Notes from "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell on

Word-of-Mouth marketing

- that is, how to generate a word-of-mouth "epidemic", so to speak. He includes several factors he calls "laws" and identifies the important players in creating a word-of-mouth advertising scenario and thus helping spread an idea among many different kinds of people.

The law of the few

The idea is that all trends start with a small number of people doing something differently.

This is noticed and the word is spread by:

Connectors

These are simply people who know a lot of other people in many different social circles.

Salespeople

These are people who not only can talk about an idea, but are skilled at closing a sale also. That is, they naturally enroll people to "buy in" to the idea they are presenting.

Mavens

The word “Maven” means “One who accumulates knowledge.”

The stickiness factor

This is whether the idea "sticks" - that is, really fits in, feels right, becomes popular.

The law of context

This refers to the idea that what may seem to be the cause of something may lay instead of the context changes surrounding the times - the neighborhood starts looking better, and because of context, crime rates go down, for instance. This is related to:

The broken window theory - repair the windows, improve the whole system by raising its energy This came from actual studies as to why crime did go down in some neighborhoods and not in others. All that was different was that windows were repaired in the neighborhood that saw the drastic reduction in crime.

• Using groups and clubs helps spread the “context” out into small subunits.
  • The "rule of 150" reflects an interesting way in which the style of the group affects the context. The "rule of 150" refers to the largest size a company can become in terms of number of employees before the cultures begin to disintegrate into small sub cultures who feel separate from the others. This is why W. L. Gore & Associates always would build a new building if the number of employees grew to above 150. The people always were able to feel they were working together with other people whom they knew.

The notion of a “channel capacity” – of there being a range of six or seven groups of people/societies whom we can discern things among without making “mistakes”, thus making us feel uncomfortable and uncertain of whether what we are doing will be acceptable - may be part of the human psyche, and may thus explain why we feel more comfortable in smaller groups.

When considering the number of people we care about closely, this is somewhere about ten or fifteen people, above which we personally begin to ‘overload’ because it takes too much time and energy to exhibit deep caring for larger than that number of people.

The number 150, to put it an easy way, would be the maximum number of people whom you work together with who you would feel comfortable if recognizing them in a bar or at a party, feeling at ease that you can approach them informally and engage in a conversation.

• The "rise of isolation" issue – younger people have become isolated from adults due to the internet, email and cell phones, along with TV and game machines, of course, thus the rise of immunity in communication (that is, the communication doesn't "reach" them), and the increasing importance of the role of the maven. Young peoples’ actions take place in isolation, rather than in reaction to adult behavior. So they create their own social structures, worlds and rituals, systems of belief, and activities in their more isolated worlds within which they and their social circle of friends their own age react to, not to adults.

The "cure" for this "immunity" lies in the connectors, the salesmen, and the mavens.