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Duncan Watts first came to the marketing world’s attention in 2003, when a New York Times article positioned the Columbia University professor as the anti-Malcolm Gladwell. While Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point laid out an entertaining theory that fads like Hush Puppy shoes and the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood spread because of groups of people called influencers, Watts has argued that that model is deeply flawed. Watts, now a research scientist with Yahoo, charges that influencers have been poorly defined and that scientific data show you’re just as likely to spread a message or product by targeting a random group of consumers as you would by going after so-called influencers.
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