I was on a lunch date at a local diner when the conversation turned to music and whether I played any instruments. As I told my story about having been a drummer in a high school garage band, she asked: Can you play something that I would recognize? After thinking about it for a few moments, I began drumming on the table with both hands…
I recently received a copy of Made to Stick, courtesy of the publishers. It’s another of those ‘searching for the holy grail of effective communications’ books, this time by way of the stickiness frame developed by Malcolm Gladwell in explaining tipping points. The ideas for making sticky or memorable communications are pretty basic (at least to people who study communications). The stories they tell, lots of stories, make this a book to recommend to people who need to learn the lessons again. If it becomes the breakthrough business book of the year, we are in more trouble than I thought (see below).
As I read through their formula, some quotable quotes emerged from the story-telling that you may find useful in designing your social marketing programs. [Note: consider these the takeaways.]
- Simple – A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Unexpected – Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
- Concrete – We [program planners and developers] might find our own decisions easier to make if they are grounded by the needs of specific people: our readers, our students, our customers.
- Credible – If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships.
- Emotional – Mother Teresa once said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’
- Stories – With a story you engage the audience – you are motivating people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
The formula for stickiness: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Stories (SUCCES).
The authors also sketch out four villains to creating sticky communications. The first three are:
- Getting lost in the information or data and losing sight of the core idea – or burying the lead.
- Focusing on the presentation rather than on the message – style over substance.
- Feeling trapped by too many choices or ambiguous situations – decision paralysis.
The fourth one, the Curse of Knowledge, is illustrated by this story they tell.
In an experiment people were assigned to either the role of ‘tapper’ or ‘listener.’ Tappers had a list of 25 well-known songs (in the US, such as ‘Happy Birthday to You’ and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’) and were asked to pick one and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess what song was being tapped out.
Before they started, the ‘tappers’ were asked to predict the odds that the listener would correctly guess the song. They predicted the odds at 50 percent. Over 120 songs were eventually tapped out in the experiment, and the actual number of correct guesses was 3, or 2.5%. The tappers were astounded at how difficult the listeners found this task to be. After all, it’s an EASY, WELL-KNOWN song. The problem is that it is only easy and well-known when you know the title of the song and are humming the tune in your head as you tap it out. Tappers had no idea of what’s it’s like to just be sitting there listening to them tap (The Curse of Knowledge - we forget what other people don’t know or what frame of mind they are in).
How often are we tapping to our audiences because we know too much about what we are trying to communicate and assume that the audience knows it as well?
Anyway, back to my story. After about 5 seconds of my drumming, a guy in the next booth jumps up, turns around to us and yells “Wipe Out!”
If you didn’t see that coming…I suggest you go read the book.
Photo by TravOC
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