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This one is not as much fun as my Testimonial Fail post that earned a mention by Brad Geddes. This one comes from someone advertising on Weather.com. Obviously this is a cheap spammy ad no matter where you are. But in this case, it takes Yosemite National Park as my city, and then tells me [...]
You’ve all seen the bumper sticker: “If it ain’t grown, it’s mined.” I realized some years ago that this is a powerful metaphor for many things in life and I started to divide people into farmers and miners. I came to this realization when I watched how our neighbor, who owns 23 vacation rentals, maintained [...]
Most people in academia learn a style of writing that is great for precision, but terrible for persuasion, and those habits are deadly when it comes time procure grants, fellowships and jobs.
Even if you don’t achieve huge success, conducting interviews and listening more carefully to the way you and others speak will be enlightening. I’m just getting started on interviews, but already I feel it’s changing the way I speak or at least making me aware of some annoying habits in my speech.
If you hate listening to yourself, read on »How do you promote your book with Twitter? It’s not necessarily obvious, especially for those of us who are writers and scholars first and foremost. But publishers aren’t doing much for new authors anymore, so you have to do it yourself.
Read how Twitter can help keep your book of the remainder shelf »Aardvark is a relatively new service launched by some heavy hitters. But everything about the signup process sets off my spidey sense. Danger! Danger!
Read why I'm not an Aardvark fan »Friends may do as they may, but people who are trying to market via Twitter often seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly they’re doing and hurt their reputation rather than enhance it. Here are some thoughts on the different uses of Twitter.
What are the four twitter modes? Click to find out »We all know birds of a feather flock together, but we’re often unaware of how frequently we flock with birds of our feather. Even when we say we are uninfluenced, the opinion and action of the crowd often get us to behave in ways we do not expect and can be used against us to influence our actions through the principle of social proof. (part 3 of 3 in the series on Weapons of Influence).
Read what legions of fans have to say about social proof ;-) »Consistency and Commitment are usually good things, but what about when underhanded marketers or other persuaders get us to subtly commit ourselves before we know what they’re after and then play on our desire to be consistent with our commitments? This is used against us every day. (Part 2 of 3 in the series on Weapons of Influence).
Read how commitment and consistency work for and against you »Robert Cialdini’s book Influence discusses several “Weapons of Inflence”. This first part examines the power of reciprocation — our need to give back to someone who has given something to us — and how this is used to influence us every day in our buying decisions and in other areas. Parts 2 and 3 will look at social proof and comment and consistency.
Read how we get sucked into reciprocal relationships unknowingly »
There’s not much to say. This site is maintained (to put it charitably!) by Tom Lambert, a historian by profession, an outdoorsman by avocation and a geek by nature.
If you have a question, comment or injurious insult, go ahead and send me an email.