Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

communication for a change

Archive for the 'Rules' Category

wisdom that guides practical persuasion

Counting on Facebook with GM

16th May 2012

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.

Posted in Business, Rules, Tech | Comments Off

Mining Change

15th May 2012

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.

Posted in Business, Health, Politics, Rules, Science, Tech | Comments Off

There Are No Laws of Best Ads

13th May 2012

A marketing company shares what it considers the most effective print ads of the year. Through a proprietary formula, the agency quantitatively rates thousands of print ads, then presents the best 10 of the year. You can visit the 2011 ads then the 2008 for a comparison.

As I look over these Top 10s I am at a loss to explain why these are rated as Great compared to all the other ads. Of course, we don’t have the Bottom 10 ads as a comparison and that might help, but this exercise reveals the problems with assessing persuasion.

Maybe you’re the maven after all and you can explain why these ads are Top 10 and others that look the same and ran in the same contexts aren’t. I can’t.

Start with my Rule: There Are No Laws of Persuasion and If There Were, Why Would Anyone Tell You.

Stated another way. If you do know the Laws that allow you to understand these Top 10 ads, then you are the Queen of Tomorrow.

Posted in Business, Rules | Comments Off

Persuasion versus Smoke and Mirrors

12th May 2012

You see this all the time. A web story attracts your attention with the Top 10 Ways to Get Lucky or Top 10 Ways to Get Rich or, you know the drill. You fall for it and click . . . into a 10 page slide show replete with new ads on each refreshed slide. Like this one about Top 12 Best Email Marketing Tips for Professionals.

No marketing professional would find anything of use in this listing. No tips. No wisdom. No insight. No nothing but a Top List. Sure, it attracts hits or Reception in the first stage of the Cascade, but realize the persuasion emptiness of the ploy. The click represents an atom of attention, processing, or response, the smallest indication, a mere twitch. Aggregate a million of these twitches and what kind of Change can you Count?

See again the difference between Smoke and Mirrors, and Persuasion.

The Internet beguiles with Big Data of traces, glimmers, and evaporations as if you are Dr. Frankenstein and can create life from the assembly of small dead parts.

Posted in Metaphors, Rules | Comments Off

Facebook IPO Scarcity Gets More Scarce!

11th May 2012

Dancers beware!

Facebook is, blush, pleased and honored to announce that its dance card for the May 18 IPO Prom is filled! More dancers have requested dances than Facebook can, blush, provide that day.

Assuming, blush, that all the said dancers do indeed attend the Ball on May 18!

When It Is Rare, You Must Have It!

P.S. When the Belle of the Ball is working this hard, you have to wonder just how bella the Belle is. Facebook isn’t glowing, it’s sweating.

Posted in Business, Rules, Tech | Comments Off

 

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