The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

The answer is that 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.

Yet we often fail to give them proper credit for the role they play in our lives. I call them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. This experiment is where we get the concept of six degrees of separation.

But if you actually quiz the two of

them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

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.

Once you’ve made all of the connections, the strange thing is that you will find the same names coming up again and again.

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid.

And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating.

He keeps on his computer a roster of 1,600 names and addresses, and on each entry is a note describing the circumstances under which he met the person.

Perhaps it is best to call the Connector impulse simply that—an impulse, just one of the many personality traits that distinguish one human being from another.

But 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.

Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas—“weak ties” are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do.

Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are. Connectors like Lois Weisberg and Roger Horchow—who are masters of the weak tie—are extraordinarily powerful.

It’s also the case that the closer an idea or a product comes to a Connector, the more power and opportunity it has as well.

It’s not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow.

Paul Revere was the Roger Horchow or the Lois Weisberg of his day. He was a Connector. He was, for example, gregarious and intensely social.

But Paul Revere quickly emerged as a link between all those far-flung revolutionary dots. He would routinely ride down to Philadelphia or New York or up to New Hampshire, carrying messages from one group to another.

And Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that—like most of us—once he left his hometown he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on.

Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors.

It’s possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up.

however, 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.

Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also—and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word-of-mouth epidemics—a Maven.

The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.

if marketplaces depend on information, the people with the most information must be the most important.

The answer is that although most of us don’t look at prices, every retailer knows that a very small number of people do, and if they find something amiss—a promotion that’s not really a promotion—they’ll do something about it.

honest. In the ten years or so since this group was first identified, economists have gone to great lengths to understand them.

What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too.

“They like to be helpers in the marketplace.

This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace.

They are more than experts. An expert, says Price, will “talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don’t talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Maven will. They are more socially motivated.”

Mavens, according to Price, are the kinds of people who are avid readers of Consumer Reports. Alpert is the kind of Maven who writes to Consumer Reports to correct them.

What saves him is that you never get the sense that he’s showing off. There’s something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace.

“A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems,

generally by solving his own,”

although what I suspect is that the opposite is also true, that a Maven is someone who solves his own problems—his own emotional need...

He simplified everything. He has everything processed.

What makes people like Mark Alpert so

important in starting epidemics? Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail.

Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics. What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.

It was carried by a man, a volunteer, riding on a cold night with no personal agenda other than a concern for the liberty of his peers.

there is something about the personal, disinterested, expert opinion of a Maven that makes us all sit up and listen.

But their real power derives from the fact that the reviews are the reports of volunteers—of diners who want to share their opinions with others.

I realized that I had stepped into the middle of a little Mark Alpert–generated, word-of-mouth epidemic.

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.

The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. Alpert’s motivation is to educate and to help.

To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.