April 26, 2006

The Tipping Point

Written by Brian Turner

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a great exploration about how little things can create big changes. It’s the entire focus of the book, and it makes for riveting reading at times.

Having just read Freakonomics I was concerned that I’d opened another pop turkey - but the Tipping Point shows it’s superiority in every way, by continually referencing itself against real world examples.

This isn’t a book speculating about how the world works - it’s demonstrative of how the world works - and all focused on the viral spread of ideas.

This means that the book has a direct business interest in terms of viral marketing - and though this book doesn’t show you how to viral market, it does importantly point out key features of how an actual viral spread of ideas works.

In doing so he sets out 3 laws:

The Law of the Few
The Stickiness Factor
The Power of Context

Law of the Few

The Law of the Few says that it only requires a few key individuals to create the beginnings of a viral campaign.

The caveat is that these cannot be ordinary individuals, and Gladwell distinguishes them as three different types:

Mavens
Connectors
Salesmen

The Mavens are those who bring information together - those who have a real authority interest in their field, and can highlight important information that sticks out.

The Connectors are those people so well socially connected, that once a Maven informs them of this important piece of information, the Connector can spread knowledge of this through their own extensive social network.

The Salesmen, as the title implies, then sell the importance of this information to Joe Public.

Another good point about Gladwell’s book is that he acknowledges that these divisions are rough and somewhat arbitrary - one of his key historical examples of how information spread, highlights someone who was both a Maven and a Connector.

The key lesson for viral marketers here is that unless they think outside of the sale, they are simply Salesmen - and that without the Connector and Maven aspects to their campaign, the mechanics of viral marketing just aren’t going to be stacked in their favour.

The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context

Stickiness is another interesting part of the equation - the message has to be memorable.

But that’s not all - being memorable is irrelevant if there’s no call to action followed through - and that required context.

While many marketers seek to use sex - or more recently, disgust and aversion - to make at least some part of their message memorable, the problem here is that if it doesn’t deliver on a call to action, the point of being memorable becomes useless.

Malcolm Gladwell illustrates here with a college campaign for Tetanus innoculations - and how shock tactics could certainly make the campaign memorable - but lead to little actual action.

To get the students to actually sign up required a single simple peice of context - easy instructions on how to get to the college infirmary to receive the jab.

The lesson here is simple - the college students should have known about the location already - the previous presumption that shock alone should work failed because it needed the context of students knowing- and being reminded - of just how simple and easy it was to carry out the required call to action, and go for a jab.

Overall

This is a great book and really squats on the pop Turkey Freakonomics - both books sometimes use the same examples (ie, New York crime stats in the 1990’s), but while Levitt is prepared to use it as a platform for grand sociological generalisations, Gladwell simply contents himself is showing that a process exists, and this is how it works.

This is why The Tipping Point is such a good book - it’s a description of a tool, a phenomena, and event that occurs socially within our society - and Gladwell simply shows us how this can work, isolating key elements.

And though The Tipping Point is by no means going to tell you how to successfully run a viral marketing campaign for business, if that’s something you’re interested in, you can at least see what elements may well be required in the process.

Overall, a very worthwhile and interesting book, for those in business but also for general reading.

Filed Under Reviews