Cockeyed Optimist

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a brief review of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

I have read all the way through this book more thoroughly now and found that he covers topics that make very interesting reading for any serious blogger, like me, who is interested in what can be used as a tipping point to bring on a virtual epidemic, so as to drastically increase sales or to promote an idea.

One of the epidemics he mentions was the sudden increase of popularity of Hush Puppy shoes, a product that had become boring and had been relegated to very uncool status. He has many other engaging examples of sudden broad changes that are not easy to explain.

His thesis is that the phenomena that trigger such changes depend on several factors:

• Special people: who he calls ‘connectors’, ‘mavens’ and ’salesmen’;
• The ’stickiness factor’; and
• The power of context.

Now anyone who is blogging seriously is well on the way to becoming a Connector. This is someone who is a good communicator, but, more importantly, one who knows lots of people and talks to them freely, so that ideas can spread. So, in our case as bloggers, this is to do with links and favourites.

So, what is a Maven, in Gladwell’s terms? He quotes the following definition told him by Linda Price, a professor of marketing:

“A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests. They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you ….”

What this tells us is that a successful blogger should aim to be a Maven, too, as well as a Connector. You should be posting about topics that you are really enthusiastic about, so you can pass them on to others.

The third type of special person involved in a tipping point is the Salesman. Gladwell’s definition is a little different from the normal one; let me quote him:

“Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people — Salesmen — with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.”

So these are the three types of skill that are needed, so the successful blogger must either emulate each of them, or else (more likely) find people like that who are willing to work alongside her or him.

But special people are only part of the picture; Gladwell then goes on to talk about stickiness. What is this about? Well, it’s not enough simply to get the message across, with your connectors, mavens and salesmen. What you need is something to make that message stick.

Malcolm Gladwell uses the children’s tv programs ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Blue’s Clues’, plus a series of tv commercial advertisements, to make this next point. The examples he gives seem trite, even unconvincing, but the point is, they worked!

First, Sesame Street only started to really catch on when the producers began to have scenes where the Muppets appeared in the same scenes as human actors, and interacted with them; previously they had been kept separate. With Blue’s Clues, which was aimed at a very young audience, the sticky factor was one that tv executives took a lot of persuading to allow — the show was repeated with exactly the same form and content every weekday; and this is what made the kids keep on watching — counterintuitive, yes?

And the other example was the advertising for the Columbia Record Club. This arose out of the account being switched from direct marketer Lester Wunderman, to the huge McCann Erickson agency. Wunderman challenged them to a shoot-out, and, to cut a long story short, won in a landslide. His device was deceptively simple — viewers of the tv ads were told to look out, in the print ads in TV Guide and Parade, for a ‘Gold Box’. If they found it, they could write in for a free record of their choice. This ‘Gold Box’ was what made the campaign ’sticky’.

The last of the three elements is context. One scenario that Gladwell uses to illustrate this is the incidence of crime in New York City. Before about 1990, New York had one of the highest rates of crime in history; over 2,000 murders and 600,000 serious felonies every year. On the subways and in certain neighbourhoods there was utter chaos; it was completely unsafe to be there. But in the early 90s something happened; the murder rates plummeted by two-thirds; and serious crimes fell to half what they had been at the beginning of the decade (on the subway it dropped by 75%). Something had happened to cause this reverse epidemic, but what?

There were many elements in the environment of New York City, especially on the subway, that perpetuated a sense among the inhabitants that nothing mattered, so why should they make the effort. One of these was graffiti; the subway was completely covered with them, including all the cars. A new subway director, David Gunn, was brought in to supervise the renovation of a completely run-down system, and to much criticism he decided that graffiti removal was a priority. He was told not to worry about graffiti, that there were many more important problems, but he persisted. And, ultimately it was recognized as one of the factors that had changed people’s attitudes, and therefore their behaviour.

So that this was one of the many contextual elements that brought about the tipping point for New York City. Gladwell goes on to relate many stories that demonstrate his thesis; he tells a fascinating tale, and if you want to read it, it is likely that you will find it as compelling as I did; go ahead!

Here it is again: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

If you like this book, you might also be interested in another of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, that I reviewed in June, here.

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