Popularity and Opinion Leaders

In their paper, Easley and Kleinberg discuss how information cascades can depend on a small number of initial decisions in the population. They use the Harry Potter books for an example and pose the question: Would the Harry Potter books be as popular if we could go back in time to when the books were released and replay the situation again. I think it is a valid question and one that provokes a lot of thought from the reader. I found the question to be very interesting because as has been the case in the past, the best technologies, books, movies, etc. do not always garner the most popularity. The Harry Potter books are well written and entertaining but so are many other books that most people have never heard of. In order to achieve the overwhelming popularity that the books received, many events had to go the right way for J.K. Rowling, but how did these random events lead to success?

Easley and Kleinberg discuss these initial random events that have a huge impact but they do not go into too much detail. After reading the paper I was left wondering how these random events lead to popularity. I personally believe that the key to something gaining popularity is having these initial events gain the attention of opinion leaders. As Rogers discussed in a paper that we read earlier, an opinion leader is someone that is able to informally influence others. The two-step flow model for network diffusion is that opinion leaders get information and then spread the information to less active people in the network. If a good book like one of the Harry Potter books reaches opinion leaders early on, talk of the book will diffuse through the network and gain a great deal of popularity. If the book had failed to reach opinion leaders early on it could have ended up being a book read by a narrow audience. Easley and Kleinberg discuss the importance of reaching a critical audience size as a result of the initial events but I would argue that having an audience of opinion leaders is more important than having an audience of a certain number. In order for a something like a book to continue to gain widespread popularity, it must have a significant amount of opinion leaders in its audience and not just a large number of people.