You might expect our sales to skyrocket. They did not. If anything, our sales rank was lower in the 24-hour period after her tweet than before. We didn't sell a single extra copy.
This is not surprising. Online networks may be good for transmitting information, but they are usually not conduits for behavior change.
Although our research shows that obesity, happiness and even divorce can spread in networks between close friends, there is little evidence that behaviors spread between the tenuous relationships people have online.
On September 30, we mentioned this Twitter experience at a conference held in Washington by the American Legacy Foundation on the use of online networks to foster smoking cessation. It's very tough to quit smoking. But online networks connect motivated smokers to each other, and they seem to work.
Although the audience laughed when we showed them a slide with Milano looking grimly at our sales figures, one of the attendees thought that something was not right.
Susannah Fox of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project argued that if someone else, someone really influential, someone such as media mogul Tim O'Reilly, had sent the tweet, there might have been a different outcome.
So we contacted O'Reilly, and he graciously agreed to a little experiment.
On October 1, he too sent out a positive tweet about "Connected" that included a link to Amazon.com to his 1.5 million followers. This time, our sales rank did bounce a bit, but we estimate that we sold just one or two extra books. Given the number of followers he has, that's just a little better than the odds of getting struck by lightning. The mogul beat the actress, but not by much.
