Yet even as Watts was conducting his research, marketers were becoming increasingly convinced that trends were the product not of murky social forces, but of charismatic, connected social alphas. In truth, it was an old--even hoary--marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.
Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."
