The WSJ presents an interesting persuasion application. Many tech and Internet companies are recruiting college students as Ambassadors for their brands, products, and services. According to the story, the students are not paid for this work, but rather get valuable points and prizes in the form of resume hits like, Campus CEO or Director of Social Media. For this reward Ambassadors engage in self directed persuasion efforts on campus like going into classroom and writing the company name and logo on chalkboards.

You see the obvious advantage for the companies. Free labor spreads the word in a target rich environment. You provide a little Cool Factor and the student does the rest. Of course, notably absent in the article is any kind of Count for the business TACTs. Does the Ambassador Persuasion Play™ produce any Counts of Change?

This past weekend, about 150 college reps and their friends convened in New York City for the second annual Rent the Runway Rep College Capstone Weekend. To take part, college students were required to write a post for a company blog and produce a one-minute video promoting the service. A spokeswoman says it was “recommended” that attendees rent a dress from the company for the event.

Even if the Ambassadors don’t generate a penny’s worth of business for Rent the Runway through new customers, the Ambassadors themselves buy RtR’s product themselves. So, at the very least the Ambassador play gets Unpaid Employees to buy the product! Talk about selling sand to a Saud!

And one cannot help but notice the Ambassadors featured in the article.

Normally, the persuasion play with attractiveness is to use it to attract other people, but with the Ambassador Persuasion Play™, it seems you use the attractiveness of the student to gull them into providing free labor and buying your stuff. The Other Guy in this case isn’t all the other students on campus, but just those Pretty Women and a few Pretty Men who’ll pay to work for nothing because you tell them they are attractive and everyone knows how persuasive that is.

An enthymeme is a persuasion syllogism. It deliberately omits key elements in the Major or Minor Premise to better ensure that you fall into the persuasion Conclusion. For example, read the first two paragraphs of this Paul Krugman article.

A few days ago, I read an authoritative-sounding paper in The American Economic Review, one of the leading journals in the field, arguing at length that the nation’s high unemployment rate had deep structural roots and wasn’t amenable to any quick solution. The author’s diagnosis was that the U.S. economy just wasn’t flexible enough to cope with rapid technological change. The paper was especially critical of programs like unemployment insurance, which it argued actually hurt workers because they reduced the incentive to adjust.

Right. Krugman is the Nobel-prize winning columnist for the New York Times. He knows his stuff about economics. He read this paper that proves our unemployment problems are structural and can’t be fixed quickly. Tah!

O.K., there’s something I didn’t tell you: The paper in question was published in June 1939. Just a few months later, World War II broke out, and the United States — though not yet at war itself — began a large military buildup, finally providing fiscal stimulus on a scale commensurate with the depth of the slump.

Do you see the enthymeme, easy, ripe, and luscious? Wanna fix unemployment? Start a World War!

When you write enthymemes that attack yourself, you don’t need an opponent.

I’m warning you.

(MoneyWatch) General Motors (GM) will cease running paid advertisements on Facebook, according to a source close to the situation who spoke to CBS MoneyWatch.com on condition of anonymity . . . The move by GM, the third-largest advertiser in the U.S., to back away from Facebook comes at an awkward time for the social network. Facebook is expected to go public on Friday in stock offering that could value the company at more than $100 billion.

Facebook is a Count that produces no Change. Get in on the morning of the 18th and out by the afternoon.

This is just a haphazard sampling, but with an Effect Size this Stupendous, even a focus group will demonstrate it. Start with a recent article about the Obama re-election effort.

CHICAGO — With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all.

Now, the popularity of hiring statisticians in business.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick. Computing has become cheap and available enough to process any number of formulas.

Finally, a scientific breakthrough for data mining.

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

You’ve read variations on the Big Numbers theme. There’s Truth in them thar Hills of Data and if you know how to Mine Them, you can Change the Other Guys, win elections, earn trillions, and sit at the Cool Table. Particularly among aspiring persuasion mavens, Big Numbers with Big Data and Big Statistics is the New New Thing. Since everyone is living in Web 2.0 everyone has torrents, tides, and tsunamis of information about Other Guys which has got to lead to Change. Right?

While there’s a ton of nuance in the answer to that question, the First Nuance for me is:

Numbers without Theory is just a million Monkeys at the Abacus.

Just as those monkeys at the typewriter won’t produce Shakespeare, neither will these monkeys at the abacus produce Fishbein and Aizen or Petty and Cacioppo or, to be more famous about it, Kahneman and Tversky. Yet, the New New Thing rush to Big Numbers pretends you can drop the theorist and as long as you have monkeys with degrees from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon armed with quantum computers, you can discover like Einstein.

You see my bias. I’m a theory guy and that reflects both my nature and nurture. Without a schematic, a blueprint, scribbles on a paper cocktail paper, you will not find Truth whether for elections, business, or science. Theory is the One Ring that binds all other Rings. And the better your Theory, the better everything else about your persuasion.

Sure, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. But remember.

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You Can Change It.

The New York Times continues the Adoration of Zuckerberg in a Sunday Review profile of the Facebook CEO. You know they launch an IPO on May 18, doncha? And, in case you’ve forgotten just how great Zuckerberg is, nearly a child genius you could say, you need to read the profile. Might help with your investment decision.

Among the many heroic attributes the profile reveals, the close is the best.

On some evenings, as dusk falls in Menlo Park, Mr. Zuckerberg and a small circle of his lieutenants play roller hockey, and maybe knock back a beer or two, outside Facebook’s headquarters. The game is a relatively recent arrival there, although Mr. Zuckerberg has played it since his boyhood in Dobbs Ferry. Out in the courtyard, the crew — almost all of them men, almost all in their 20s — hoot and skate until it is almost too dark to see much of anything. Across the courtyard floor, giant black tiles spell out the word “hack.” They’ve nicknamed their rink “Hack Stadium.”

Roller hockey. Men . . . in their twenties. Counts like a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. You learn a lot about a leader when he’s in a fire fight around the net.

The Facebook boys and their captain, Mark Zuckerberg, skate hard. They line up shots with care. And they play to win.

Okay, mavens, this is PR Hack 101 and it serves its purpose. Burnish the brand in front of a potential $100 billion payday. And, if you can get enough Other Guys to put out on May 18 with ridiculous prose like this then that’s what you do. A small price to pay for success.

I have no idea how well the IPO will float, but I sit slack jawed at the persuasion lessons behind it. Facebook is a PT Barnum play and still proves there’s a sucker born every minute. Jeepers. I’m not even sure this is persuasion.

And I don’t care what anyone else thinks or says. No way the NYT has money riding on this. No way.