The Elements of Persuasion

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

If you have been a regular reader of this blog you noticed a stunning transformation a few weeks ago. We suddenly went from being a bland off-the-typepad-shelf way to post words, to being an actual blogsite designed to tell a story. The change involves more than just new colors and buttons. It involves a whole new point of view. The Hero responsible? We owe it all to Amy Lenzo, Creative Director of Clear Light Communications.

If you are a very long time reader you will remember Amy’s website Beauty Dialogues. We raved about it in one of our very first post because Amy's photos are such stunning examples of images as stories. But in the intervening months (has it really been that long?) she also has added written content that is not to be missed.

Her thinking on the link between design, the Internet and community is profound and, yes, beautiful She tells a great story. She knows all the facts and wraps them in such good-hearted emotions that we are compelled to see things differently. And the more we work with Amy and Clear Light the more we know “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

We often tell our clients that story is not a marketing add-on - something you come up with after you have a good idea to sell it. Story is how you have that really good idea in the first place. This is particularly true of design stories. Great design, the type Amy does, doesn’t just present information, it reveals the stories underneath. Great designs are acts of discovery. Check out Amy’s website and discover for yourself how design can help build a living web community. You will really thank me for this link.

DO THE RIGHT THING

We have written before, both in Elements of Persuasion and in past blogs, about the very real business advantages working for the common good can bring – particularly when you are trying to build a brand or unify your creative team. Finding the right not for profit cause and linking up to it can be major career booster.

But we haven’t talked much about how storytelling relates to the unique problems of the not for profit world. Well, we haven’t talked about it much here yet. You can find two guest blogs we did over at Getting to the Point, a blog connected to the Network for Good that deals with those issues. 

Once you are there spend some time checking out the archives and the rest of the site. As with our friend D. K Holland’s site on Branding and Nonprofits this site run by Katya Andresen has great marketing advice that applies to all businesses. There is something about dumping all the “market share” “return on investment” “maximize profit” buzzwords that brings things back to basics and makes even difficult concepts easy to understand and apply, at least the way she does it. And it doesn’t get much more basic than deciding to do the right thing. Check it out. 

WATCHING THE ODDS

One problem we have using the five-element story model to analyze political campaigns is how to accurately measure the PASSION that a candidate is actually generating.  Polls are very good at finding out how many people share a candidate’s POV – their success at becoming the party’s potential HERO. But it is passion that motivates actual turnout. This is particularly true in primaries.  In our model Passion equals Fire, so another way to say this is ”How do you accurately determine how hot a candidate really is?”

One way is to look at the money. Cash is the fuel every campaign burns. But fundraising is only accurately reported quarterly. By that time the relation between the giving and any specific political position (the reason for the increase or decrease in passion) doesn’t show up. You had better believe the campaign is acutely aware of it, but the rest of us are in the dark.   

Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo – an absolute must follow site - is using the betting odds on candidates to do just this. He says he is using the odds to show “conventional wisdom on how the candidates stand,” but we think he is on to something much more interesting. Check out his analysis of Obama.

Whether you’re betting on the horses, the world’s series, or a candidate, if you don’t feel that heat, you don’t make the bet. And if you are a player, (and if you aren’t you won’t be betting on one of the major sites) when you stop feeling it you immediately take your money off the table.  That makes these odds ones to follow. Find out more about the “candidate futures markets” here.

AL GORE AGAIN??

You heard it here first. OK, maybe not absolutely first, but we have said it before. In our original discussion of the political story elements we said Al Gore’s POLITICAL STORY had all five of the elements of a successful campaign more fully developed than any other Dem.

We know, we know “Al Gore’s not running.” We know this so well because that is what every Dem says, usually following the phrase, “Boy, wouldn’t that be great, he would be perfect but…”

Now Peter S. Cohl over at Political Brandwagon, a favorite site of ours, has a nice piece about Hillary fatigue - we think it may be more than that, with some red-state Dems starting to actively run away from her candidacy - and the potential of Gore pulling an October Surprise.

If Gore decides to run he will need to clean up the negative story debris from his last campaign. Those bits of disinformation concerning his supposed claim to have invented the internet, to be the model for Love Story, etc. These are the sort of half remembered story fragments that can mutate into a new and more powerful viral nastiness if not dealt with. Right on schedule there is a piece in Vanity Fair, “Going After Gore” by Evegenia Peretz that does just this.

Perfect Timing. Coincidence? Vast Left Wing Conspiracy? The Fickle Finger of Fate? We just report, but this time, don’t let Fox News decide.

ARE THE ELEMENTS ONLY METAPHORES?

Marketing Guru David Berkowitz (not that David Berkowitz – and can you imagine how tired he is of saying that) wrote a very nice review of Elements of Persuasion on his blog. Check out the rest of his site. If you are in marketing – and who in business isn’t – you’ll find it well worth your time.

David says that he originally thought we were stretching a metaphor by including a fifth element – Space – in our list of elements and he’s not sure why Earth relates to Hero. Couldn’t Water relate just as well?

Good points. In the hopes of drawing him into debate (we like what he has to say so we’d like him to say some of it here) we point out two things.

1)    We didn’t add a fifth element. Pythagoras did – though he called it IDEA.  Actually, since Empedocles (from whose writing our classic Greek elements come) was a student of Pythagoras, no one added the fifth element – it was Empedocles who forgot to include one of the five on his list.

2)     We aren’t using the Greek Elements as metaphors – at least not only metaphors. They are for us – as they were for the pre Socratic Greek philosophers who originally used them – ideas in the Platonic sense of the term. In more modern terms they are psychological states. Because Story is not only what, but how we think, the elements allow us to link breakthroughs in cognitive psychology to practical story strategies and perceive those strategies holistically.

Clearly we haven’t explained this connection adequately, so in following posts we will talk more about this. Thanks David for bringing it up. We appreciate the feedback.

Comments 101

If you are like me you have probably spent years flitting about the web reading blogs and never leaving any comments. I always told myself that I really didn’t have much to add to the conversation. Actually, the whole process of posting intimidated me. It seems I’m not alone.   

A few days ago I was talking to my friend Jane. We always make a point of going out together and working a precinct on Election Day helping to get out the vote. So I know that when it comes to politics Jane is no shrinking violet. She told me she had been reading this blog but hadn’t posted a comment because it seemed confusing.

As in many things, Jane is right. The comment section below seems to imply you need to be a member of TypePad to leave a comment. I thought that too when I first read it. I WAS WRONG. All you need to do is enter your email address, choose a name you want to be known by on this blog, and then type your comment. If, like me, you have been putting off posting, this is a very safe place to try it. We won’t use your email address in any way.

It’s that simple. We want to know what you think, so take a walk on the wild side and leave a comment.

FRED THOMPSON ANNOUNCES

Like most political junkies I tuned to Fox last Thursday for the New Hampshire Debate, which Fred Thompson skipped, then flipped to NBC to hear Thompson officially declare his candidacy seated safely on Jay Leno’s couch. In story terms, Thompson’s choice of venue was smart. The debate format (particularly as it is now structured) is a FACT rich environment, the Tonight Show is famously STORY rich, and it is stories, not facts, that drive voters to the polls. 

Thompson is trying to claim the psychic shelf space originally created by Ronald Reagan. It is doctrinally conservative with a Hollywood polished veneer of plain folks likeability. And Thompson can “aw shucks” with the best of them. Over at Political Brandwagon, Peter S. Cohl calls Thompson’s approach “Southern Fried Reagan.” I disagree with Cohl on much he says in his post (I don’t think he is taking into account the years of party-building that Reagan put in shoring up other Right Wing Republican candidates before he finally won the nomination on his third try for it) but the site is well worth a click.

I’m glad Thompson is officially in the race for purely acoustical reasons. I’ll definitely tune in for the next debate – one Thompson will attend – to hear how Thompson’s slow-burn Tennessee drawl stands up against Giuliani’s clipped and smirk-laden New York delivery. Since both are former U. S. Attorneys, their courtroom training should set some sparks flying at last. 

Bob Dickman on The Business Shrink

Yesterday, I filmed an interview with The Business Shrink, which will begin airing nationally on Thursday of this week. Check your local listings for airtime!

The Cliff Notes Version

A few days ago I mentioned that you might want to shoot over to Amazon to get our new book because the story I checked at was running low of copies. I love Amazon (no duh) but I miss the browsing quality of flipping through paper pages before I buy that you get with brick and mortar bookstores. Amazon makes up for this with its “look inside” feature, but for reasons we are still trying to figure out, this isn’t set up for The Elements of Persuasion yet. Luckily there is a workaround. Shoot over to Marshall Goldsmith’s e-column at Business Week. We had a long talk with Marshall about the book and he did his usual masterful job of cutting to chase and synthesizing the real meat of our conversation. You can read it here.

The YouTube Debate Story Gets Legs

In a recent post, I wrote that the YouTube debate format – which allows actual voters to asks questions in ways that stress their emotional content - demands that candidates hear the story inside the questions. The candidates who do this will be the ones that win not only those debates, but other increasingly web connected elections.  Don’t believe the web-connected part? Look at the fund raising figures. There is a tremendous opportunity here to make empathetic contact with the voter, to become the hero of their story. This isn’t a massive paradigm shift (good politicians instinctively listen for the voter’s story), but it is a big enough change to suggest shifts in campaign communications strategy. The GOP seems to be shifting itself right off the playing field with Guilliani and Romney leading the rush to the showers. Both announced that they have “scheduling conflicts” and won’t be able to participate in the planned CNN-YouTube GOP debate. Check out Steve Benen’s work at Talking Points Memo (great website BTW –where I spend my morning coffee) to find out what they are afraid of, and click on the link to a video by the Firefighters showing how they feel about Guillaini. That video, and a few others linked to the site make it clear the GOP YouTube problem might be substantial.