An interesting press release: “Ketchum Partners With Leading Social Network Expert Rob Cross to Enhance Social Network Analysis and Activation for Clients.” The headline mostly says it all. Ketchum is a PR firm, Rob Cross the master of bringing social/organizational network analysis initially to a host of KM practitioners (moi aussi) and since, via the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, to a consortium of businesses.

Through the Network Roundtable, Rob has been able to invest in the development of specialized survey software and methods. To date, the use of the software has been restricted to consortium member companies for their internal use and research. This commercial collaboration is interesting in that it will enable, presumably, Ketchum to use the software with their clients, for example to: “map networks of influencers within their organizations and identify the roles and relative influence of opinion makers within and across such networks.”

Of the many applications for SNA, the one that marketing and PR firms have always been the most interested in is the ability to identify influencers. The attraction to this idea is obvious: find the influencers and you can use them to “spread the word.” Recent research by Duncan Watts has examined this hypothesis and he states:

Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large
cascades of influence are driven not by influentials, but by a critical mass of easily
influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that
influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires
more careful specification and testing than it has received.

I do hope that Rob and his work with Ketchum will help us understand the dynamics of influence even more as the theory is put into practice.