Public Opinion Series

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, 2002, Excerpts

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts: Connnectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

Connectors

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few. They are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together. Connectors are important for more than simply the number of people they know. Their importance is also a function of the kinds of people they know. The closer an idea or a product comes to a Connector, the more power and opportunity it has as well. Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors.

 

What makes someone a Connector? The first – and most obvious – is that Connectors know lots of people. They are the kinds of people who know everyone. Sprinkled among every walk of life are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are. They manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. In the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

Mavens

If you look closely at social epidemics, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.

 

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. They want to tell you about it too. Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.

 

What sets Mavens apart is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention. To be a Maven is to be a teacher. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.

 

A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.

 

The one thing a Maven is not is a persuader. He’s not the kind of person who wants to twist your arm.

Salesmen

In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are the 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.

 

Permission-givers are the functional equivalent of the Salesmen. People who die in highly publicized suicides – whose deaths give others “permission” to die – serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.