Originally I had entertained the thought of putting up a basic, tell-all headline like “Why I didn’t fall for The Tipping Point.” But yes, I chose to say “I’ll tip your point” instead.

As it turns out, I love Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, but it initially didn’t seemed destined to be that way. My first exposure to Tipping Point was a classic set-up for a disastrous reception by a skeptical college student.

Some background:

I went to a small private school for my Bachelor’s degree. The student body, somewhere in the 4,500 count, was a fairly well-knit community. The heavily involved knew the heavily involved, and I think of my old self as one of the overinvolved. This doesn’t mean I was a very important person. It just means that in the circles I ran with, we often saw each other at the same meetings. (It kind of drove me nuts.) My weekly agendas tended to revolve around very socially conscious and cultured gatherings and functions. It was possible, at this school’s size, to make big waves by knowing the right people. And that, my friends, is just one of the many benefits of a private school education!

In my junior year, a wave of popularity for The Tipping Point swept through the world of higher education administration. In a minimal amount of words, Tipping Point is about patterns of influence: how they travel through communities and through whom the influence travels. This was big news for the staff at my school, who, as any educational institution’s administration should, wanted to find a way to better disseminate information unto its students.

Gladwell discusses the personalities of people who spread information effectively en masse, calling them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Basically, each of these groups of people possesses particular traits that equip them for being trusted people, go-to people, and persuasive people. As all college institutions suffer from bouts of student apathy, higher ed administrators realized: We need to find our Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

My school said, “We need to find our ‘Students of Influence.’”

Students of Influence is exactly what it sounds like. A group of students who are released into the co-ed wild (Sounds dirty.) to influence other students, oh, and spread key information, too. It’s an “interesting concept,” isn’t it? Get a bunch of kids to be your student center gossip hounds. This type of word of mouth model is all over the place now (or at least in any business that might even consider creating a department called “Marketing”), but in 2004, this idea was fairly novel.

To find its Students of Influence, my school sent out a campuswide e-mail and asked us undergraduate students to respond with the names of students we go to for information. I feel sorry for the Student Assistant who had to quantify that data. Anyway, the most frequently occurring names in the e-mails were aggregated into one big super group: the SOI.

No one actually referred to us as that, the SOI. Come to think of it, no one actually referred to us as the “Students of Influence,” either. Our very existence to the campus at large and to one another individually was ambiguous, save for the promise of pizza at our irregular meetings. I believe there were two. (Meetings, that is. Not Students of Influence.) It’s unfortunate, but in my senior year the SOI was more or less disbanded. (Or maybe they just kicked me out and chose not to disseminate such information to me. It’s absolutely possible.) The caveat of gathering an institution’s most trusted and, inevitably, involved students is that it’s impossible to get them all into one room at the same time.

Aside from the oxymoronic effort of gathering the (small) world’s busiest people for one meeting, the SOI also hosted an interesting blend of non-uniform opinion. For instance, I don’t remember the details of our attempted meetings before the end of junior year, but I remember thinking that not everything applied to me. Of course, at this time I was fulfilling the role of liberal arts student leader never fully satisfied with The Admin or The Man. Some of the other more fringey students of the SOI (including myself) often felt that the information was too high-brow, too non-specific like the University was just tossin’ dollar bills like it was makin’ it rain. What we wanted to hear was that the school’s monies and resources would be applied toward worthwhile programs. Yet what we often heard in those SOI sessions (and similar discussions even before the formalization of the SOI) were the ubergeneric bullet points and vaguaries that one would find on a glossy prospective students brochure.

That was always my biggest point of wonderment with the SOI. How were they going to use us “Students of Influence” when we represented so many different perspectives on campus? Inherently, we also represented many different opinions on the decisions we were being told to tell “were already being carried out.”

But did it work? Did I influence other students?

Maybe. If anything, more sarcastically so.

The Tipping Point, in review.
I love this book. I purposefully put off reading it because it brought me back to my student days in what was the short-lived Mickey Mouse Club on campus. Finally, it was handed to me (by the newly engaged Still Fighting!), and indeed it has changed the way I see the world. It’s given me a fantastic excuse to sit down to lunch and just contemplate human nature. Like many social science studies (psychology, sociology, communication, et c.), it gives names and models for things we may have noticed in the way people act around us. Some people don’t see the value in theorizing such things. I, for one, love learning about practical paradigms. And so, I love The Tipping Point.

Next up, Blink.