A place where the unexpected becomes expected

After reading "The Tipping Point," I started thinking about all the outrageous trends that have been started in the last few years.  At least one person had to think that UGG boots or Crocs were worth starting a trend over.  Those trends couldn't have just popped out of thin air and into stores with the buzz they had without someone telling people about them.  This is exactly the idea that "The Tipping Point" is based on.  Malcolm Gladwell explains the tipping point as the "one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once" (9).

Like any trend or epidemic, all it took was for a select few to think that the product was cool.  Then the trend would spread like wildfire.  In "The Tipping Point," Gladwell refers to the spread of a trend like a very contagious virus or infection.  All it takes is one person to spread the virus to everyone around him or her, and then they would give it to everyone around them.  This is how an epidemic would start out and it would just keep growing.  This entire process only happens after an epidemic is contagious.  There are many factors in making an epidemic, and all of them need to be involved to lead to the tipping point, that one dramatic moment.  Gladwell used the example of the Hush Puppies trend to show exactly how this idea is put into action.  In 1994, Wolverine, the company that manufactured Hush Puppies, was thinking about taking them off the market entirely because of bad sales.  They found out that people in Manhattan were going crazy over these shoes and the shoes were becoming hip in the bars and clubs downtown.  By the next year, Wolverine was selling more than 14x as many shoes as they were in 1994 (3).  Of course, these few people were not the only reason Hush Puppies succeeded in the market.  A tipping point is all about a few factors happening all at once to create a surge of buzz marketing.  

I believe that we need something like this for the Athletic Auction in April.  Factoring in this economy at this time we really need something that will make the Athletic Auction tip.  A great way to make this happen is to find out who are the influential people in Milledgeville and the surrounding areas.  Most of these people would have the means of being connectors and could spread the word that participating in the Athletic Auction can really help with the Milledgeville economy and the community.  If the Athletic Auction brings in more money for the Athletic Department, they can spend it on their sports by getting better equipment for the players and on marketing for sporting events to get people to the games.  All of this will get the economy rolling again in the Milledgeville area.  These factors are great incentives for the connectors to spread the word and for more people to come to the Athletic Auction. 

Another way to get our event to tip would be to make it sticky.  We need to continually reinforce the information of the auction to our target market.  In "The Tipping Point," Gladwell writes about an experiment conducted by Howard Levanthal, a social psychologist, on a group of senior college students at Yale University.  He tested two different groups with different booklets explaining the dangers of tetanus in order to see if it would show a difference in the number of people who actually were inoculated.  He tried the experiment a few different ways until one of them stuck.  He found out that once the students were reminded of the times of the clinic hours, they were able to find time in their schedules to come get inoculated (96-97).  For the Athletic Auction, we can apply this same idea by reinforcing the date, time, and place of our event.  Hopefully through reinforcement we can achieve the stickiness factor. 

When reviewing the different types of people Gladwell writes about in "The Tipping Point," I think I have a little bit of all three kinds of people in me, but probably the two most dominant would be the salesman or the connector.  I find joy in meeting new people and I love to unite completely different groupings of people.  I'm nowhere close to being a Roger Horchow of the world.  I don't have the ability to meet and remember that many people.  I also know from reading "The Tipping Point" that most of the connectors' abilities come out once they enter the business world.  Hopefully, once I step out into that world, more of my connector instincts will come through.  I also believe that I have some of the traits of a salesman.  People always tell me that I have the ability to persuade.  I'm hoping that like my connector abilities, my salesman abilities will strengthen after I join the world of business.  Since I am still a student, I feel like I still have so much room to grow and strengthen my abilites.  Now that I have read The Tipping Point, I know what to look for and what to build upon.

As for the connection between social media and "The Tipping Point," I believe that I have noticed my own tipping point with Twitter.  Before I joined Twitter, I had only heard it mentioned in Dr. Miller's Mass Media Law class.  She had only mentioned that it was a social media outlet and that her PR Admin class was involved in it.  I forgot about it until it was mentioned again in my PR Admin class.  My tipping point came after I joined.  I heard it everywhere!  It was like wildfire.  Twitter was on the news, on other social media websites, and even my non- mass communication friends were joining the new buzz.  I know that it was popular among the people in the business world, but it wasn't popular among the people in my life, in my world.  That one instant that I started noticing the mention of this "new" social media outlet was my tipping point for Twitter and maybe even the rest of the country.  All it takes is one person to think it's cool and tell a connector and then the trend spreads like wildfire.  That's how Myspace, Facebook, and now Twitter have taken off.