‘Influencing the influencers’ is fast becoming one of those really annoying phrases that I hear a bit too much at the moment.

I have a number of problems with this statement. First of all it suggests that there is a one size fits all, Holy Grail of a strategy and that is to appeal to the cool, ‘hype connected people’. You know, you infect the select few that have a blog and are on Twitter and hey presto, you have yourself an epidemic.

I’m a different strokes for different folks kind of guy so I don’t really fall on either side of the Gladwell or Watts fence, but I have to say, Watts is largely underrepresented in marketing column inches/blog posts/tweets. Whilst Gladwell champions the ‘law of the few’, Watts suggests things are more random and that a middle range of connectivity (mass market) is more effective than those groups who are highly connected i.e. some groups can be too highly clustered, connecting to each other and not across other groups in the population, hence things don’t spread.

Think of Susan Boyle. This didn’t spread because of the few and I don’t believe that 5 years ago she would have been able to have got the exposure she did this year. Five years ago she may have got some good figures on Youtube, but the very thing that catapulted her to stardom was how media channels and distribution mechanisms, shared and overlapped with each other like never before. The same is true with MJ’s recent departure. Stuff needs to move between the small hyper connected to the large moderately connected. From the online to the offline. It wasn’t a handful of viewers that told their friends about it on Facebook, it’s much more complicated than that. Media just didn’t work together as it does now.

Whilst age old, I always thinks of Fallon’s Cadbury’s Gorilla case study. They created the first 90 second TV spot with the web in mind. Knowing that people would be searching for it on the web, as soon as it aired it was on Youtube. They didn’t ‘seed’ it before hand, or give a sneak preview to a select group of influencers. They went straight for the heart of the network that they want it to end up in.

It’s all very well identifying the few people who are believed to be the influencers but it’s irrelevant if they are not connected either directly or indirectly to the rest of the population. This is a fundamental point, that is fundamentally ignored and something we need to try and design for. So when someone says you we need to influence the influencers, ask them ‘who are they really?’ And ‘then what are you going to do next?’