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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

Friday links for your procrastinating pleasure:

Feed the head. I am not sure what the point is, but it doesn’t seem to like the white marble.

The acrobots! Click on them and try to make shapes…

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5matcs. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Hugh McLeod is working on re-creating the “Thresher” virus in a new campaign to promote Stormhoek wine. My UK readers will appreciate this:

Download the Thresher Coupon here

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6fdlb8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

This post at Gaping Void is a must see:

Edelman have kindly asked me to come to their London office today and give a talk about blogs and post-Cluetrain reality for one of their clients. Here are my notes:

SETUP:

1. I’m not here to tell you about your business. You already know it’s a jungle out there. You already how hard it is to fight out there, just to earn a few pennies on the dollar. You don’t need me reminding you of that. What I would like to do, however, is pass along what I’ve learned from blogging, and explain where I think it can help your cause.

2. To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written. Why? Because it was the first book that talked about the internet the way it REALLY is- i.e. people talking- as opposed to the way business and the media pretend it is- i.e. people buying.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
I’ll be blunt: In marketing terms, I don’t think anyone can truly understand the internet until AFTER they’ve read The Cluetrain. Highly recommended.

3. Nobody cares about you. That last sentence terrifies a lot of corporate types. We grew up thinking corporations and the media was all-powerful. That all a guy in a suit needed to do was snap his fingers, buy some TV commercials, and suddenly the masses would line up in droves, begging to buy your product. Seth Godin calls this old world the “TV-Industrial Complex”. Those days are over. We’ve got too many choices. We are over-programmed and oversupplied with great choices already. In the future, the companies that will win are those that can rise above the clutter. To rise above the clutter you have to offer something remarkable; something worth talking about. A great, award-winning TV ad campaign for a lousy product won’t cut it any more. People have gotten too smart. And like The Cluetrain says, thanks to the internet, they’re talking to each other.

4. You’ve already done “efficient”. We’re living in a post-efficiency world now. We already know how to make things better, cheaper and faster than the previous generation. We already know how to squeeze our suppliers till the pips squeak. We already know how to build systems that maximize profits at every stage of the production and selling process. We’re already outsourcing our stuff to China, and so is everyone else. Been there. Done that. So where does the growth need to come from? What needs to happen, in order to save your job?

There is a lot more, go read it all. Then print it out and carry it around with you. If you are not familiar with the Cluetrain Manifesto, the 95 Theses are here, and the rest of the book is here.

This is a very important book for the knowledge worker, possibly the most important.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5hbp6a. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

The urban legends of the kidney thieves, the gang members who cruise with no headlights, and the flesh-eating bacteria have something in common with age-old fables, nursery rhymes, and modern-day ad campaigns. What could it be? That these ideas seem to have a life of their own, a “Sticky” factor that makes people remember them, and pass them on. But where does that come from?And can it be duplicated intentionally?

Using a word coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, Chip and Dan Heath have done exhaustive research and come up with a theory that explains why some ideas catch on, and some just wither away. They use anecdotes and stories, some familiar, some new, to describe the phenomenon of stickiness and its ancient roots in every culture.

Made to Stick unpacks the essence of very effective communication, messages that stand the test of time and pass from one person to another like the flu. One of the core ideas of the book is that effective communication is based on “Gap Theory” - pointing out things that people may be unaware that they do not know. Exploiting this gap with six very specific conditions can make your communication sticky, therefore effective. Rather than asking yourself,”What information do I need to convey?“, you must shift your thinking to the viewpoint of your audience, “What questions do I want my audience to ask?” Once you know that, then you can work on getting your audience to care by providing context and appealing to their emotions. An emotional idea makes people care, and when they care, they remember.

What makes ideas sticky, and just how do you get people to care? Even more, how do you get people to take action? The Heaths use an acronym for describing the components of a sticky idea: SUCCESs.

1. Simplicity - it contains only the most rudimentary, core idea
2. Unexpectedness - what you don’t know gets and keeps your interest
3. Concreteness - an example that the audience can relate to, nothing abstract
4. Credibility - vivid details that enhance the image
5. Emotions - as opposed to analytical or statistical information
6. Stories - instead of lists

These components, used in combination, can take an idea and make it viral. A sticky concept does not have to use all of the components, but stickiness increases and communication is enhanced by using more.

This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let’s take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to “maximize shareholder value.”

Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it’s short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it’s coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.

Contrast the “maximize shareholder value” idea with John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.

The Heaths write with wit and humor, explaining the power of some of today’s urban legends and successful ad campaigns, dissecting them to expose the stickiness components that made them successful. Much of the research turned up some very counter-intuitive results (see pages 211-212 on Positive Mental Attitude!), but the lesson is that a simple message with some very specific qualities can make your audience do the things that you need them to do, in order to make your message successful:

• Pay attention,
• understand and remember,
• agree or believe,
• care,
• and be able to act on it.

Whether you are chairing a meeting to explain the new TPS reports, or creating a new corporate culture, creating a message with basic, core information that appeals to emotions and can be conveyed in a credible story will be remembered, long after the last PowerPoint slide has faded from memory.

We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

This book can’t offer a foolproof recipe. We’ll admit it up front: We won’t be able to show you how to get twelve-year-olds to gossip about mitosis around the campfire. And in all likelihood your process-improvement memo will not circulate decades from now as a proverb in another culture.

But we can promise you this: Regardless of your level of “natural creativity,” we will show you how a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference. All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas.

Rating: 5 of 5

Related:
Time Magazine Article
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blog
And just for fun,
The Secret of Stickiness

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5hxr3m. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen