I recently read an article in the New York Times that asked the question, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” The author, Duncan Watts, states that cumulative advantage occurs “if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still.” He says that if in fact people do not make decisions independently, but are rather socially influenced, then predicting hits is impossible no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

Duncan writes, “As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors.”

This statement left me asking, if this is true, how can these random fluctuations in popularity be artificially created?

Isn’t this exactly what occurs when people game Digg by faking the popularity of an article, or pre-populating a forum with fake users to make it seem as if social interaction is already taking place?

I can see artificial cumulative advantage being applied to other aspects of social media and link building as well. One example would be pre-populating comments on your own blog, so that when unique visitors come it seems as if there is already an on-going discussion, resulting in your new traffic sticking because visitors will be more inclined to join the conversation. Also, cumulative advantage is often what sparks the rise of social networks (ie. MySpace, Facebook). One of your friends was on MySpace and then another, and then once five friends told you they were on, you decided to join. Additionally, writing or creating “link bait” is in a sense the prediction of a blockbuster, which also relies on cumulative advantage. You hope the initial few people that visit your blog post or website share the link with their friends, who in turn continue to spread it virally.

When you launch your next project, think of how you can create popularity fluctuations of your own in order to increase the chance of your project becoming the next blockbuster.