| Herd by Mark Earls - review and interview with the author in In their own words |
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Malcolm Gladwell 2006 I read the back cover and made up my mind about the
book instantly! Blink and you'll miss it.Just kidding. This is a wonderful
topic and bound to be popular with the agency world when we often have
to work so fast and desperately want to know that when we haven't time
to find all the evidence and work it all out that we're still likely to
be right and insightful and possibly brilliant at the same time. You're
knocking on an Malcolm. The book is written in the same engaging style
as the Tipping Point - great stories engagingly told and before you're
really grasped the point he's off to another story which seems totally
different. And he leads you to the end without you're really gettinga chance
to challenge his thinking. That's how Tipping Point worked and here he's
done it again. Like Tipping point he gives you clues but by the time you
get to the end you have no more idea about how to be intuitive than you
learned how to creative word of mouth - he describes but doesn't prescribe.
But it's an entertaining journey all the same. But there are points where
you just want to stop the relentless flow and challenge the logic. Take
the account of the 4 police officers who gun down an unarmed man in the
Bronx. We go off into a segue all about mind reading using facial expressions
and into a study of autism based on the look on the face of an autistic
subject watcing Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And Gladwell used this one
piece of observation of a single subject to draw conclusions about autism
in general and autistic behaviour in the normal population. Surely it doesn't
take an extensive academic study to conclude that 4 armed men chasing a
suspect into a tenement lobby dark are likely to fear their quarry will
be armed and dangerous and quick to open fire as a result. It doesn't make
them autistic it just makes them scared. |
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Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Charles Mackay 1841! Wordsworth
Review to follow when I've managed to plough through it! About halfway end of Jan 2004! Jan 2005 I've given up!Garrulous and funny in patches but avoids analysis mostly - so why bother documenting all this peculiar behaviour?
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The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell 2000 Little Brown and Company
This is a really interesting and very easy read about how epidemics or crazes spread. The author identifies personality types, message sequencing and elements of the context reaching tipping points to produce discontinuous change. I would describe it a provocative more than anything. I didn't finish the book knowing how to start an epidemic. But it did make me think about the "lumpiness" of the audience for communications. Some viewers/listeners are much more important than others because they carry the message on. In advertising this lumpiness is generally ignored. In the age of 1 to 1 we can't afford to ignore these differences. This book asks a lot of the right questions. I don't think it has found the answers.
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Unleashing the Ideavirus, Seth Godin2000 Do you Zoom Coy
Picks up where Malcolm Gladwell finished with the Tipping Point and is a lot more practical than Gladwell in what you actually do to harness the power of word of mouth. It is also unique in that not only can you download hardcopy from http://www.ideavirus.com/ perfect for sampling or even not paying a penny if you can handle the guilt but those of you with a Palm Pilot can download a copy that runs on that - so how funky can you get?!!
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The Anatomy of Buzz, Emmanuel Rosen 2000 Harper Collins
ANother viral marketing book. Haven't read it yet. Apparently it is strong on casestudies and weak on how-tos but good for anecdotage!
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