Change

Despite their popularity, influencers do not drive social change.

Conventional wisdom holds that a marketing message requires an endorsement by a celebrity or influencer. Advertisers believe a popular or famous person reaches a wide audience and shapes its behavior. However, now that social media can give researchers detailed data for tracking how social behavior changes, they’ve learned that social norms don’t go viral along the same paths that memes or messages travel.

Highly connected individuals are less likely to adopt an innovation or new norm early in its life cycle because they wait for a critical mass of other users to render it acceptable. This phenomenon is called the “coordination problem” – in short, new behaviors are compelling only when a sufficient number of people you know adopt them. Influencers adopt new behaviors late because they are inhibited by “countervailing influences” – the people in their networks who haven’t yet accepted the innovation. The counterintuitive reality is that social change and innovation propagate more swiftly on the periphery of networks, among small groups – like start-ups and community...