Malcom Gladwell is an incredible writer. His prose are so simple to read. Gladwell does a great job of walking his reader down a psudo-scientific path to reach a predestined conclusion.

The problem is that his theories are mostly just feel good bullshit that do not stand up to experimental scrutiny. Intuititively, I sensed this when reading his book. But here we have someone who’s actually done some experimental research to blow the whole “connectors” crap out of the water:

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

This is important for you to understand for viral marketing. Sure, it helps to have your viral picked up by highly visible personas or sites. But it’s far more important to create a meme that wants to go viral.

So for viral campaigns it would seem that it will be much more productive to attempt to emulate the viral characteristics of the content of a meme than it would be to try to emulate the propagation method. IE: spend less time trying to get the perfect Digg submitter and more time making it so that people really want to Digg your shit.

That’s not to say you can’t push your boarderline story over the top with the help of an aggressive social media network: you can. But at least for social media and viral ROI, you’re better off focusing the bulk of your efforts on the meme.