Every once in a while Walt Disney teaches us something important. His notion that “it is a small world after all” turns out to not only be true, but a key ingredient to smart marketing.
Stanley Milgram discovered in his now famous 1967 small world experiment in that two random US
Since Milgram’s ground breaking experiment, refinements from a bevy of researchers have empirically proven that the small world phenomenon is real. While debate still surrounds whether the "whole world" is a small world, there is uniform agreement that there are many small worlds within the whole. Popular examples are mathematicians and actors. Mathematicians created the Erdős number to have fun describing their distance from Paul Erdős through shared publications. Elsewhere, three movie fans created the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The fun here is to figure out how many movie connections away (the distance) any actor or actress is from performing with Kevin Bacon. The fun of these games is finding who the hyper-connected people are. Research shows that while many people are six connections away from anyone else, it also shows that there are a few highly connected people out there.
What makes the small world phenomenon meaningful is that certain types of individuals can be as influential as mass media under the right conditions. In the midst of our social networks, there are select people we think of when we need expert help. In turn our experts gravitate to a handful of uber-experts, who appear to know everything about a specific topic. These select few are Mavens. When Mavens speak, people listen. And when Mavens express opinions that “stick” as particularly meaningful, hyper-connected people get the message out, and mass opinions change.
Connectivity is speeding up and morphing with the inventions of email and now blogging, but the fundamental influence of Mavens remain. BuzzMetrics tracks the evolution and impact of opinions in the blogosphere. In a white paper on trans fats, BuzzMetrics illustrates the importance of Mavens with sticky messages. They report how the topic of trans fats evolved from an esoteric subject into a national health craze with no appreciable news coverage, convincing Frito Lay to remove these common artificial fats from their snack foods in less than a year.
Not surprisingly, marketers have been trying to pin down these influencers for some time. However as Feick and Price pointed out in 1987, “targeting mavens with communications may be difficult.” Much research has found mavens to be active media consumers, avidly consuming all media that touches their topics of interest; yet challenging to describe with no discernable geo-demographic characteristics.
Marketers know the value of mavens and have set traps to collect them. Examples abound but mostly involve phone numbers and websites providing free expert information on products and product areas, delving into the art, science, and market pricing for specific topics. After finding the mavens with info-honeypots, marketers try to empanel them. Quality CRM databases identify the mavens and treat them with special care. Intuitive marketers are less formal. They connect with mavens by building them into their social networks. In all cases, marketers check new ideas with their mavens before investing. Clever marketers then leverage their mavens with free merchandise to diffuse new products and positioning to the public before launching advertising and promotions. In the case of new products, marketers also spend excessive attention on early adopters to maintain positive word of mouth.
Online researchers would do well to take note. Instead of using statistically meaningless quota samples, they would provide value in trapping and reporting on category mavens and other important influencers like connectors. These new research panels, like well managed CRM databases, could easily evolve into new high-impact personal media channels. Imagine the value of ready made word of mouth media channels, or better yet auction them off like Google, track their impact with BuzzMetrics, and discover the value.
I strongly agree with the statement issued above. I have done extensive researching on the Maven not to mention Connectors and also the Salesperson. I based my theory from the book "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. It is definately worth the read if you want to know more information about this type of person. I have written a formal thesis statement and essay on the subject another one worth reading.
Posted by: Michael Dawe | January 05, 2007 at 09:59 AM