Does it ever seem like some people know everyone? At the least, they know someone who knows someone who can help you with any problem you have.

Of course, there are times when this type of person is overbearing, and their attempt to connect themselves is self-serving, heavy-handed and quickly wears thin. There are a few, however, who we find genuine, whose connections serve us well and who we are happy to know.

Relationships with that type of person should be cultivated and allowed to shine.

Last week in this space, I wrote about being open to reaching out to others, giving information about what we do, and sharing this with others who could benefit from it. Of course, some people are just better at this than others.

In his book “The Tipping Point,” bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell looks at the idea of ‘epidemics,’ not from a viral standpoint, but through the spread of ideas. He tips off (forgive the pun) some of his findings in the book’s subtitle, “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.”

If you don’t believe that little things can make a difference, let me steal a thought experiment from Gladwell’s introduction. Imagine that you had a piece of paper you could fold in half 50 times, how tall would it be at the end? No matter how difficult it may be to believe, it could reach the sun.

It is the mathematics of exponential progression - once things begin to build, the numbers can take off. In this scenario, after all, just one more fold of the paper makes it big enough to get to the sun and back.

That concept helps show why it is good to reach out to the right people; they may be just one person, but they can reach many more. Gladwell picks out three types of people who are powerful at affecting others: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Connectors are those who cultivate large numbers of acquaintances and, thrive off knowing many people. They keep a foot in many different areas, so they can draw people together whose worlds may otherwise not have collided.

Mavens are those we trust for expert opinions. They pride themselves on finding the best deals, the best places to eat, the best places to stay and do it with a level of precision that gives credence to their opinions.

Finally, salesmen are those with a charisma that convinces others to listen. We tend to know when we are being sold a bill of goods, but we also know that sometimes it has been done well enough to work.

This doesn’t mean that to be a thriving member of a community you need to be one of those three types. They are just the ones who have the natural abilities to be influencers. Those types are so strong that it probably won’t take much thought to come up with an example of each in your life.

If you are not one of those types, you cannot force yourself to become one. Being aware of them, though, can help you use their power. If you are an individual looking to reach into different social circles, connectors can help. If you are in a business that could serve someone who is a maven or salesmen, put a little more effort into that relationship, for it is bound to pay off exponentially.

And if you doubt the power of these types, here is a final example that Gladwell gives in his book:

In the late 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to find how human beings are connected. He mailed a packet to 160 people who lived in Omaha, Nebraska. The recipients were also given the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston. They were told to write their name on the packet and mail it on to a friend or acquaintance that the person thought would get the packet closer to the stockbroker. The idea was that Milgram could trace the hands the packet went through until someone delivered it to the stockbroker.

Amazingly, half of the responses reached their endpoint through the final hands of three people. “Dozens of people,” Gladwell says, “chosen at random from a large Midwestern city, send out letters independently. Some go through college acquaintances. Some send their letters to relatives. Some send them to old workmates. Everyone has a different strategy. Yet in the end, when all of those separate and idiosyncratic chains were completed, half of those letters ended up in the hands of Jacobs, Jones and Brown. Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

And it is very worth knowing those special few.