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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Dear All. I read with some interest the "Is the tipping point toast?" article about Watt's critique of Gladwell influencer "hypothesis". However, I believe they missed the point completely. The work by Watts (Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis) is a computer simulation in which he shows that the most connected people are not responsible for the success or not of a viral marketing campaign. For all of us working with real world experiments this is something well known and I am ready to buy it (I did almost 5 years ago, when I started). Influentials (defined as the most connected) are as relevant as other people, like "bridges" between communities, for example. The problem with the "influentials" hypothesis as is presented in the article is that social connectivity is everything: the structure of the social network around an individual is the only metric used to define an "influential". But this is not true: an influential for example can be a poorly-connected person between two almost isolated communities. How influential is an individual is only set by his role played on the spreading of information (if you think about viral marketing campaign) and not by his social connectivity. Thus "influence" is given by the dynamics of the process, not by the social network close to the individual. For example, in our viral marketing campaigns we have also observed that response time of an individual to information dissemination is paramount to the success or not of the campaign. And other metrics could be implemented (size of the community close to the individual, clustering coefficient of the individual, etc.) The title of the article is also misleading: Tipping-Point is here to stay, the problem is how do we get closer to the tipping point by new techniques to identify influentials Best --------------------------------------------------------------- Esteban Moro Egido | Phone: + 34 91 6248727 Departamento de Matematicas | Fax: + 34 91 6249129 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid | email: [log in to unmask] Avda. de la Universidad 30 | E-28911 Leganes (Madrid) SPAIN | http://markov.uc3m.es --------------------------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.