communication. community. cognition.
Posts tagged persuasion
The Flow of the First Mover
May 6th
In communications, framing is everything. And when it comes to branding, it is essential.
Want proof?
What’s the longest river in the United States?
It’s the Missouri River, which is about 200 miles longer than the Mississippi.
But wait a moment, are we comparing apples to apples?
Let’s look at the map of the great Mississippi River Basin.
The mighty Mississip’ is shown in the dark blue from its headwaters in Minnesota all the way to the delta and the Gulf Coast.
It’s certainly an impressive river, and has played a key role in the development of trade an commerce in the cities up and down the banks. It cuts a swath of 2,320 miles through the middle of the United States.
Just look at its mighty tributaries, the Ohio flowing from the east and the Missouri from the west.
Here’s the Missouri River, highlighted in orange. It stretches 2,341 miles, which is just 20 miles longer than the Mississippi. Even though it is longer by just a little bit, the Missouri is considered the tributary to the Mississippi.
Yet again, we let our first understandings and preconceived notions cloud our thinking.
The measurement of the orange line stops where it intersects with the Mississippi.
Let’s take a look at how the Missouri River ought to be treated on the maps.
When you take the very top of the Missouri’s tributary system, all the way back to Bower’s Spring (on the Jefferson) in Montana, and stretch it down as a single navigable route all the way to the Gulf, you have gone 3,900 miles.
Now that is a river.
But why is it the Mississippi? Why isn’t the Mississippi considered a tributary of the Missouri River? (Factually speaking, and depending on drought conditions, anywhere from 45-70% of the volume of the Mississippi comes from the Missouri’s watershed!)
And for that matter, why isn’t the Missouri considered part of the Jefferson River?
It all has to do with First Mover Advantage.
Big Mouths Do the Defining
If you want to persuade, you need to be first and loudest in framing the discussion. The words you use (and the words you intentionally avoid) are essential to getting others to view the situation through your lens.
Was there a tragic event that might have been preventable? Always bad, but made better through a lens focused on comparative advantage, or a track record of success.
In the river example, the Big Mouths actually do the defining. The Mississippi River doesn’t start in Mississippi, it ends there. And given the length of time it was considered the boundary of the United States, it’s obvious we knew a lot about the Mississippi long before we had an inkling the Missouri was even longer. That’s why, at least as far as the definitions stand today, the mouth of the Missouri is considered to end where it connects to the Mississippi, instead of the other way around.
Once we knew more about the makeup and length of the Missouri, and the breadth of its watershed, we might have changed a few things. But that takes an awful lot of effort. By that point, there were too many maps to change, too many preconceived notions, and too many catchy ditties about the mighty Mississip. Yes, the Big Mouth at the Delta did all the defining, and defies any logic to change it.
What you have to ask, though, is given a change in the initial condition, would people still think the way they do about the Missouri/Mississippi relationship?
Icy Rocks and Chads
If you think this is not a big deal, let’s look at a couple of other cases where First Mover Advantage played a part.
Remember the furor that erupted over Pluto’s status as a planet? This was brought back into my attention while watching a Stephen Hawking documentary which referred to our sun, and its eight planets.
It will still take me a while to get used to that, even though I know for a fact there are nine planets. (You see, the Earth and its Moon really act more like a dual-planet system than a true planet-satellite, but there’s yet another example of First Mover at work…)
Then there is that whole election thing from November of 2000. While there was a huge confusion in Florida involving ballots and butterflies and chads and who won the state, there was also a consensus notion that George Bush was in the lead and that Al Gore was behind. Hand recounts done long after the fact tend to support the eventual outcome, and I don’t intend to reopen that debate here. But the communications coming from the Bush team in the days after the vote were bolstered by the appearance that he had won, and Gore was painted into a corner of communicating from behind.
Be aware of the Flow of the First Mover, and how important it is to define the terms before someone else does.
Is the ‘Good Ole Boy’ so dumb, or crazy like a fox?
Apr 30th
If you asked a group to describe the prototypical “Good Ol’ Boy,” I would imagine the adjectives returned would not be that flattering.
From The Free Dictionary:
A man having qualities held to be characteristic of certain Southern white males, such as a relaxed or informal manner, strong loyalty to family and friends, and often an anti-intellectual bias and intolerant point of view.
From Wikipedia:
Good ol’ boy is a slang term used in the United States and Canada, either to self-identify as or to refer to a male, usually white and of Northern/Western-European descent, who lives in a rural area and/or subscribes to a traditionally “rural” lifestyle. The term is generally thought to originate in the rural areas of the southern and southwestern U.S. While other terms such as redneck, hick, yokel, “Bubba“, and “white trash” are also applied, though usually pejoratively and are often interchanged with “good ol’ boy,” the “good ol’ boy” is more of an idealized image of rural Americans.
Politically, good ol’ boy refers to representatives that engage in cronyism.
Cronyism.
In the business world, references to a “Good Ol’ Boy Network” are at best a way of hinting at exclusion through ignorance, and at worst an accusation of intentional discrimination.
So how do you identify the Good Ol’ Boy?
- Manner of dress?
- Speech?
- Homespun stories?
- Tone?
I was having lunch with a coworker the other day, and she was talking about her supervisor. She called him a real Good Ol’ Boy, but he was surprisingly effective as a communicator. Everything he communicated was through anecdotes and story, and even years later she remembered just about every detail of what he said.
The Story Factor
We already have more facts than we can process. Story persuades and motivates.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Annette Simmons’ book The Story Factor, where she outlines the kinds of stories that resonate with people, and the way you can use them to communicate more effectively.
Now look at the guy in the suit above. His clothes are communicating a belief in the prevailing corporate culture.
Listen to the drawl. It’s measured, yet accessible.
Consider the anecdotes and tales he weaves. They’re about past experiences that happen to pertain to the issue or challenge at hand.
And listen to the tone – a good story is meant to entertain and engage, while also informing.
Too many people are willing to look at the above attributes and write off the rube for being too slow and too folksy to be of any value.
And when you get a bunch of those folksy, homespun rubes working in upper management, then it’s clear they all got there by conspiring to trample on the careers of their faster-talking, smoother and hipper competitors! Thus “Good Ol’ Boy” enters the collective consciousness as a pejorative. Psychologically, it’s easier to write them off as evil and manipulative rather than understand they might just be on to something effective.
Maybe there is a thing or two to learn from them. Particularly when they get results.
Imported Turf
Apr 12th
While traditional media outlets claim to “embrace the conversation,” are they still holding it at arm’s length? Is it enough to host comments and invite input online, without the due diligence to see if others are manipulating the agenda?
A few days ago, I wrote about what appeared to be a fairly obvious case of Astroturfing – the practice of creating fake “grass roots” in order to make it seem like public opinion was different than reality. One of my biggest clues was the sheer volume of comments posted between the moment the story went live at 5 a.m., and the time I read them (dozens of them) at 6:15 a.m.
If newspapers were a little more sophisticated about this sort of thing, they might check their IP logs and see the source of all that recent traffic — most of which is not washed through any proxy, and does give decent geographic information.
For example, let me show you the sort of data one can mine if they use the right tools:
The two images you see to the right are screen captures from my Sitemeter administration page. They show two separate visits to Occam’s RazR, both time and date stamped.
As you can see, both of these visits came from Boca Raton, Florida, and the visits overlap in time. Curiously, you can see from the out-click information that both of them left comments. They also come from different browsers, which is a nifty little way to be logged onto the same site concurrently from different profiles.
As it happens, those comments correlate in time to a pair of comments left here, by people purporting to be “5 Points Joe” and “Garlic Rolls,” two screen names you see used in the AL.com comment threads about Bingo. “Garlic Rolls” is one of the many commenters who is firmly for a vote of the people and is pro-gambling, while “5 Points Joe” is a little more skeptical, and is often accused of being a “Sock Puppet” handle for Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor Joey Kennedy. (That accusation is laughable on several counts, but I digress.)
Here is the screen shot of my WordPress comment administration panel, verifying the IP addresses of the comments. I took the liberty of blurring out the email addresses used by those who posted, for reasons I will get to later.
Since the panel shows newest comments at the top, you can see that the “5 Points Joe” comment, left at 6:27pm, came first. I seriously doubt this is from the real 5PointsJoe, because a quick look at his comment history shows him engaged on a number of issues not related to gambling in Alabama. Why would a paid lobbyist based in Boca Raton be so involved in flood warnings at schools, police trials, and whether George Barber is a good guy for offering free land downtown for business development.
Brad (claiming to be Garlic Rolls), on the other hand, has only posted in bingo-related threads. And in the comment, Garlic claims to be on unemployment in the state of Alabama, while posting from Boca Raton. I would think that someone whose lamenting the loss of his/her minimum wage job would be staying someplace cheaper than Boca Raton while cashing those Alabama state unemployment checks.
But hey, I’ve been wrong before.
I’m not a betting man, but here’s where I would put the smart money:
- Both comments were left by the same person.
- Neither email address shows up in searches.
- Wanting to throw me off the trail, the Phony Joe was left first, so the Garlic Rolls could respond.
The entire thing reeks of underhanded manipulation. And it parallels a more fundamental question raised by the real Joey Kennedy of the Birmingham News, about transparency and our right to know who is paying for all the issue advertising.
Round-Up the Turf Merchants
If I were a reporter, I’d be wanting to chase down some pertinent data. A couple of years ago, this same newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating corruption in Alabama’s two-year college system, and that entire series of stories started with a request for a raw data dump. Brett Blackledge asked for the raw records, and started stitching together the tendrils until the narrative came into focus. But I’m not so certain that will be as easy to accomplish here, because most newspaper web sites are run as completely different divisions. I do know that AL.com is run out-of-state, and there is likely not decent access to the raw information that could establish patterns of astroturfing.
What about privacy? The News doesn’t publish letters sent anonymously, so I don’t buy the precedent that this is somehow invasive.
I love my lawn. It is good turf. But some turf is wrong, and deserves to be terminated.
So, who wants to do a little digging into firms that handle political campaigns and public relations efforts out of Boca Raton?
