The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,10

across Boston Harbor to the ferry landing at Charlestown. He jumped on a horse and began his “midnight ride” to Lexington. In two hours, he covered thirteen miles. In every town he passed through along the way—Charlestown, Medford, North Cambridge, Menotomy—he knocked on doors and spread the word, telling local colonial leaders of the oncoming British, and telling them to spread the word to others. Church bells started ringing. Drums started beating. The news spread like a virus as those informed by Paul Revere sent out riders of their own, until alarms were going off throughout the entire region. The word was in Lincoln, Massachusetts, by one a.m., in Sudbury by three, in Andover, forty miles northwest of Boston, by five a.m., and by nine in the morning had reached as far west as Ashby, near Worcester. When the British finally began their march toward Lexington on the morning of the nineteenth, their foray into the countryside was met—to their utter astonishment—with organized and fierce resistance. In Concord that day, the British were confronted and soundly beaten by the colonial militia, and from that exchange came the war known as the American Revolution.

Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word of mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word of mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is—even in this age of mass communications and multimillion dollar advertising campaigns—still the most important form of human communication. Think, for a moment, about the last expensive restaurant you went to, the last expensive piece of clothing you bought, and the last movie you saw. In how many of those cases was your decision about where to spend your money heavily influenced by the recommendation of a friend? There are plenty of advertising executives who think that precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word of mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore.

But for all that, word of mouth remains very mysterious. People pass on all kinds of information to each other all the time. But it’s only in the rare instance that such an exchange ignites a word of mouth epidemic. There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that I love and that I’ve been telling my friends about for six months. But it’s still half empty. My endorsement clearly isn’t enough to start a word of mouth epidemic, yet there are restaurants that to my mind aren’t any better than the one in my neighborhood that open and within a matter of weeks are turning customers away. Why is it that some ideas and trends and messages “tip” and others don’t?

In the case of Paul Revere’s ride, the answer to this seems easy. Revere was carrying a sensational piece of news: the British were coming. But if you look closely at the events of that evening, that explanation doesn’t solve the riddle either. At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary—a tanner by the name of William Dawes—set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. But Dawes’s ride didn’t set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren’t alerted. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through—Waltham—fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro British community. It wasn’t. The people of Waltham just didn’t find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word of mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn’t. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?

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. Revere’s news tipped and Dawes’s didn’t because of the differences between the two men. This is the Law of the Few, which I briefly outlined in the previous chapter. But there I only gave examples of the kinds of people—highly promiscuous, sexually predatory—who are critical