For the past five years, anyone in the communications business has been busy trying to identify and connect with the 10% of their stakeholders that my friend Ed Keller and his co-author, Jon Berry call The Influentials. Their arguments make sense: if you engage those who do the influencing, it stands to reason that others will be influenced by what they have to say. Or does it?

Fast forward to last September. We held a roundtable with a number of staff and industry notables, and it was there that I was introduced to the thinking of Duncan Watts by Max Kalehoff who was at that time, the head of marketing for Nielsen Online. (Note -- The output from the session is a white paper authored by our own Jonny Bentwood, entitled Distributed Influence. That paper alone has spawned a fair amount of blog chatter over the past week, and I’ll be posting about that soon.).

At any rate, Max clued me in that Mr. Watts advocates for a reduction in narrowcasting our efforts against influencers in favor or a return to marketing to the masses – those who are easily influenced. Guy Kawasaki just wrote a great post about it. And a number of folks I respect including Hugh McCleod and Karl Long have since weighed in on the discussion.

Here’s my add to the conversation: we don’t live in an either / or world; imho, a smart, balanced approach focused on those you know will improve your odds of success. But what must change is the nature of your approach. If you’re trying to connect with your “influentials,” you’d better invest the time to get to know them on a personal level. And if you’re trying to connect with your “masses,” you’d better get to know what makes them tick incredibly well.

Sadly, the majority of marketers / communicators buy into the need to change where they spend their money, but not how they spend their money. Today, the approach we take matters as much or more than the target or the delivery. Mutual respect and collaborative problem solving are at the root of what both the average AND influential person wants in a relationship with marketers. And what they want will carry the day over what we want from here on out.