Malcolm Gladwell

Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia.

These people were dying of old age.

They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

This is what Connectors are like. They are the Rod Steigers of everyday life. They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches.

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.

a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are 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. Who are these Salesmen? And what makes them so good at what they do?

. “If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don’t understand—things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability,” says Anderson.

all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, by putting the Muppet behind the H U G, by mixing Big Bird with the adults, by repeating episodes and skits more than once, by having Steve pause just a second longer than normal after he asks a question, by putting a tiny gold box in the corner of the ad.

clue order they had—the clue order that seemed the best back when they were writing the script—gave the answer away far too soon. Sherman’s clue order had suspense. The original order did not. They had spent a morning with a group of kids and come away with just what they wanted. It was only a small change. But a small change is often all that it takes.

Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.