I'm currently reading  Prof Cialdini's  book on persuasion  due to  a sad realization that  in human terms, as applied to an office , that the  medium is often the message.  

  Recall that Fed Ex ad  the manager reiterated the same suggestion that had just "died"  but  added a little paralinguistic flair at the end of the sentence which brought all the little monkeys to attention? That's one of the  situations I  want to create first time around. What has that to do with  Influence though?

There's this idea  that there's  this group of trend setters that tell you how to eat, play,work and vote and that you only need to get this select group of people and  you're assured a successful product launch.  It's a nice idea but as Duncan Watts suggests

"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."

From observation alone we could deduce that  but it's nice that his experiments match this.  E.G if influence was a certainty why are so many attempts to create it met with  a collective shrug?   It's a long article but within it Watts  demonstrates  why the "influentials" as a part of marketing doesn't stand up to examination while still allowing for the possibility that his idea may be incorrect .  That's one stage further than the  'this works, so there' crowd.  Realistically it's more the "we want it to work this way crowd" which is another point well made in the article. 

Economics has pretty much failed in a similar attempt by attempting to predict what people want, when they want it and how much the will pay.  Thankfully the Austrian school is smarter taking a view that you  can't rely on people to do what they say they will do so wait till they act first.  I bring that up since it seems to account nicely for the  20/20 hindsight in creating "influentials"   but in the relative scarcity of using them to anyone's advantage.

Is the Tipping Point Toast? -- Duncan Watts -- Trendsetting