The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,76

much, much better system,” says Tom Valente, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don’t necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn’t going to be available at that time—and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide twenty four seven service, and it doesn’t cost us anything.”

One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. “They are all very well connected people,” Junge says. “They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug and any kind of needle. They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts.... I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out.”

Does this sound familiar? The super exchangers are the Connectors of Baltimore’s drug world. What people at Johns Hopkins would like to do is use the super exchangers to start a counter–drug epidemic. What if they took those same savvy, socially connected, altruistic people and gave them condoms to hand out, or educated them in the kinds of health information that drug addicts desperately need to know? Those super exchangers sound as though they have the skills to bridge the chasm between the medical community and the majority of drug users, who are hopelessly isolated from the information and institutions that could save their lives. They sound as if they have the ability to translate the language and ideas of health promotion into a form that other addicts could understand.

3.

Lambesis’s intention was to perform this very same service for Airwalk. Obviously, they couldn’t directly identify the equivalent of Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen to spread the word about Airwalk. They were a tiny ad agency trying to put together an international campaign. What they could do, though, was start an epidemic in which their own ad campaign played the role of translator, serving as an intermediary between the Innovators and everyone else. If they did their homework right, they realized, they could be the ones to level and sharpen and assimilate the cutting edge ideas of youth culture and make them acceptable for the Majority. They could play the role of Connector, Maven, and Salesman.

The first thing Lambesis did was to develop an in house market research program, aimed at the youth market that Airwalk wanted to conquer. If they were going to translate Innovator ideas for the mainstream, they first had to find out what those Innovator ideas were. To run their research division, Lambesis hired DeeDee Gordon, who had previously worked for the Converse athletic shoe company. Gordon is a striking woman, with a languid wit, who lives in a right angled, shag rugged, white stuccoed modernist masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills, midway between Madonna’s old house and Aldous Huxley’s old house. Her tastes are almost impossibly eclectic: depending on the day of the week, she might be obsessed with an obscure hip hop band, or an old Peter Sellers movie, or a new Japanese electronic gadget, or a certain shade of white that she has suddenly, mysteriously, decided is very cool. While she was at Converse Gordon noticed white teenage girls in Los Angeles dressing up like Mexican gangsters with the look they called “the wife beater”—a tight white tank top with the bra straps showing—and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. “I told them, this is going to hit,” Gordon remembers. “There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal.” So they cut the back off a Converse sneaker, put a sandal outsole on it, and Converse sold half a million pairs. Gordon has a sixth sense of what neighborhoods or bars or clubs to go to in London or Tokyo or Berlin to find out what the latest looks and fashion are. She sometimes comes to New York and sits watching the sidewalks of Soho and the East Village for hours, photographing anything unusual. Gordon is a Maven—a Maven