Malcolm Gladwell could not possibly have known the full implication of his 2002 book The Tipping Point. Masterfully conceived, Gladwell introduced the idea of social epidemics; why they start, how they propagate and how they change society. Eight years later with social medium enveloping our daily lives, Gladwell's case studies carry forward a haunting look at how things mysteriously develop and how they affect who and what we are.
 
With one of our firm's offices in Grand Rapids it was commonplace to hear about happenings at the Wolverine Shoe Company. This work-a-day factory has conservatively produced footwear for decades, including their Hushpuppy brand. By the mid 90's Hushpuppies were about as hip as a cassette player with sales slipping to only 30,000 pairs annually. This crushed suede, lightweight crepe sole shoe was ready for the dumpster. Then something strange happened.
 
The company's executives Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis ran into a stylist from Manhattan who stunned them with the news that Hushpuppies had suddenly become hip in all the clubs and bars there. Baxter recounted, "We were being told that resale shops in Soho and the small Ma and Pa stores that still carried them were selling out." Baffled, the Wolverine executives looked for an answer since it made no sense to them that shoes so out of fashion were making a comeback. They were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself. Baxter and Lewis admitted in Gladwell's book that in fact at the time, "they had no idea who Mizrahi was." By fall 1995 everything exploded; designers from L.A. to New York requested shoes for their shows and 460,000 Hushpuppies were sold. In 1996, the shoes won the prize for "best accessories" at the Fashion Designers awards dinner, and the company quadrupled sales from the year before!
 
How did this happen? Gladwell opines the first few kids, whoever they were, weren't on a mission to promote a trend. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then a fashion designer picked up on the smallest ripple of a trend and used the shoes to promote haute culture. The shoes and the buzz surrounding them passed a critical point and they "tipped" in Gladwell's vernacular.
 
But this amusing case study only scratches the surface as to why inertia is so ethereal; arriving without fanfare as it did in New York City when 15 years of rising street crime and after-dark violence reached a point in 1992 where 2,154 murders and over 6,000 serious crimes occurred. Just then, something strange happened. At this mysterious zenith writes Gladwell, the crime rate tipped and began to turn. Within 5 years, murders and serious crimes dropped by 64 percent! Streets became habitable and beat-cops heard less and less chatter after dark.
 
How can a subtle shift in social current lead to a national redemption of a pair of shoes, or cause murder rates to drop by two-thirds over 5 years? The answer is being played out in front of us every day. We see it in PPM reports, social media indices and focus groups. Ideas, messages and products spread just like viruses do. The phenomena of the word-of-mouth now geometrically ignited by our formats riding the current of social mediums is here to stay, offering us mind-bending potential to use our imaging and creativity to go where we've never gone.
 
If some fail to exploit the pantheon of viral expansion they'll miss the race. If it doesn't exist in the mind, it doesn't exist.