The Theory of Innovation Diffusion and How it Applies to Political Blogging

Marketing types take notice! Your opinion leaders have been identified for you. But first….a little about innovation diffusion.

Innovators as defined by Everett Rogers are those individuals who are ventursome, educated, use multiple sources for information and have a greater propensity to take risk. Early on, this theory was applied to those who use multimedia outlets to gain their information, a cross breeding of various television news sources, newspapers, radio, magazines, etc… basically those who sampled in an effort to find the truth. (at least as it applied to the news). These individuals would then become opinion leaders and disseminate the information that they had developed among their colleagues and friends.

Those that adopted the beliefs of the early innovators are called “early adopters”…go figure. These people would then further disseminate the information to others leading to early majorities, late majorities and finally laggards. The adoptation of these concepts in terms of numbers of individuals would appear as a bell curve.

Bloggers have been fairly misunderstood by the media in general, but it is simple a matter of people who are either innovators or perhaps early adopters with access to computer technology using a new media to disseminate information and grow a culture of acceptance among the masses. In fact, bloggers have been doing such a good job of this lately, that they are beginning to influence the mass media (along with the general population) and that is the point of it all.

Some folks have begun to harness these opinion leaders via mass blogging sites (think Daily Kos) and advertising sites (think Pay Per Post). Individual opinion leaders can make the decision to keep themselves “pure of thought” or commit themselves to the dissemination of other ideas. Those that choose to participate in the dissemination of other ideas move themselves down the innovation food chain and are more likely to become early adopters as opposed to innovators.

Original thought is tough to come by, but it is out there. Whether it is in the adoptation of new technology, political thought processes or cream cheese. (Yeah, I like the new jelly swirl stuff on my bagel).

Back to current politics for a moment. For those of you old enough to remember Vietnam, it took many years for public opinion to turn against the war. The drumbeat for change was led by college students, the youth and some mass media outlets who posted death counts on the evening news.

Today, with the rapid advance of technology, opinions against the war are being moved in dramatic fashion. This ultimately may change the very nature of warfare when it is being waged by Democracies into what needs to be very fast decisive victories with low casualties. I think Clinton understood this when war was waged in Yugolslavia by air. This was a very fast military victory without casualty to Americans. A blueprint for the future of warfare, and a frightening one.

There may also be implications for opinion leaders (aka bloggers) out there as in the past opinion leaders were a bit challenging to locate, although it could be done by assumption. For example, it would be assumed that a gourmet cook would be an opinion leader on the best cooking knives. Bloggers readily identify themselves, and this could lead to some danger for political bloggers in certain societies, perhaps even the US in the future. (In other words, prepare to have your Vonage tapped…lol)

I will end the post here as I am going off on a tangent, but I will leave a couple of links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.....nnovations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_leadership

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld