Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Book: Introducing NLP

by: Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour

Subtitle: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People

Interpreted Thesis:

"NLP is the art and science of excellence, derived from studying how top
people in different fields obtain their outstanding results."

"The purpose of NLP is to increase human choice and freedom."

"The development of a rich awareness in each of our physical senses is
sensory acuity, and an explicit goal of NLP training."

*Note
I originally typed this entire post out about 6 - 8 months ago. When it was
nearly complete (probably 4-5k words), it got deleted entirely. I was obviously
completely distraught, and it’s one of the reasons I haven’t blogged in quite
a while. The book, however was really SO good that I felt I had to redo it.
In fact, I’ve re-read the book several times since then. I’ve also read a few
other books on the subject, but none of the others had the down to earth approach
that really seemed to teach me so much that this one did. The book is actually
out of print - with some copies selling upwards of $100 - $200 (for a while
when I last checked the cheapest one was $50). It seemed to say something about
the quality of the book, to me, if the demand for it was this high.

Editorial:

This is a fantastic introduction to Neuro Linguistic Programming. It has a
ton of bookmark worthy content, and my copy is filled with dog ears from reading
repeated times. Since we are constantly bombarded by media from every direction
at nearly all times - it’s important to have selective filters about what you
consume. NLP arms you with the filters for perception, and encourages you to
maximize your mental cpu cycles.

Topics:

-Neuro Linguistic Processing
-Communication
-Psychology
-Self Improvement

Key Terminology

Anchoring - The process by which any stimulus or representation (external or
internal) gets connected to and triggers a response. Anchors can occur naturally
or be set up intentionally.

Congruence - State of being unified, and completely sincere, with all aspects
ofa person working together toward an outcome.

Content Reframing - Taking a statement and giving it another meaning, by asking,
‘Where would this be an appropriate response?’

Eye Accessing Cues - Movements of the eyes in certain directions which indicate
visual, auditory, or kinesthetic thinking.

Frame - Set a context or way of perceiving something

Future pace - Metnally rehearsing an outcome to ensure that the desired behaviour
will occur.

Reframing - Formal process to stop unwanted behaviour by providing better alternatives.
-or- Changing the frame of reference round a statement to give it another meaning.

Quotes - I read something once that had the definition of the quotes pattern
as talking as if someone else was telling the story.

Quotes from dog-eared pages:

Reasonable men adapt themselve to the world.
Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves.
That’s why all progress depends on unreasonable men.
-George Bernard Shaw

NLP is the art and science of excellence, derived from studying how top people
in different fields obtain their outstanding results.

A photograph never was the person.
A stepping stone is not the journey.
A musical score is not the sound.
There is no magic, only magicians and people’s perceptions.

An artist, a lumberjack and a botanist taking a stroll through a wood will
have very different experiences and notice very different things. If you go
through the worldlooking for excellence, you find excellence. If you go through
the world looking for problems you will find problems. Or as the Arabic saying
puts it, " What a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you are
hungry or not."

Some of the NLP basic filters are often referred to as Behavioural Frames.
These are ways fo thinking about how you act. The first is an orientation towards
outcomes rather than problems.

The Four Stages of Learning:
1.Unconcious Incompetence
2.Conscious Incompetence
3.Conscious Competence
4.Unconscious Competence

Outcomes Summary
You can remember this from the mnemonic ‘POSERS’ spelt out by the letters:
Positive
Own part
Specific
Evidence
Resources
Size

Representational Systems:
Visual - sight
Auditory - hearing
Kinesthetic - touch/feeling
Olfactory - smell
Gustatory - taste

Eye accessing cues
Straight - visualization
Up/right - visual constructed images
Right - constructed sounds
Down/right - kinesthetic/ feelings
Up/left - visual remembered images
Left - Remembered sounds
Down/left - Internal dialogue

Visual memory questions:
1. What colour is your front door?
2. What do you see on your journey to the nearest shop?
3. How do stripes go round a tiger’s body?

Visual construction questions:
1. What would your bedroom look like with pink spotted wallpaper?
2. If a map is upside down, which direction is southeast?
3. Imagine a purple triangle inside a read square.

Auditory memory questions:
1. Can you hear your favorite piece of music in your mind?
2. Which door slams loudest in your house?
3. What is the sound of the engaged (busy) tone on your phone?

Internal dialogue questions:
1.What tone of voice do you use when you talk to yourself?
2. Recite a nursery rhyme silenty.
3.When you talk to yourself, where does the sound come from?

Kinesthetic questions:
1. What does it feel like when you put on wet socks?
2. What is it like to put your foot into a cold swimming pool?
3. How do you feel after a good meal?

Changing submodalities is a matter of personal experience, difficult to convey
in words. Theory is arguable, experience is convincing. You can be the director
of your own mental film show and decide how you want to think, rather than be
at the mercy of the representations that seem to arise of their own accord.
Like television in summer, the brain shows a lot of repeats, many of which are
old, and not very good films. You do not have to watch them.

Lists of Sensory-based words and phrases

Visual
Look, picture, focus, imagination, insight, scene, blank, visualize, perspective,
shine, reflect, clarify, examine, eye, focus, foresee, illusion, illustrate,
notice, outlook, reveal, preview, see, show, survey, vision, watch, reveal,
hazy, dark.

Auditory
Say, accent, rhythm, loud, tone, resonate, sound, monotonous, deaf, ring, ask,
accent, audible, clear, discuss, proclaim, remark, listen, ring, shout, speechless,
vocal, tell, silence, dissonant, harmonious, shrill, quiet, dumb.

Kinesthetic
Touch, handle, contact, push, rub, solid, warm, cold, rough, tackle, push, pressure,
sensitive, stress, tangible, tension, touch, concrete, gentle, grasp, hold,
scrape, solid, suffer, heavy, smooth.

Neutral
Decide, think remember, know, meditate, recognize, attend, understand, evaluate,
process, decide, learn, motivate, change, conscious, consider

Olfactory
Scented, stale, fishy, nosy, fragrant, smoky, fresh

Gustatory
Sour, flavour, bitter, taste, salty, juicy, sweet

Anchoring Resourceful States Summary
1. Identify the situation where you want to be more resourceful
2. Identify the particular resource you want, e.g. confidence
3. Check the resource really is appropriate
4. Find an occassion in your life when you had that resource.
5. Select the anchors you are going to use in each of the three main representational
systems; something you see, hear, and feel.
6. Step into another location and in your imagination put yourself fully back
into the expreience of that resourceful state. Re-experience it again. When
it has peaked, change state and step out of it.
7. Re-experience your resource state and as it comes to peak, connect the three
anchors. Hold the state for as long as you want, then change state.
8. Test the association by firing the anchors and confirming that you do indeed
go into the state.
9. Identify the signal that le’s you know you are in a problem situation where
you want to use your resource. This signal will remind you to use your anchor

Unified Field of NLP (Robert Dilts) for
a salesman:

1. Spiritual -
2. Identity - i am a good salesman
3. Belief - if i do well at sales, i could be promoted
4. Capability - i can sell this product to people
5. Behaviour - i made that sale today
6. Environment - this neighborhood is a good area for
   my work in selling

 

However, because only moving black objects are recognized
as food, a frog will starve to death in a box of dead flies. So perceptual filters
that are too narrow and too efficient can starve us of good experiences, weven
when we are surrounded by exciting possibilities, because they are not recognized
as such.

Meta Model Patterns and their questions -

Deletions:

• Unspecified Noun - ‘Who or what specifically…?’
• Unspecified Verb - ‘How specifically is this happening?’
• Comparison - ‘Compared with what?’
• Judgement - ‘Who says…?’
• Nominalization - ‘How is this being done?’

Generalizations:

• Modal Operator of Possibility - ‘What prevents you…?’
• Modal Operator of Necessity - ‘What would happen if you did/didn’t?’
• Universal Quantifier - ‘Always? Never? Everyone?’

Distortions

• Complex Equivalence - ‘How does this mean that?’
• Presupposition - ‘What leads you to believe that…?’
• Cause and Effect - ‘How exactly do you make yourself do this…?’
• Mind Reading - ‘How do you know?’

Ambiguity is one such method. What you say can be soundly ambiguous. Like the
last sentence. Does ’soundly’ here mean definitely or phonetically? Hear, it
means the latter, and it’s a good example of one word carrying two meanings.
Another example would be, ‘When you experience insecurity… (In security?)’
There are many words that have different meanings but sound the same… there/they’re…
nose/knows. It is difficult to right/ write phonological ambiguity

Note: Two other types of ambiguity include - syntactic and punctuation ambiguity.

There is an interesting pattern known as ‘quotes’. You can say anything if
you first set up a context where it is not really you saying it. The easiest
way to do this is by telling a story where someone says the message you want
to convey, and mark it out in some way from the rest of the story.

I am reminded of a time when we did a seminar on these patterns. One of the
participants came up to us afterwards, and we asked him during hte course of
the conversation if he had heard of the quotes pattern. He said, ‘Yes. It was
funny how that happened. I was walking down a street a couple weeks ago and
a complete stranger came up to me and said, "Isn’t this quotes pattern
interesting?"

Conversational postulates - Questions that literally only require a yes/no
answer, yet actually draw a response. Examples: ‘Is the door still open?’ (Shut
the door)

The story of the prince and the magician.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. - William Shakespeare

We are not reatreating, said a general, we are advancing backwards.

The Prince and the Magician - an awesome narrative that summarizes a lot of the concepts of NLP in a short story. Originally published in The Magus.

Six Step Reframing

1. Identify the behavior or response to be changed
2. Establish communication with the part responsible for the behavior
3. Seperate the positive intention from the behaviour
4. Ask your creative part to generate new ways thta will accomplish the same
   purpose
5. Ask the X part if it will agree to use the new choices rather than the old
   behaviour over the next few weeks
6. Ecological check (make sure there are no other parts that may object ot
   the new choices)

Application to SEO:

NLP seemed to go well beyond SEO for me. It has become more a philosophy that
has helped to structure my way of life in being more solution oriented than
problem oriented. If you tell someone NOT to think about purple and green striped
flying monkeys, it is the ONLY thing the will think about until given an alternative.
NLP focuses on giving you alternatives for your line of thinking, which in turn
gives you more choice in behavior.

There are certainly plenty of applications for NLP to SEO, though I see it
more as ability to become a better teacher, consultant, or communicator. NLP
is truly a fascinating topic, and the understanding is something that will most
likely enrich your life far beyond just search. Any understanding of human thought
patterns really help with search and user behavior, but this book will help
beyond search into your everyday interactions in life (assuming you get off
the computer every now and then).

Closing Notes

I’d encourage anyone to read this book - in case you didn’t get that. Maybe
one day I’ll do a list of resourceful NLP links.

Book: Confessions of an Advertising Man by: David Ogilvy

Here’s the scoop: A good friend of mine, and fellow search marketer who spent many years on Madison Avenue has convinced me to educate myself further about "old school" advertising, and has provided me with a great reading list, which I’m now one book through. If the rest are anything like this one, it should be pretty easy to get through them.

Interpreted Thesis: More so than a thesis - there is a purpose behind this book. David Ogilvy wrote this book for three reasons - 1. To attract more business. 2. To demonstrate value for a public offering 3. To make himself better known in the business world. These three were in his own words, and I have a lot of respect for people who can admit to their own self serving motives. This book has no doubt educated a multitude of folks interested in advertising for many years as well. It really reminds me in many ways of a the motives for what a blog SHOULD be. It is highly specific to what he was knowledgeable about, and he stuck to that topic to educate others, and had no qualms about admitting that the writing was fueled by ego and self serving motives.

Contents

I. How to Manage an Advertising Agency

II. How to Get Clients

III. How to Keep Clients

IV. How to Be a Good Client

V. How to Build Great Campaigns

VI. How to Write Potent Copy

VII. How to Illustrate Advertisements and Posters

VIII. How to Make Good Television Commercials

IX. How to Make Good Campaigns for Food Products, Tourist Destinations, and Proprietary Medicines

X. How to Rise to the Top of the Tree - Advice to the Young

XI. Should Advertising be Abolished

 

Key Terminology

Quotes from dog-eared pages:

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn’t even verbal. It requires "a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconcious."

There is one stratagem which seems to work in almost every case: get the prospect to do most of the talking. The more you listen, the wiser he thinks you are.

Amateurs do it by cajoling a group of agencies into submitting free campaigns, on speculation. The agencies which win these contests are the ones which use their best brains for soliciting new accounts; they relegate their clients to their second-best brains. If I were a manufacturere, I would look for an agency which had no new-business department. The best agencies don’t need them; they get all the business they can handle without preparing speculative campaigns.

(1) What You Say Is More Important Than How You Say It

Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, "Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn’t set the body copy in ten point Garamond."

(11) Don’t be a copy cat

Rudyard Kipling wrote a long poem about a self-made shipping tycoon called Sir Anthony Gloster. On his death bed the old man reviews the course of his life for the benefit of his son, and refers contempuously to his competitors:

They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left ‘em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind.

(4) Other words and phrases which work wonders are:

How to, Suddenly, Now, Announcing, Introducing, It’s Here, Just Arrived, Important Development, Improvement, Amazing, Sensational, Remarkable, Revolutionary, Startling, Miracle, Magic, Offer, Quick, Easy, Wanted, Callenge, Advice to, The Truth About, Compare, Bargain, Hurry, Last Chance

If you need very long copy, there are several devices which are known to increase its readership:

(1) A display subhead of two or three lines, between your headline and your body copy, will heighten the reader’s appetite for feast to come.

(2) If you start your body copy with a large initial letter, you will increase readership by an average of 13 per cent.

-More quotes from David Ogilvy

Application to Search

It is not all to surprising that many of the same principles from ad agencies should apply to new SEM agencies. It was, however, good to see insight into how a TOP agency is run. The same principles of attracting and keeping clients, of being a good client, and on advertising seems to parallel a lot of what I’ve said in my top posts in the past as advice to SEO agencies, clients, and individual SEO’s (new school advertisers).

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the attitudes of old school advertising. I love the confidence they have in some great concepts they have set forth. I also hate the rigidity in thinking that the same confidence creates. I think being stubborn, and having this confidence is a prerequisite for creating any type of marketing, and knowing that your ideas will succeed when everyone else says they won’t.

Aside to the folks at Ogilvy:

I can only imagine the internal political warfare taking place with the NEO Ogilvy folks and their traditional breathren. I understand that the "cobbler’s kids sometimes has no shoes", but there’s still no excuse for still using frames and few titles on your site in 2007. Just click through on search results to see one of many reasons why. It may not be priority, but there is still no excuse for oversights like these. I’ll be happy to refer several people that could help. Quit letting the lawyers and politicians win the battles.

It is also reassuring to see that these same top agencies, are still so worried about the old principles, or something else, that they are oblivious to search as a new ad medium. I know that it may not be a priority, but that is still no excuse for not utilizing title tags. I tried to demonstrate title tags to anyone who cared to listen a year and a half ago - ironically, at the time of this post - that post ranks #4 for "top ad agencies". I think David Ogilvy is probably rolling over in his grave now that he can see what a "web headline" (IE: title tag) is - and how underutilized it is at his agency and others. Can you imagine any ad agency not spending the proper amount of time crafting an effective headline?!? I can only hope he’s rooting for the new little guys to get bigger before the large agencies truly start to figure it out.

Closing Notes

This is definitely a book worth reading if you are blurring the lines between SEM and advertising, have clients, or even ARE a client of an SEM firm or ad agency. David Ogilvy had a proven track record of success, and has become a name synonymous with successful advertising. He lays out his knowledge in an offering that I’m sure his competitors and friends were quite thankful for.

Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

Subtitle: Exposing Why The Rich Are Rich, The Poor Are Poor – and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car

Here’s the Scoop: I’ve had a fascination with economics lately – it’s pretty tough to get through an econ book in a short time, and I’ve been reading this one through several trips. Some areas are very dry, but others are completely fascinating to me. This book was recommended reading by the authors of Freakonomics, one of my personal favorite books along with Armchair Economics. This book does a nice job of using narrative examples to illustrate some core principals of economics. There are some areas that are rather dull, but economics is a TOUGH subject to make interesting unless you can SEE how it applies to you. At the point that you do see how it affects you, it becomes exciting – The book does a nice job of giving examples, and helps you to see more examples of how economics principals affect your daily life.

Interpreted Thesis: Economics is all around us, and understanding the principles of economics allows you to be a better consumer, voter, and businessperson. The book provides insights to use the investigative tools of economics to your advantage in everyday life.

Topics:
-Economics
-Pricing
-Markets
-Information
-Globalization
-Poverty and world economic growth

Chapters:
Who Pays for Your Coffee?
What Supermarkets Don’t Want You to Know
Perfect Markets and the “World of Truth”
Crosstown Traffic
The Inside Story
Rational Insanity
The Men Who Knew the Value of Nothing
Why Poor Countries are Poor
Beer, Fries, and Globalization
How China Grew Rich

Key Terminology:
Bargaining strength comes through scarcity.
Scarcity defined on wikipedia
Selective pricing
Externality charges
Spectrum auction
Increasing returns – theory related to diminishing returns

Quotes from dog-eared pages:

The best-price targeters pair their efforts to improve profits with apparently virtuous behavior. … It’s good business to offer discounts to elderly and to students (translation: charge higher prices to people likely to have jobs) Who but a cynic – or an economist – could object to such commendable behavior?

The most surprising examples of all come from the world of computers. For instance, IBM’s “LaserWriter E,” a low-end laser printer, turned out to be exactly the piece of equipment as their high end “LaserWriter” – except that there was an additional chip in the cheaper version to slow it down. The most effective way for IBM to price-target their printers was to design and mass-produce a single printer, then sell it at two prices. But of course to get anyone to buy the expensive printer they had to slow down the cheap one. It seems wasteful, but presumably it was cheaper for IBM to do this than design and manufacturer two completely different printers. Intel, the chip manufacturer, played a similar game by selling two very similar processing chips at different prices.

…the group price-targeting strategy is inefficient because it takes seats away from customers who are willing to pay more, and gives them to customers who are willing to pay less. Yet airlines and railroads still use it, because the alternative of individual price-targeting isn’t feasible.

…you can’t get more efficient than a perfectly competitive market

Why are taxes inefficient? Because they destroy the information carried by prices in perfectly competitive, efficient markets: price no longer equals cost, so cost no longer equals value.

Externality charges give people both the information to make the right choices, and the incentives to do so.

On the information contained in a soft drink advertisement…

The only information that potential customers can glean from such an advertisement is that it was expensive to make, and that therefore the Coca-Cola company plans to stick around with the same commitment to high-quality products that it always had.

“Someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” – Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, now commonly applied to economists.

It is always useful for the game theorists to draw on experience as well as pure theory, because if the game becomes to complex for the players to understand, then the theory becomes nearly useless for practical purposes since it tells us nothing about what they will actually do.

In the spectrum auction, the problem is similar: each bidder has his own forecasts and technology plans, but each knows that other bidders will probably have different insights. The optimal strategy would take advantage of any information revealed by other players’ bids – but this is not easy.

We learned back in chapters 1 and 2 that firms will charge the maximum they possibly can, under any circumstance. We also know that their ability to do this is limited by their scarcity power.

We still don’t have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed, in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it “social capital,” or maybe “trust.” Others call it “the rule of law,” or “institutions.” But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it’s in most people’s interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else. The incentives to create wealth in any way at all are turned on their heads…

Economist David Friedman observes, for instance, that there are two ways to produce automobiles: they can build them in Detroit, or they can grow them in Iowa.

Chapter 3 showed that the world of truth created by markets produces good outcomes not just because it provides incentives, but because it generates information about the costs and benefits of all kinds of goods and services through the price system.

We know that a market system limits the scarcity power of firms; most firms face competition, and sectors of the economy that are not very competitive tend to attract new competition over time. The competition and free entry of new firms, by limiting scarcity power pushes powerfully toward efficient production, new ideas, and consumer choice.

Countries that are rich or rapidly growing have embraced the basic lessons of economics we have learned in this book: fight scarcity power and corruption; correct externalities; try to maximize information; get the incentives right; engage with other countries; and most of all, embrace markets, which do most of these jobs at the same time.

In the end, economics is about people – something that economists have done a very bad job at explaining. And economic growth is about better life for individuals – more choice, less fear, less toil and hardship.

Application to search

Scarcity is one of the big principles behind why so many SEO’s are currently successful. There is a huge demand for SEO services that will plateau over time.

There were several applications to search marketing and online business including the use of selective pricing. It was interesting to read the many examples of group price targeting practices, but how vehemently opposed to individual price targeting consumers have become (a technique amazon.com used via cookies for some time). One of the examples in this section was how organic foods are often used as a price determination strategy to investigate where the to end of the marketplace is located (IE: how much people would be willing to pay for foods by using “organic” as the premium).

There ARE actually instances (described in detail in the book) where price targeting can be a good thing. Understanding price-targeting strategies can be very important to the success of any business. Pricing is optional, and for this reason it reveals information – and information is valuable both when doing competitive intelligence, and to becoming and informed consumer.

There are examples of the auction models based on economic principles being used by successful companies all over the web. Understanding user behavior and how to provide incentive through a viable revenue model is one of the critical foundations to a successful business online.

Book: The Cluetrain Manifesto by: Christopher “Rageboy” Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, and Rick Levine

Subtitle: The End of Business As Usual

Here’s the scoop: (more…)

I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve been asked about the gent on my consulting contact image on my site.

The image is a not so subtle homage to the monkey looking for a banana in SG’s “Big Red Fez”. It’s a book I think anyone who does websites should read anytime several times. All sites should have a banana, and all site owners should read this book.

The guy looks a little upset so I thought I would elaborate, expain, and disclaim, that I do not advocate banana meltdowns like the gentleman with the banana is holding. Banana’s on webpages are definitely lucrative with so many monkeys(vid) running around. If you’ve read the book or heard the story, you probably already knew this.

Online Success:
Content + Links + Value + Banana.

I’m not real sure why I waited so long…perhaps because I was afraid it was overhyped…but the point is, I’m finally reading it. I didn’t want to wait to post until I finished a review, since I will probably drink the knowledge of the book for quite some time to come to take it all in.

I’ve already found myself “dog-earing” about every page, and I’m really enjoying the insights, many of which I’ve taken in already second hand from the powerful memes that have been spread far and wide by this book.

Just in case you haven’t read this book…I don’t want you to make the same mistake of procrastinating to read this book any longer like I did, so I am posting this now. Read this book. Your can do it for free online in case you’re really cheap. Do yourself a favor, and don’t wait any longer to get on the cluetrain.

I’ll be sure to add to the thousands of reviews when I get a chance to digest it all and regurgitate my favorite parts.

Book: The Tipping Point by: Malcolm Gladwell

Subtitle: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Here’s the scoop: Malcolm Gladwell was the keynote speaker at the recent Boston Pubcon. I figured the memes from the idea in his book would be spreading like wildfire from all the procrastinators that finally found a good reason to read the book like me. This is one of those books that I had heard about so much about in other places, that I felt like I already knew the thesis…and I suppose I kind of did. What was astounding was that the narrative was so compelling that I really enjoyed it despite feeling as though I had already read the cliff notes from the summaries of others.

Interpreted Thesis: Idea epidemics are the result of the right people, the right packaging (approach, distribution, presentation, etc.), and the right time and place.

Traditional thinking creates traditional slow change. Little ideas that reach the right people at the right time can create amazing results towards the adoption of something new. Just because and idea is great, doesn’t mean it will widely adopted. An understanding of social dynamics, methods of presentation, and situational context can greatly increase your likelihood of having an idea spread virally.

Topics:
-Evolution of Ideas
-How things change
-Sociology
-Marketing

Key Terminology

Three rules of the tipping point:

• Law of the Few

Based on Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen, the law of the few states that it only takes a few of the right people to start an epidemic.

-Connectors - The people who know “everyone” - People motivated by getting to know and understanding a wide variety of people.
-Mavens - Yiddish for someone who collects information. - Someone who enjoys collecting and redistributing information, often from a tendency to enjoy helping others. People motivated by educating and helping others.
-Salesmen - People who are naturally persuasive without necessarily intending to be. People who are naturally charismatic and have a subtle persuasive effect on those around them through their demeanor.

• Stickiness Factor

Probably the most overdone phrase of the last ten years in regards to websites. This phrase alone has reached the masses, and I was well aware of the definition long before ever reading Mr. Gladwell’s initial description. There is a simple way to package information, that under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it. This idea has been so inspirational, that “stickiness” has probably been mentioned in every strategic discussion of a website in the last few years.

• Power of Context

This was probably my most favorite section of the book. The idea is that, “epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the places and times that they occur”. The power of context is an amazing tool for trying to determine logic or motive in people’s actions. It’s easy to judge people on poor decisions, it much more difficult to understand the rationale behind why they made those decisions. Understanding of people can be a very powerful tool that is sharpened by an understanding of the power of context.

This section was made extremely interesting by discussing the “broken windows theory” in regards to the reduction of crime in NYC. I must note a compelling counterpoint to this theory in Freakonomics, but both theories seem to have some very logical and thought provoking points.

These were the main points of the book that were followed by many strong examples of the points being made including some interesting case studies. Despite the redundancy of the stories, the examples were descriptive enough to draw me in as the reader not only to the ideas being pitched, but also to the story at hand. The non-fiction description of characters and companies was compelling enough that I could visualize them, making me want to understand further how they’re circumstances applied to the idea of a tipping point.

Quotes from dog-eared pages:

In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

Eye movement research is based on the idea that the human eye is capable of focusing on only a very small area at one time — what is called a perceptual span.

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and the circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.

**In reference to the Stanford prison experiment
Zimbardo’s conclusion was that there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.
More on Fundamental attribution error.

The 150 rule:
Dunbar has actually developed an equation an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species — the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain — and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8 — or roughly 150. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship…
More on Dunbar’s number

Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system — a transactive memory system — which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.”
More on transactive memory systems
Somewhat related - Aaron’s post on memex

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then — whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software — he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

“discordant details were leveled out, incidents were sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole was assimilated to the preexisting structure of feeling and though characteristic of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread.”

More on Gestalt, from which comes the idea of “leveling and sharpening”.

Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

The world — much as we want it to — does not accord with our intuition. This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.

Application to SEO:
Many of the principles and ideas in the book have a direct impact on human understanding. Any enlightenment of the human disposition helps a marketer/seo to do a better job of reaching prospects successfully. SEO is much bigger now than reaching robots with meta tags.

The idea of “transactive memory systems” is extremely intriguing to me, and is one of the main reasons that I started a blog. I no longer have to remember all of the subtle details of a book that I read, because if write about it, I have a searchable memory system for later. I only have to remember some of the points in order to trigger the response to go and search for more information. In some ways, search engines are transactive systems as well. You can become as smart as what you are searching for, and have a better understanding of something in only minutes. It is hard to contemplate the impact that SE’s will have on human learning, having reduced the time for information retrieval from perhaps hours with libraries and other analog means to the mere seconds it takes to type a query.

I have more and more interest in social networks, sociology, and other social dynamics in regards to becoming a better marketing professional, and a better person in general. The studies and experiments are often profound and life-changing experiences when you understand them better.

Closing Notes
I am very pissed off at myself that I didn’t make it to the keynote speech now. I got involved in a good conversation and before I knew it it was too late to slip in. I was lucky enough to walk in to the signing session about the same time as Malcolm, and had him autograph the copy I have just finished reading complete with dog-ears. It seems awkward to ask for an autograph, but the timing was just right where I only had to stand behind a few folks, and had my copy with me, so I thought it was worth it. I would have much rather just had a conversation about nearly anything, but I imagine Malcolm has surprassed Dunbar’s number long ago. I thank Mr. Gladwell for writing such an inspirational and forward thinking book. If anyone has done summaries of the keynotes, please post them below so others can check it out.