
Are influencers overrated? New Study questions effectiveness of targeting “hubs” - anigbrowl
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/are-influencers-overrated
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roenxi
> "Find people who hold the most influence, typically those who sit at the
> center of a social network"

This is an assumption - and I'd be interested to see what gets found when it
is tested. Influencers are critical, but are they detectable in the degree of
a social network graph?

I know a couple of people whos opinions would cause me to change my actions. I
don't know if I'm friends with them on a social network, which I mainly use to
keep in contact with close friends. The highly connected nodes in a social
network could very easily be people who are the social equivalent of town
criers rather than the social equivalent of the town mayor, or local
matriarch/patriarch, who wield actual social power and validate or invalidate
"what everyone knows". In that case, seeding them preferentially isn't all
that different from seeding random people.

Societies can do an exceptional job of hiding who actually has final say on
what are and are not the valid opinions. They are not the people who talk the
loudest, or most frequently.

~~~
philipov
Twitch.tv streamers who get live audiences in the 10k+ range are most
definitely detectable in the degree of a social network graph.

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pizzazzaro
When we _know_ that these so-called "influencers" are bought and paid for? It
really reduces their effectiveness.

Now that we know it happens, having plausible deniability will only spread a
culture of distrust on social media sites.

Then again, is that really a bad thing? Humans using their electronic presence
as billboards really is some dystopian cyberpunk fodder.

~~~
davemp
Social media is really wild right now. Twitter verified symbols are almost
exactly Dr. Seuss’s star belly sneetches. [1]

I’m sure with a bit more effort one could compile a long list of social
behaviors warned against by literature that social media sites directly
implement.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stor...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories#Stories)

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eksemplar
I don’t think targeting a single influencer is really that valuable, but
targeting a platform seems to work really well.

DXracer chairs have heavily targeted twitch streamers and I think that’s the
main reason behind their success, because they are really expensive and
uncomfortable, yet every teenage room of every colleague of mine houses one.

Of course that’s completely anecdotal, I just couldn’t help laughing at my own
daughter when she bought hers. Because it’s a really horrible product with an
insane price tag that only sells because everyone has one.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
For a different anecdote on the same topic, I had no idea where they came from
until seemingly in a matter of < 6 months they were in stores everywhere. I
tried one and found it quite comfortable - feels like a much more reasonably
priced Aeron (and I'm not so happy about Aeron's nontransferrable warranty
games).

Later on I saw one in a Twitch video and I just figured they also found it a
nice chair. Funny that the directionality may have been reversed!

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DoreenMichele
_Simply seeding a few more people at random avoids the challenge of mapping a
network’s contours and can spread information in a way that is essentially
indistinguishable from cases involving careful analysis; seeding seven people
randomly may result in roughly the same reach as seeding five people
optimally._

Interesting and I like it, though it conflicts some with previous studies I
have seen where introducing new concepts through someone low in pecking order
results in dramatically slower spread than if it starts with someone high in
pecking order.

Also, there is a lot more to the article than that one point.

~~~
vageli
Would you happen to have any links/author names to check out these studies?
They sound interesting.

~~~
DoreenMichele
No, sorry. Stuff I read long ago and a quick Google is not turning it up.

One study I recall seeing introduced something like gum drops to primate
groups. If the alpha male was given them first and liked them, this became the
hot new trend for the entire group in just two hours. When introduced via the
lowest ranking member, after two years it had only gotten to about half the
group.

I've read a bunch of stuff over the years and enjoyed the writings of Frans de
Waal, among others.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal)

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kopo
Cool study. Ant hills don't have influencers. They are still able to run
billion individual colonies. The more connected we get the more we resemble an
ant hill imho in terms of info dispersion.

Feels like its also why news/journalist hubs aren't required as they once
were. Other than for attention mining which seems like a unsustainable
temporary glitch in the system.

~~~
sgt101
Don't they have a queen?

~~~
marcosdumay
Usually more than one. They do not control the colony in any way. That name is
misleading on this context.

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IronSoul
Nice piece of work. The role of influencers in this study is akin to that of
hubs in scale-free network. Diffusion on scale-free and small-world network
have been studied extensively in physics community. It will be interesting to
compare the results from this paper with work on scale-free networks.

~~~
davex32
> Nice piece of work. The role of influencers in this study is akin to that of
> hubs in scale-free network. Diffusion on scale-free and small-world network
> have been studied extensively in physics community. It will be interesting
> to compare the results from this paper with work on scale-free networks.

Also, context is everything. A social graph is not a flat structure. This
work, for instance,
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03826](https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03826), shows
that how consensus is formed and spreads across an agent population depends
heavily on how different network types overlap.

I also remembered this work on how rare scale-free networks are rare in the
wild: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400)

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luka-birsa
Interesting study, but this totally falls under Betteridge's law of headlines.
No, influencers aren't overrated.

There is no way in hell I will get the message across as effectively as if I
have an influencer spread it. This should not even be a question. If I have a
story and I tell it to 7 people at random and convince them to spread it vs.
convince Paul Graham to spread it - no contest.

We just did a test with one influencer (6M followers on Twitter) to promote
our products - bang for buck way better than advertising.

The connection asymmetry (good influencer has magnitudes more connection) and
trust/influence (I trust/believe information coming from PG) are important. It
is however hard work finding good influencers, and just having a lot of
followers does not mean a thing if they are not engaged etc... But worth it.

~~~
auganov
Mind sharing some details? Did you do it through a middleman as part of an
ongoing relationship or just was it a direct one-off? What's the approximate
price range? How elaborate was the advertising itself (as in product
placement, sponsored tweet, a combination of these etc)?

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gsich
Yes.

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dang
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

~~~
gsich
Yes.

