With N-TEN's Non-Profit Technology Conference coming up in just one month, we thought you might want a little reminder of PICnet’s shenanigans from NTC 2006 in Seattle.

In the world of CRM systems, we’ve played with them all. Internally, we’re fans of the SugarCRM tool for a variety of reasons, none of which I’ll even try to explain here. Well, I will point out one: SugarCRM 5 finally includes an easy to use module builder (something our friends in the Salesforce.com world have had for a while now).

This is the holy grail of online CRM systems which kept organizations like PICnet in the world of offline databases like FileMaker Pro. With our internal tracking of domain names, databases, pipeline and sales, server configurations, etc, we needed something that could pool all this data into one place.

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point has become the marketing world's leading book on understanding how trends ripple through society. In short, one of the cornerstones of Gladwell's thesis is that highly influential individuals disproportionately affect the buying decisions of others in the community. If marketers can focus their efforts on the influentials, they'll reap the returns.

But what if Gladwell got it wrong? What if his interpretation of Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees of Separation experiment was short sighted, and based on a data set that was too small?

Duncan Watts, a research who now does work for Yahoo Research, was interviewed in Fast Company magazine's February 2008 issue. In his interview, he was able to effectively have me question whether or not these influentials really had any more power than the average Joe and Jane.

More importantly for us at PICnet, we have for a long time focused our discovery process on building personas for highly connected individuals for our clients. The goal is to determine what those highly influential individuals in an organization's community want to be communicated with, and to determine the most effective path to doing so in online communications.

If Watts is right, however, the effects of luck and "right place, right time" might be much more influential than our Influentials.