September 23, 2005 – Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

September 23, 2005 – Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

I had a great conversation with PP who is the editor of a well-known trade publication based in Cleveland. I had called to catch up on the whereabouts of folks I used to work with when I was employed at the company. We ended up talking for a good hour about a whole collection of topics beginning with the fortunes of a few of our workmates who had left the company after my departure in 1995. I had last called PP in the fall of 2001 when I had been consulting after leaving my last employer. When we worked together, I was commuting to Cleveland from San Jose once a month for a week at a time. The airline industry was healthy back then and I had frequent flyer miles accumulating on both United and American, each round trip costing under $250—how I managed that fare is another story.

I was finding plenty of time to read on the flights back and forth: SJC to ORD to CLE outbound and the reverse inbound—substituting DFW for ORD when I was on American. PP is an avid reader and I would suggest books that I found engrossing: books by William Gibson, “Unearthing Atlantic” by Charles Pellegrino, “Assembling California” by John McPhee, among others. Our conversation got round to books with my suggesting to her “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. We got round to this discussion when PP asked about what I had been doing. My reply was to cite the book as the reason for what I had been devoting my efforts toward in the past four years. The book likens information dissemination to the spread of a virus. I’ve been trying to see how I could use this viral infection to build brand awareness to some small success.

And the information can be anything, a fashion trend—Gladwell cites the rebirth of Hush Puppies shoes by young people in Greenwich Village making them part of their fashion. The word was spread by information outlets—people within any group who are by nature those others turn to for the latest in whatever. The Internet makes this kind of information distribution far more efficient thus accelerating the adoption and discarding of trends—the latest fashion, the hottest sound, the best movie, etc. In business, of course, the web has been taken over by marketers attempting to force this information distribution—spam—as opposed to finding ways of leveraging the natural process. The most insidious manifestation of this practice is use of people as Judas Goats in an effort to attract and infect buyers to purchase a product. The process is described in William Gibson’s latest novel “Pattern Recognition”: attractive men and women are recruited to hang out in places where upscale purchasers are likely to frequent and make a favorable mention of a product in passing. “I just bought this Sony cell phone and it’s got so many cool features,” and then if the unsuspecting stranger shows interest, going through a product demo. If the stranger gets infected and buys the phone, he’s likely to try to infect others.

The spread of a virus is dependent on carriers to infect others but all carriers are not equal. Some are far more infectious. That led us to the discussion of the article in a recent issue of “The New Yorker” about Rick Warren, the pastor in Saddleback Valley, Orange County, responsible for an evangelical movement the likes of which has not been seen since the coming of Christ. I make this gross hyperbole because of the breadth of Warren’s impact on the worldwide Christian community. As soon as I mentioned the article, PP chimed in “oh the article on Pastor Rick.” She is an avid “New Yorker” reader, too. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the article.

Warren's book “The Purpose Driven Life,” has sold 23 million copies, Gladwell estimates and his website www.pastors.com is read by pastors worldwide. But, that isn’t the real story. Warren’s teachings simply serves as a guide that is being used by uncounted numbers of small groups gathering regularly during the week to discuss their religion and what it means to their daily lives. Furthermore, the discussion is not driven by a single source, though Warren’s book serves as a reference, these groups have entirely different concerns and each addresses those concerns uniquely. Most of these groups operate autonomously from others. Warren’s book is the catalyst but each Christian group acts independently on the information. The analogy to the groups springing up in the Muslim world all over the world is eerily similar. No central leader but individual leaders in small groups infecting their own small cells. It’s like these many cells of Christian and Muslim thought forming and living amid the body of modern society.

As someone with a long career in communications, I find the phenomenon fascinating. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these groups in building a base of power has not been lost on marketers. The success of “March of the Penguins” among conservatives with its lessons of traditional values such as monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing have lead other film makers to attempt to tap into this channel as a means of promoting their work. As an aside, I liked the movie, not as a metaphor for human experience but as a wonder of nature like the salmons’ return to the spawning grounds through thousands of miles. The moviemakers saw a good story and filmed it, unlike the “Passion of Christ,” which was made for the conservative audience it found great favor with and distributed through the very marketing channels, other filmmakers are now coveting.

We did spend a good deal of time talking shop. Her magazine is doing well. As editor of the magazine, she finds herself making presentations to industry groups and at conferences her publication company sponsors—tough for a mom with three youngsters. The oldest is ten and the last time I saw her PP, her husband and the lovely newborn had joined me for dinner at a restaurant in downtown Cleveland. It was our farewell dinner after we closed the magazine the two of us had been working on. A decade and it seems only yesterday. We rang off as I told her I wouldn’t wait so long to call the next time.