Sorry, Malcolm. You’re still on the hot seat. I was initially planning to call this An Apology To Malcolm Gladwell: Your Book Isn’t Crap After All. I was inspired by news of amazing work in the field of social media analytics — news that suggested that real Influentials were finally captured “in the wild.”

That was before I dug deeper. The facts are that some cool data mining techniques are helping one company leverage their own “Influentials” (Gladwell calls them Mavens), but the work isn’t scalable to other industries. The only thing we can say for sure about these Influentials is they’re helping someone half a world away pick up more cell phone minutes. Here’s the research that got me so excited.