicators, of course, but from my conversations with a lot of CEC members, I see an opportunity for the function to make inroads on both points.  For one, I do sometimes get the impression that relevance is something we assume we have.  This reflects a little bit of “proximity bias,” meaning that we assume what is interesting to us is interesting to others.  It also signifies the importance of more objective listening to stakeholders before we communicate (not just monitor penetration after)—something that is much easier now we have social media monitoring at our fingertips. As for spotting people who “buy what you’re selling,” we can all do better at spotting our everyday advocates and making sure they have the information they already want to talk about.

Do you think that we’re over-relying on influencers and getting a message “out,” and not thinking enough about the audience’s likelihood to want to pass it on?