Take a look at this breakdown, and think of how you might use these same thoughts in your day-to-day marketing duties. He broke everything down into a few specific principles that help us understand how ideas move. Gladwell saw the nature of what makes things go viral. He saw what made people attracted to ideas and products. Gladwell knew something that all social media marketers would need to know just a few years later.

The Tipping Point was Gladwell’s first successful book, which he adapted from an article he wrote about the drop in crime in New York City and the social movements that made it happen. It’s something that social media marketers spend their lives trying to figure out. Malcolm Gladwell is an iconic figure in the Social Sciences for figuring out what makes people move in a certain direction or gravitate towards certain products. Drawing from basic principles of epidemiological study, the diffusion theory of innovation, and the language of contagion, this essay argues that an epidemic model can provide insights not only into the ecological complexity of communication but also the unpredictable nature of rhetorical success.What makes certain things fly and others stay stagnant? It’s a formula of luck, precision, and finding something that people can’t get enough of. As an ecological method of investigating natural and social phenomena, epidemiology furthers the work already done on ecologies of writing by focusing on how rhetorical practices can (and must) engage the processes of contagious diffusion and the dynamic relationships that constitute the pulse of network culture. Following Gladwell’s lead, then, this essay presents an argument for supplementing other ecological approaches to writing with the conceptual framework of an epidemic model. From the contagious quality of an idea and the disproportionate effects it may have on a population, to the often mysterious longevity certain messages have as they spread, Gladwell’s articulation of cultural epidemics suggests broader implications for an epidemiological approach to rhetorical practice that should not be overlooked. Whether the contagious agent is a disease or a cultural meme, an epidemic gains a disproportionate foothold in a population, exceeding expected thresholds and moving by means of diffusion rather than deliberate causality. More broadly, Gladwell argues that if we want to understand the phenomena of sudden, compelling trends that increasingly mark success today, then we need to think of them as epidemics.

In his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers a bold but simple claim: “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do” (7).

The tipping point gladwell