This article, by yours truly, was in this past Saturday's Vancouver Sun.
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The Memes are In Our Minds.
By IAN ANDREW BELL Nearly three years after its publication, Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (H.B. Fenn, 279 pages, $21.95) is spreading like wildfire through business and technology circles. The ideas it presents are so infectious that practically every CEO, investor, entrepreneur or aspiring guru I have spoken to lately has quoted from it, many without having read it.
This is fitting, since the New Yorker writer's book documents how social phenomena spread like viruses through society. Academics call this field of study memetics. To the rest of us, it's "word of mouth" or the more abstract "viral growth."
But The Tipping Point is not just another marketing book. It's an analysis of how groups of people think, and how and why trends and ideas emerge to become powerful forces sweeping through our culture.
It took Lance Tracey, founder of Sutton Group Realty, Peer1 Networks and dozens of other Canadian businesses, several trips to The Jolly Taxpayer to convince me I had to read it. "How people converge around ideas isn't accidental," Tracey insisted. "It's this convergence that gives ideas power, not the ideas themselves."
Although Gladwell avoids using academic terminology, he is clearly borrowing from its dusty annals. The term "meme," the root word of "memetics," comes from Richard Dawkins, a pop-culture behaviouralist celebrated in academic circles for his 1989 book The Selfish Gene.
Memes are essentially metaphoric versions of genes and viruses. They carry thoughts, ideas, fashion whims, catch phrases, ways of doing things, punchlines and buzzwords. Socialism is a meme; so are Converse high-top sneakers. The former gave wind to the sails of Lenin and Castro; the latter adorned the feet of Kurt Cobain, and of millions of his devoted fans, as he lay dead from suicide in his garage.
Michael Smith, president and CEO of Halifax-based Info InterActive, which was recently purchased by AOL Time Warner, understands the power of self-propagating ideas. "We rely quite a bit on our customers sharing their positive experience using our service with others, and on their friends' experience when they interact with our service as they try to get in touch."
Smith said Gladwell "draws very clear lines around what attributes can make a service like ours truly viral, versus being boring and not necessarily something people want to talk about." Gladwell's tipping point is reached when the spread of an idea moves beyond the possibility of containment. When the music-swapping service Napster exploded from dormitories and nerd factories across the United States to more than 20 million households worldwide, it had tipped.
Gladwell says that for a meme to reach its tipping point, three conditions have to conspire:
The law of the few: There must be a select group of trendsetters (called "connectors") who lead the charge and inspire others to follow;
The stickiness factor: The message must have impact and be memorable and easy to propagate (think Napster);
The power of context: The message must capitalize on the immediate wants, needs, concerns and/or desires of the "carriers" it infects.
Why is this discussion of memetics relevant to normal, tactically focused businesspeople? Brent Holliday, of Vancouver-based Greenstone Venture Capital, said that "unless you're Coca-Cola, you are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of brute-force marketing dollars that it takes to quickly spread your company's message through traditional media. The next best thing is to harness the forces of nature and let those take effect in getting your ideas out to the people that matter."
Whether it's the unexplainable resurgence of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s, the radical growth of a music file-sharing service or the sudden spike in sales and influence of a largely unmarketed business book, tipping points can be harnessed to the benefit of marketers, hackers - and even writers.
During the time it took to write this article, The Tipping Point went from an Amazon.com sales ranking of 598 to one of 494. By press time, it had risen to 371. Like the dozens of examples given in the book, the very notion of an idea or trend having tipped is probably destined to become part of the vernacular - an effect that also seems to apply to the book.
Ian Andrew Bell is a Vancouver telecommunications consultant, entrepreneur and writer.He publishes his thoughts on technology, politics and culture daily on his mailing list at www.ianbell.com.��� �
