Summer Book Club-June: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

In just a few days, the calendar will say summer is officially upon us, and returning this year to the PRSA New Professionals blog is our popular Summer Book Club. We polled our social media followers, and our members selected our June book. At the end of the month, we will be discussing “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell.

As PR professionals, our ultimate goal is to spread word about our clients, companies or causes, and Gladwell discusses how ideas and trends can catch and spread like wildfire. We hope you join us, read along and take part in the discussion in a few weeks!

Amazon.com review of “The Tipping Point”:

“The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Pointhas quite a few interesting twists on the subject…Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the “stickiness” of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell’s closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that “tipping point,” like “future shock” or “chaos theory,” will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows–or at least knows by name. –Ron Hogan