The Old Time Marketing Music — wisdom from direct marketing gurus, offline and on — is that hot-hot-hot trends get kick-started by an Elite Crew of Early Adopters (like the rebirth of Hush Puppies among NYC hipsters that brought the comfort shoes back from near-death in 1994 to 5,000 percent sales).

Another Old Time Marketing Motif is that fashion and lifestyle trends are birthed by big-name celebrities, like Madonna long ago … a simple Italo-American song-and-dance girl who suddenly and explosively hit the pop charts. And made steel-tipped bras at dance raves all la moda.

Ferggitabout it, says a paraphrased Duncan Watts, an Australian digging in global trendsetter marketing mines in New York. One of Watts’ current corporate social marketing clients is Yahoo!

The viral trend-marketing machine is NOT the product of an elite few, even in celebrity-fixated commercial worlds, says Watts. According to Duncan Watts, trends spread far more democratically in a “six degrees of separation” fashion among average Janes and Joes. And they spread less like viruses than forest fires.

There! The glove that slapped the cheeks of Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point, is on the floor. The faces of admen magicians, who rode the Key Influentials horse from Madison Avenue print ads to Burson-Marsteller’s E-Fluentials (the whiz-kid Internet advertising term), now sting. This, friends, is a throw down!

There is no way I can summarize Duncan Watts’ virtualization experiments on trends and how viral marketing really works. Nor can I point-counterpoint the pushback Watts gets from Old Time Marketing Gurus, delivered through smiling clenched teeth at conferences or in carefully worded disagreements at marketing skull sessions. (One music executive calls Watts’ work “bullsh*t.”)

You can read about the academic experiments and bloody professional carnage for yourself in Fast Company’s excellent article by contributing editor Clive Thompson at <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html>, titled, Is The Tipping Point Toast?  Duncan Watts speaks for himself in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times and his new book titled, Six Degrees.

All I want to suggest here is that the next Big Thing, the next fashionista trend or hobby or product on-fire may be sitting in your inventory. And, if Duncan Watts is right, the trend-tripping fire-starters are not ensconced in some bicoastal fashion editor’s e-Rolodex or among the Influential Few. The viral/fiery market launchers may be:

Sitting in your own customer databases,

Showing up as Return Customers in your log files and web analytics,

The few but well-connected who frequently pass along your web specials, from that Email This Page To A Friend button you so smartly put on your site.

The reason Duncan Watts started tossing grenades into the gentle green fields of classic marketing wisdom is this: “The Internet has cranked up the pressure to show a return on advertising dollars, spawning incipient panic at agencies worldwide.”

(Clive Thompson in “Is The Tipping Point Toast?”)

Now, where did we put those log files, web analytics and our customer support team’s reports??