Influencers? Forget about them.

Are you obsessed with finding “influencers” for your brand or journalism?

Forget about it. It’s a fiction, an seductive idea that science does not support – according to a recent post on the Harvard Business Review:

Duncan Watts, a researcher at Microsoft who co-created one of the most important models of how social networks function, says, “The influentials hypothesis is a theory that can be made to fit the facts once they are known, but it has little predictive power. It is at best a convenient fiction; at worst a misleading model. The real world is much more complicated.”

It’s worth reading to the end of Greg Satell’s piece on influence – because there are some gems at the end about how to really improve the chance of something going viral.