Apr 24

Written by: Myra Norton
4/24/2010 1:59 PM

So back to the AdAge article featuring Duncan Watts.  Did you see that beautiful truth?  It’s in the following paragraph:

 

 “…Mr. Watts set up a web page of unknown music bands and purposefully reversed the popularity of songs as rated by the users to the site. He found that influence can indeed be engineered, as his experiment showed the more popular a song was ranked (however falsely) led to more downloads than it would otherwise have gotten.

'But the problem with doing that, we found, is the more you falsely rate, the less valuable the marketplace becomes,' he said. "There were fewer overall downloads when you faked the popularity of songs.'"

This is one of the primary tenets behind our work – once you have identified the voices that matter to your audience, you listen to them.  You don’t try to engineer them or force them to articulate your message.  You partner with them so that the message you deliver jointly is real and true and adds value to the market.  You can’t fake that.  If you do, your popularity will decrease just like the number of downloads…

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