John Griffiths is the winner of the 'Best New Thinking' category at the MRS Research Awards 2010.

Bookshop - Viral Marketing Books

Herd, Mark Earls review and interview with the author in In their own words
Blink, 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.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Charles Mackay 1841! Wordsworth Review to follow when I've managed to plough through it! About halfway end of Jan 2004!
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.
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?!!
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!