Where viral marketing theories are concerned, Surowiecki's concept of the Wisdom of Crowds is up there with Gladwell's idea of the Tipping Point and Taleb's Black Swan Theory. For a more nuanced look at the roles crowds play in disseminating branded content, check out a recent blog post by Professor Henry Jenkins of MIT, one of a series, titled "If It Doesn't Spread it's Dead." Jenkins' post offers an insightful typology of "affinity spaces" and seeks to disprove Gladwell's "influencer" model, which he suggests "has become an article of faith in most discussions of viral media."

Gladwell is just the latest in a long line of marketing theorists who have asserted the pivotal role of the "influencer" in dissemminating branded messages, but using the research of network-theory scientist, Duncan Watts (University of Columbia), Jenkins argues that messages are as likely to get passed on by an average person as they are by a "super-connected" viral conductor. According to Jenkins, "messages move through society from one weakly connected individual to another." This in turn leads to a re-formulation of the key questions. No longer should we be asking, "How do we reach the influencers?" Instead we should be examining how individuals behave in a networked society and "what kinds of social structures best support the spread of content."

Jenkins is clear on one point: "Communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers." His advice to marketers? "Be available for your users in whichever way and every way they deem appropriate, be it through a web site, widget, RSS feed or embeddable video, making the process of finding and communicating with you as easy and enjoyable as possible."

In an article on The Epidemiology of Viral Messaging on Twitter, Dan Zarrella also questions the correlation between cultural inflluencers and viral spread. Having tracked the ReTweets per Follower (RTpF) ratio for 20,000 Twitter users he found that "while users who have more followers get ReTweeted more often, the number of followers plays a less-than-expected role in predicting how widely something is ReTweeted. I expect to find that the actual content of Tweets explains more of its ReTweetability." Controversial findings indeed, undermining conventional wisdom that follower numbers are crucial to viral spread, and re-instating content as king.