May 16, 2003

THE TIPPING POINT, AND HOW IT WORKS WITH BLOGS Picked up Malcolm Galdwell's The Tipping Point yesterday, and it quickly made its way from the bottom to the top of my sizeable unread stack. This is due in part to the fact some other bloggers are writing a lot about this topic, and in part to the fact that Gladwell is an exceptional writer (he's a New Yorker editor). I mentioned his work in a previous post about corruption in Olympic sport . What got me most excited was how Gladwell's thesis -- that diseases become epidemics if and only if they meet three criteria -- lends itself by analogy to just about every change initiative (what Gladwell calls "social epidemics") you can imagine: getting your blog recognized, achieving enduring change à la John Kotter in business, or changing the world from a consumer culture to a citizen/conserver culture. The three criteria are: The Law of the Few: A few exceptional people doing something different start and incubate the epidemic. These people, who Gladwell calls "mavens", have the energy, the vision, the style, the intelligence, the charisma, the perseverence, to rub two sticks together in such a way that they improbably catch fire. Incubation also requires people called "connectors" who get the gene or meme out of the cliques and into other communities and networks. Connectors are people who have the "strength of weak links", i.e. acquaintenceship with a lot of people who move in different circles who they enjoy bringing together, so that the epidemic reaches escape velocity and spreads (as virologists said during the SARS crisis) "dangerously into the community at large." The Stickiness Factor: Some attribute of the epidemic allows it to endure long enough to "catch", to become contagious or "memorable". Mechanisms to make something sticky or memorable include reinforcement and repetition, refinement and distillation, celebrity, hooks and triggers, clarity and understandability of message, conveyance by narrative (story) , suspense, and other ways of "packaging to make it irresistable". The Power of Context: The physical, social and group environment must be right to allow the epidemic to then suffuse through the population. New York City credits the sudden and dramatic drop in crime in the late 1980s and 1990s not to changes in income, demographics or enforcement, but to an effort to rid public spaces, one at a time, of graffiti and other symbols of lawlessness. The theory was that "broken windows", signs of disorder, invited an "epidemic" of crime by signalling its permissiveness, and the closing of those windows ended the epidemic. A concentration camp environment, as a number of distressing psychological experiments have shown, will change human behaviour at epidemic speed, where harsh rules, codes and processes in a less austere environment will not.  Gladwell goes on to talk about the magic number 150 as "the maximum number of individuals with whom anyone can have a genuinely social relationship", or, put another way, "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar". He argues that the same social span is present in hunter-gatherer societies, in the military, in the most effective business units of decentralized businesses and in many other areas.The epidemic is enabled when the idea champions of these groups, who Gladwell calls "salesmen", receive and "translate" the message to put it into the group's own shared context. As an example, he explains the success of the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood this way: It had an inherently sticky message that resonated with many women, It was incubated by the few early wildly enthusiastic readers and spread by connectors to other communities, Each group of new readers adapted the message and the value of the book to the group's own unique social environment, their own social context,  and the result was a runaway best-seller. Similarly, in the case of HIV, the "few" were a small number of exceptionally gregarious and sexually active men, the "stickiness" came with the mutation of the virus to a much more virulent form, and the initial "context" was provided the close-knit communities who participated unknowingly in high-risk activities. Gladwell then applies the model to everything from the success of children's show Blues Cues to the effort to stop young people from smoking. He only briefly describes how you can create your own epidemic: Focus (identify the small group of mavens who have the talent and the passion to nurture the idea,  and the connectors who can break it out into the community), Test (refine the idea with others to see how best to package and convey the message) and Believe (that change is possible, that what might seem on the surface unlikely or illogical could be the breakthough that can change everything, and that human communication has immense power). Do blogs have Tipping Points, or is Shirky's Power Law inexorable? Shirky's Law basically says that, once a community of blogs (or of anything else) has been established, it gets harder and harder for newcomers to "break in". In the blogosphere, that means that a mere handful of early successful bloggers get the lion's share of the traffic, and the rest of us have to settle for the dregs. Of course, new communities continuously emerge and break out, and every emergence creates a new opportunity for someone else to dominate that new space. But if what you have to say isn't enough to create a new community, and if you're not satisfied with a small handful of (not more than 150, and most likely much fewer) blog readers within your own self-selected community or group, can you use the Tipping Point model to break into, or even break up, the "A-list"? It should be possible. From what I've read, successful bloggers reach plateaus of hits and readership at about 30, 100, 300, and 1000 hits/daily readers. At each plateau discouragement sets in, and some bloggers give up and stop writing if they can't get past them. What intrigues me is that these plateaus don't get progressively harder to break out from. You would expect Shirky's Law to make each breakthrough, like pushing a snowball uphill, progressively harder, but it doesn't seem to be the case. There is an offsetting phenomenon, perhaps related to Gladwell's connectors that make each blog a little more infectious as it gets further out. For the first four weeks I blogged, I averaged 30 hits a day, for the next nine weeks I averaged about 100 a day, and over the last two weeks I've been averaging about 300 a day. There were clear Tipping Points in both breakthroughs, but the amount of effort I'm spending blogging now is no more than it was the day I started. All I've done is a little bit of what Gladwell would call testing (mainly through some promotion of my business posts to some of the business "A-listers", which worked, promotion of the Salon Blogger survey to some Radio "A-listers", which worked, and promotion of some of my creative works to some artistic "A-listers", which did not work). Beyond that, all I've done is to keep blogging, believe . I have no idea if I've seen my last Tipping Point, if readers will "build up immunity" to my blog or not. We will see... 5:06:42 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Dave Pollard. Last update: 03/06/2003; 10:53:32 PM.