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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Tagstand is an NFC platform that simplifies the NFC stack for businesses and developers. Genius Idea: Program and manage NFC stickers on the web. “The way your phone interacts with the real world is going to become quite fundamental,” predicts Kulveer Tagger. Tagger is betting on the trend with Tagstand, a startup serving as a platform that businesses and developers can turn to for NFC tag procurement and management. Customers can purchase packs of stickers, and then use the Tagstand Manager to program — and reprogram as often they see fit — how those stickers function on objects in the real world. They can also track sticker usage. Tagstand could theoretically, depending on the whims of the tag owner, allow a consumer with an NFC-enabled device to touch his phone to a sticker to check in onFoursquare one day and view a promotional video or product page the next. The point is clearly to commodify NFC technology — to package it up, sell it to businesses and marketers, and make it consumer-friendly in the process. One problem: consumers aren’t yet toting around NFC-enabled devices en masse. But should that change — and research firm Juniper forecasts that it will — Tagstand, says Tagger, hopes its first-mover status will solidify it as a harbinger of the NFC revolution in the states.
In the right-here and right-now, Tagstand appears to be pulling in impressive sales and traction for a three-month startup in a nascent market. “We’ve had loads of developers and businesses contact us,” Tagger says. “We’re basically finding out what we think are going to be the first applications of NFC.” Outdoor marketing is surfacing as the most popular application, he says. A Tagstand customer in India, for instance, made a bulk purchase of 20,000 tags for $10,000. The customer plans to put tags on movie posters at malls and cinemas in India, he says. Next on the agenda for Tagstand is to give startups access to NFC payments capabilities and release an API for its tag management system. Tagstand is a graduate of Y Combinator’s summer of 2011 session. The startup is in the process of raising additional funding. |
New York Model Management and LA Models is on the Van’s Warped Tour this year. Conceptual set up the promotion from conception, execution and social media blasting. Our prime target is 14-18year old M/F. Van’s Warped Tour met our demographic requirements right on.
Not only is NYMM and LA Model’s Warped Tour booth beneficial for scouting new faces but, their photo booth is a great medium for social media branding. All photos taken in our red carpet-styled photo booth were posted to Facebook. Branded stickers were passed out with NYMM and LA Model’s Facebook address, for the attendee’s liking, and participants were encouraged to tag themselves. Not only does this promotion increase Facebook likes and brand exposure, any tagged photos will show up in the participant’s News Feed, allowing for a viral element of branding.
There are 500 million active users on Facebook — it’s about time you get in on the action and start a Facebook Page for your business. After all, the best marketing reaches out to consumers where they already are, and people spend more than 700 billion hours a month on the site. Exposure to that many eyeballs could translate to a lot of business for your company.
Not tech savvy? That’s not a problem — the process isn’t too technical. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you initiate your Facebook marketing campaign.
Go to facebook.com/pages and click “Create Page” in the upper right hand corner.
The next screen asks you to select a category from the following list:
Once you select the category for your business, you can fill in the name, address and phone number. Check the box next to “I agree to Facebook Pages Terms” and click “Get Started.” You’ll see a Page that looks like this:
Upload a picture for your page. It can be a logo, a photo of a store or a photo of a person — whatever makes the most sense for building your brand. The file needs to be smaller than 4MB, and it can be square or a vertical rectangle. However, note that the avatar that shows up next to status updates and wall posts is square, so if you don’t want anything chopped off, square might be the way to go.
Get your Page started off with some “likes” by recruiting your own friends. Start typing in names and when you drag the cursor over someone’s name, it will highlight in blue. Click once to check the person and add them to your invite. Click “Selected” to see who’s on your invite list. When you’re ready to invite, click “Send Recommendations.”
Click on “Import Contacts” to reach out to your email contacts about your new Page. You can upload a file (Outlook, Constant Contact, .csv) or you can enter your email login info so Facebook can access people in your email contact list. 
Again, you can check the box next to the names you’d like to invite, and you can preview the invitation to see what it’ll look like. For people who are already on Facebook, they’ll get a “Recommended Pages” widget on their Facebook, while everyone else will get an email that looks like this:
Once you have a photo uploaded and have a few fans on board, you can start engaging.
For status updates, you can either share with everyone or you can target by location or by language. Targeting comes in handy if the Page is for a business with several locations in various states, especially if there is a contest, event or update that is only for a particular city.
If you want to post a link to a blog post or news story, don’t just type or paste the URL into a status update. If you do, it will look like this:
To post a link the proper way, click “Link” and paste the URL. Click “Attach.” Once you “attach” the URL, you’ll see that the text and photo from the page you’re linking to will populate automatically. You can change the title, paste different text into the snippet, and change the pictures (if there are several options, indicated by the “Choose a Thumbnail” prompt):
This is the best and cleanest way to link to another page. The post looks better and it will perform better if the link is attached instead of typed in to the status. Note that you can click on either the link or the snippet to change the text before you click “Share.”
Once you have 25 fans on your Facebook Page, any of a Page’s admins can reserve a vanity URL so that your Facebook URL is http://www.facebook.com/yourbusinessnamehere. Go to the Username page, select the Page name from the dropdown menu and then write in the name you’d like to use. Click “Check Availability.” If it’s available, a prompt will ask, “Are you sure you want to set [URL] as [Facebook Page]‘s username?” Click confirm to lock in that URL — and keep in mind that you can’t change the URL for a Page once you confirm.
Facebook Insights is a great tool that can help you figure out when to post and what kind of content does well. Measuring social media success is complicated, but many brands focus on engagement. Activity on your Page is a good sign, and you can keep tabs on activity by clicking “Facebook Insights” on the right sidebar, just below the admins.
Speaking of admins, you can invite several people to run the Page and post content — links and statuses will come through as written by the Page and not the individual. (Note, the statuses above were generated when I was on my personal account — but the posts came through from “My Sweet New Candy Shoppe” because I am an admin.)
In the “Admins” section of the sidebar on the right, click “See All.” A new page will populate with the names of the admins. To make someone else an admin, just type in his name (it’ll populate in real time) — there is no limit to the number of admins a Page can have. Admins are kept abreast of happenings on the Page — including comments and posts so that your company can interact with its fans — via email.
Now that your Facebook Page is all set, you can learn more about what to do, what not to do and when to postto get the best engagement.
Mat Honan — Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, thinks modern communication technologies make you stupid, destroy your relationships and even your soul. He is wrong.The crux of Keller’s argument lies in a single paragraph:
Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.
Keller makes the same mistake in dismissing Twitter and Facebook and, well, modernity, that critics ten to twelve years ago made in dismissing blogging: he confuses medium with message. Twitter, and any technology, is what you make of it. If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life.
Instead he focuses on the short form, and its rapid fire nature. He bemoans what it does to memory and genuine interaction. His criticism echoes what previous generations said about television, about newspapers about pamphlets and even about the written word itself. In fact,it’s strikingly similar to the argument Socrates leveled against writing (which presumably Keller is in favor of):
[F]or [the use of letters] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Yes! You are right, Bill Keller. Technology will change the way we think and interact. Our brains will process information differently and we will interact with each other differently thanks to the tools we use, be they databases, communications mediums, or language itself. But Keller seems to mistake the changing nature of the way our brains work to process information and communicate with us having lost something as a society. That’s just not true.
If we lose the art of penmanship, but gain a greater ability to clearly communicate what is ultimately lost? If we become unable to recognize simple patterns in data with our eyes because we have built machines that can see complex ones our brains could not process in many lifetimes, are we truly intellectually bereft for it?
Bill Keller seems to think so. He cites the loss of our collective ability to memorize vast quantities of information as proof of a greater cognitive loss.
“Until the 15th century, people were taught to remember vast quantities of information. Feats of memory that would today qualify you as a freak – the ability to recite entire books – were not unheard of.
Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg. As we became accustomed to relying on the printed page, the work of remembering gradually fell into disuse. The capacity to remember prodigiously still exists (as Foer proved by training himself to become a national memory champion), but for most of us it stays parked in the garage.
Sometimes the bargain is worthwhile; I would certainly not give up the pleasures of my library for the ability to recite “Middlemarch.” But Foer’s book reminds us that the cognitive advance of our species is not inexorable.”
Yeah. See. The thing is not that we’re dumber, or that our cognitive advance has slowed or reversed. It’s that we need different mental abilities to process information and the modern world.
We don’t simply use new technologies, we become immersed in them. We live in an era of information assault. Data is everywhere. Ads come at us from all sides. Email pours into our boxes. The Web, and television, and radio and, yes, fucking newspapers spew information at us like, well, like newspapers once spewed from printing presses before they began drifting into irrelevance.
Memorization was once a tool for preserving information. But today the more important skill is the ability to process and filter it. To quickly decide what needs to be analyzed and responded to, and what ought to be ignored. That’s not a cognitive loss, it’s an evolutionary advancement.
There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible to be versed in all the world’s ideas. Men like Benjamin Franklin were able to master the accumulated knowledge we as humans had built up over the whole of our history. That’s impossible now! Could you even do that with the news that came out last week?
The era of The Great Man, if it ever existed, is past. We are all smaller pieces of the pie now. Our achievements tend less towards great leaps than incremental change. And yet our technology is advancing at a much greater rate than ever before due to these incremental advances of a great many than it ever did by the actions of a few learned white men of letters. We are becoming specialists. That doesn’t make us dumb.
Similarly, just as we encounter much more data each day, we also encounter many more people. Think back 20 years ago. How many people did you interact with in a 24 hour period? Almost certainly, all of your interactions were in person or via the telephone. The majority required speech. A small subset likely took place via the written word. In technologically advanced societies, that trend has reversed itself.
If you are like me, most of your daily interactions with other people take place electronically. You probably interact with a greater number of distinct individuals via emails, tweets, Facebook updates, chats, and text message than you do verbally or in person. (Unless you have a job that requires a great deal of public interaction like, say, a sales clerk at a busy department store.)
Again, you need to be able to process those relationships quickly and efficiently. It’s a basic tool for modern life. Yet that does not mean that your interactions in those mediums are any less genuine, or less soulful, even if they take place more rapidly.
Though Keller may not have done so himself, for those younger than him I think the experience of making a friend online who later becomes a friend in person is relatively commonplace. You can put the word friends inside of quotation marks all you want to denigrate those relationships, but the fact is that tools like Facebook, and Twitter, and email and the Web serve not simply as communication aids, but as the connective tissue of modern relationships.
Much of Keller’s evidence relies on a lone experience, when he sent a message to Twitter stating “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.” Keller did not ask any important questions, or engage with the other people using Twitter to communicate. He just rolled up and trolled. He went into a venue where people have elected to be, and told everyone that their presence there makes them stupid. He then laments that he did not receive more positive responses from within that forum itself.
LOL! It’s funny because it’s so fucking facile.
Calling me stupid isn’t generally the best way to get a nuanced, reasoned response out of me, Bill. To prove this point, I have broken out my notecards, and composed an old-fashioned letter to you which I am sending in the old-fashioned mail. I eagerly await your handwritten response.
Mat Honan — Before Twitter was public, it was just an AIM hack on Jack Dorsey’s pager.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a background in messenger culture. He had even launched a dispatch software startup called D-Net, back in 1999. He was also captivated by his friends status messages on AOL Instant Messenger. He wanted to combine the two. And in an era when AIM was king, he did just that.
“I loved seeing at a glance my friends status updates. But I also really appreciated at the same time the dispatch aspect, where you’re out in the world doing something away from the keyboard and IM did not allow that,” said Dorsey. “I had a RIM pager, the 850, the first email device. I programed a system where I could fire off an email from that and set my status from anywhere. And it worked! And I was able to also at a regular interval pull my buddy list and get those updates sent to my email address. It was awesome! But the number of people who had those mobile devices was so minimal that the timing was just not right. This was 2001.”
In 2006, when he was working for Evan Williams at Odeo, Dorsey resurrected the idea. He combined the timeline aspects of LiveJournal with the status updates of instant messenger and the concept of dispatch software that delivers them all remotely. Boom. That’s Twitter.
For the uninitiated, Portal is a first-person puzzle shooter. Rather than guns and ammo, the player is armed with an experimental “handheld inter-spatial portal device” that can fire two connecting gateways at a time onto (almost) any flat surface — floors, walls, ceilings. Pass through these moveable gateways to clear obstacles, thwart enemies, and skirt the ire of GLaDOS, the murderous artificial intelligence run amok in the testing facility.
The game’s unsettling plot and jaw-dropping mechanics have earned it critical acclaim and a loyal fanbase. It’s even found a place in college curricula as a way to get students thinking about spatial relations, physics, and existential philosophy.
Anticipation of a sequel has had fans drooling over proposed features (such as multiplayer support) and teaser videos (including the one below) for some time now. And while Valve has made a traditional marketing push in the form of web videos, billboards and TV spots, its final and more subversive campaign has had online gaming communities in a tizzy for weeks.
The campaign began April 1, when a collection of indie games collectively dubbed “The Potato Sack” was released on Steam (Valve’s cloud-based delivery system — sort of an iTunes for video games). Players began noticing strange symbols and coded messages appearing in the games. Savvy users began to connect these “glyphs” to other games — which were receiving new content from Steam — as well as to external websites and real-world locations. A wiki and IRC channel were created by gaming forum denizens to start pooling information about what has come to be known as the Portal ARG (alternate reality game).
Coded messages appear during static-filled transitions in Portal 2 promo videos.
While it’s only been in motion for a few weeks, the ARG is exceedingly complex and tended to unfold in real time, with clues hidden across the web, gaming forums, podcasts, YouTube videos, and the Potato Sack games themselves. Highlights include cryptic blog posts that were deleted soon after discovery, messages in Morse code, clues encoded in the waveforms of audio files, and a handful of interconnected images sent from Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve himself, to a few prominent gaming blog editors.
An audio file run through spectrogram analysis reveals the hidden message: WhyMustThereBeSiblingRivalry.The scope of the campaign cannot be overstated, but you can get the blow-by-blow on the Investigation History page of the wiki.
In the last few days, mounting clues were indicating that GLaDOS, the exceedingly creepy AI villain defeated in the original Portal, was attempting to reboot herself on the Internet and release Portal 2 early with the help of fans engaged in the ARG. A new website appeared, titled GLaDOS@Home, and featured a countdown clock and progress bars for all the games in the original Potato Sack. The more fans played these games on Steam, the faster the clock would tick down, with the promise of an early release for Portal 2.
At the time of this writing, however, the countdown is on track for the original release date of April 19 — in fact, it may even be a few hours late. After countless hours searching, decoding, compiling, purchasing and playing other Steam games, the most dedicated Portal fans essentially get nothing. And some of them are pretty upset.
So has Valve created some of the most epic buzz in gaming, only to shoot itself in the foot by punking its most loyal fans?
“Valve missed an opportunity to craft an ARG that actually let gamers ‘alter’ reality,” says Matt Peckham, a gaming journalist who covered the Portal ARG for PC World. “Instead, they got gamers to pay for their marketing stunt.”
But has that damaged Valve’s image? “I suppose it depends how good (and bug-free) Portal 2 is,” Peckham notes. “You follow a negative event with an overwhelmingly positive one, and people tend to forgive (and forget) their grievances.”
Despite some of the negative sentiment, the ARG may be remembered by fans as a unique an enjoyable experience, despite falling short of the end goal. “While the idea of the game getting an early release is cool, the ARG really is a way for fans — those kind of die-hard fans who actually take the time to figure out these sorts of things — to interact with the game in a different way,” says Andrew Webster, a writer who covers gaming for Ars Technica. “And in that I think it’s a success no matter what. Valve has built up so much goodwill amongst the gaming community that it would take a colossal screw up for something like this to damage its brand.”
Both Peckham and Webster agree that despite the depth and complexity of the ARG, the most ingenious aspect of it was that it got fans to buy and play 13 additional games they might not have on their own volition. “Somehow, while promoting its own game with a massive campaign, Valve still managed to come out the good guy by supporting indie games at the same time,” says Webster. “Not only did the ARG try and get players to play more indie games, but it likely sold a few as well, which is good for the developers for sure, but also for Valve, since it owns the Steam distribution platform.”
“It’s one of the most clever cross-exposure schemes going,” Peckham added.
Fans will likely rejoice around the actual game once it has been released to the masses. But whether enough goodwill remains for future Valve marketing efforts like this is yet to be seen.
Customer relationship management isn’t just the domain of big brands, and these days, more and more companies are offering free online tools to make it easier for SMBs to keep track of and reach out to their customers.
For some SMBs — whether they’re brick-and-mortar shops or online businesses — being able to monitor customer feedback, respond to complaints and help answer questions across a wide variety of websites is incredibly valuable, and it establishes a rapport with customers, who are likely to spread the word and praise the SMB for its outreach.
To get a better understanding of what the CRM tasks are and the best tools to accomplish them, Mashablespoke with Marsha Collier, who wrote the book on online customer service.
Collier says that when it comes to reaching out to customers on the web, small businesses actually have an advantage over their corporate counterparts.
“There is the opportunity for more communication within the company, more chance to build a customer-centric culture. They don’t have the issues of having to pass new ideas through meetings and legal department. If the owner/president is involved and the lines of communication are fairly open, they can turn on a dime and beat the competition,” she says.
Given the agility of a smaller company, Collier says that while there are lessons to be learned from larger corporations’ social media campaigns, the most important part of bringing your business online for customer interaction is that you’re creating a personality for your company and giving your business a face. “When you engage the community, you personalize your business. Your business is no longer a store or a website: It’s a person.” And at that point, Collier says, it’s vital to communicate promptly and personally, which can be time-consuming.
“I know of small business owners who continually monitor social media platforms for mention of their businesses. They get text messages and try to direct the issues immediately. I even heard of a brick-and-mortar restaurateur who got a text about cold French fries at his location. He texted the manager, who then showed up at the table within minutes to diffuse the situation.”
When it comes to specific tools that SMBs should be using, Collier says, “Of course, the very basics would beTweetdeck or Seesmic. You’d be surprised how many small businesses don’t know about the basic tools.” She says HootSuite is a great choice for a slightly larger business.
Anyone who runs an online business will tell you that customers are shopping 24/7. Collier says they can “smartly install a web-based help desk from Zendesk or chat products like Meebo Me or Skype on their websites to immediately answer customer service issues.”
Collier says those who wish to monitor mentions of their brands or verticals can use sites such asSocialmention or Tweetbeep. “Small business again can jump the gun here,” she notes. “Using their knowledge of their own industry, they can comment topically on blogs. They can even help their competitors’ customers in public on Facebook, on blogs or boards. By helping people with good service they can turn those people into prospective customers.”
Collier says she’s spoken at length with scores of SMB owners while writing her book, The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide. She says some of the most diligent practitioners of online CRM are the tens of thousands of business owners who make their living selling only on eBay or Amazon. Collier says these people have to “stay on top of customer transactions” in a way that other SMB owners and managers don’t.
For offline businesses, Collier says, “Keep in mind we are on the cusp of this new form of online customer service, and the tools and procedures are just now being perfected. The few businesses that actually ‘get it’ right now are doing it right.”
A fine example that Collier recommends for further study is @UnitedLinen, a company that uses social media to connect with customers in its local area. “The company has a personalized stream where it engages customers,” she says, “yet it’s also used for product announcements and crowdsourcing” and promotion of itsYouTube series on the art of folding napkins.
Collier also points out that quite a few food trucks have mastered the art of social media CRM. She recommends checking out the efforts of street food companies such as Streetza Pizza and Kogi BBQ.
At the end of the day, Collier says, “Good customer service in any form has a positive effect on ROI. The White House Office of Consumer Affairs is quoted as saying, ‘A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience.’ If that is a real world statistic, the online world must be ten times that.”
She adds that people don’t do business with those who have a reputation for mistreating their customers. And since more companies are shifting to social media as the platform for all customer service, “small businesses should grab the opportunity and begin to make their mark.”
In other words, practice will make perfect, and Collier advises getting as much social media practice as you can.
Unfortunately, not all customer interactions online are going to be positive, and there is little SMB owners can do to control that. “Negative feedback can appear anywhere,” Collier says. “New media has drawn an end to controlling the situation.”
Rather than trying to shut down conversations that might cast your business or product in an unflattering light, Collier recommends approaching all such conversations with honesty and a willingness to make amends if needed.
“The object is to be there, to monitor the various sites,” she says. “Claim your business’ Facebook Page, sign up with Yelp, Angie’s List, Trip Advisor and any review site you can find on a Google search for your industry. Be transparent. Own up to mistakes and let the audience know about how you made things right for the customer.”
Being proactive with social media makes it easy to nip a negative situation in the bud — and everyone knows how quickly you responded, which can help you win even more customers.
BY GREGORY FERENSTEINToday
Many of the world’s most powerful brands are doubling down on Facebook, from President Obama to The New Yorker. The powerful, hidden psychology of a fan page might just make this a worthwhile bet. Psychologists have long known that tiny, voluntary actions can cause sweeping changes in our opinions, transforming luke-warm attitudes into concrete beliefs. In other cases, the mere perception of a name or idea in the news can cause us to wildly exaggerate its importance. Here we’ll take a deep dive into the social psychology of manipulation and how the simple act of a Facebook ‘like’ could have the exact intended outcome that these messaging brands, like politicians and newspapers, are seeking.
Dissonance
Rationalization, arguably social psychology’s most powerful known cognitive force, predicts that a user will unwittingly feel much more positively about brand after they click ‘like’ than before–namely, because our actions secretly influence our opinions.
The academic term for rationalization, “Cognitive Dissonance,” was popularized by social science great Leon Festinger, who discovered how to manipulate undergraduates into enjoying an exceedingly boring game. After a painful hour of play, one group was offered $1 to lie to a fellow student about how enjoyable the game was, and the other group was offered $20. The academically earth-shattering result was that the group paid $1 was far more likely to say they enjoyed the game in a post-experiment survey.
Why? Participants in the high-reward group easily rationalized their decision as greed-driven, whereas the low-reward group needed a justification, and end up convincing themselves how much they actually enjoyed the game, rather than believe their integrity could be purchased for a $1. Dissonance/rationalization has been replicated countless times since: appliances are rated higher post-decision, smokers who fail to quit downplay the dangers of their habit, and students who cheat have less ethical qualms after doing it once.
Every opportunity to reflect on our choices is an opportunity to reconstruct a past view of ourselves as flawless decision-makers.
The New Yorker laid out a perfect dissonance bear trap by requiring readers to like their Facebook page in order to read Jonathan Franzen’s 12,000 word story about the island inRobinson Crusoe; everyone but die-hard fans needed to rationalize why he was worth so much more effort than other articles on the Internet, likely turning many luke-warm spectators into full-fledged fans.
Even if the effect is small, it’s all many messaging brands need: a handful of highly active users spreading buzz, creating viral videos, and recruiting friends.
Exaggerated Importance and Laziness
One of the simplest ways to seem more influential in a conversation is to angle participants so that they are looking at you more often than anyone else. Perception hijacks our opinions, and unwittingly assigns credit (and blame) to whatever we’re looking at. In one deliciously simple experiment, psychology professors Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske put six participants in conversation so that they could either see both discussants equally, or placed behind a discussant, so that they were able to only view one speaker. As expected, those who could see both rated each almost identically important in the conversation, while the others vastly overrated the importance of the speaker they saw.
However, the relatively neutral value of “importance” is impotent without another psychological accomplice: laziness–it’s cognitively easier to attribute kudos to someone who seems influential, rather than actually think about what is being said. For instance, highly informed and engaged listeners are immune to celebrity endorsements of candidates, cheesy campaign videos, and bumper sticker politics. As well, the most political ignorant citizens are also immune, since they likely won’t be engaged at all. The sweet spot for campaigners is a moderately informed citizen, just ignorant enough to want non-information cues to help them make up there mind (such as good looks or college background), but still engaged enough to listen in the first place.
This is why some academics freaked out when CNN decided to overlay a political debate with a crawling “worm” that dipped and spiked with the approval of a small focus group watching the live debate. Follow up studies show that citizens were unwittingly influenced by their estranged focus-group peers on TV.
Thus, seeing a lightly peppered stream of “Barack Obama” or “The New Yorker” in a newsfeed not only influences how moderately informed citizens feel about the candidate or media outlet, but might influences how persuasive they will find future speeches or essays. Seeing friends endorse a candidate or website constructs a rose-flecked prism of optimism through which we evaluate the world.
Counter-attitudinal Speech
The writers of pledges and oaths were aware of speech-induced manipulation far before psychologists discovered that asking an individuals to say something, even if it contradicts their own opinions, could secretly twist their beliefs into favoring what they’re saying.
For instance, in the eerily titled “Generalization of Dissonance Reduction: Decreasing Prejudice Through Induced Compliance,” participants were tricked into becoming more favorable towards African Americans by being asked to write an essay in support of more minority scholarship funds (at the expense of white students). As expected, those participants who were led to believe they had a choice in what position to advocate (but were encouraged to help the researchers out by writing a pro-minority essay) had even greater gains in pro-African American beliefs.
“Liking” a brand is a public act, one that involves both a declaration of one’s own endorsement and taking up valuable space on a friend’s newsfeed. Knowing this, moderately interested readers of The New Yorker are forced to justify either believing that they are callous to spamming a friend’s wall with mediocre brands, or that The New Yorkeris actually something their friends would enjoy. Heck, according to this research, users might think they’re friends should be happy such a wonderful article was brought to their attention.
Placing content behind a ‘like wall’ is a difficult decision. For those brands seeking an elusive and unquantifiable sense of influence, the hypnotic pull of a Facebook page might just do the trick.
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