@Publish

The Four U’s of headline writing as outlined by the AWAI are a very helpful guide to evaluating any piece of sales copy or content: Useful Ultra-specific Unique Urgent Useful is absolutely required. If your headline can only be one more thing, make it ultra-specific. This is key because specificity presents the most benefit to your reader.

the #1 rule for building credibility is making good on your headline’s promise.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maxim: Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Use short sentences Use short first paragraphs Use vigorous English Be positive, not negative

Mark Twain wrote: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.

Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories--inaccuracies, missteps--than less transported readers.

When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.

stories can also function as Trojan Horses. The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

storytelling is a uniquely powerful form of persuasive jujitsu

we are beasts of emotion more than logic. We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with “Once upon a time.”

GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick told The Wall Street Journal that the company "is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important."

All of us writers at ReadWriteWeb participate in varying degrees on Twitter too. We post and repost links to our stories and that of our colleagues, and many people follow us as a result. All well and good. But wouldn't it be better if someone else posts a link to our stories on their Twitter account? Doesn't that link carry more weight than just our own flogging of our content? Yes.

you have to constantly feed your discussions and other sites with content, with recommendations, and spend time to make sure that you are part of the ongoing conversations online. It certainly is easier to just put up a piece of content on your own website, press publish, and walk away. But it is more satisfying once you get your OPM network working for you.

Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.

Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.

Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.

We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.

But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.

We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.

Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.

As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.

Tetlock's conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like "Berlin's prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions." Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one's ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).

In today's uncertain environment, breadth of perspective trumps depth of knowledge.

The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.).

Today’s students face a job market that increasingly clamors for real technology skills, not just the ability to post party pictures on Facebook.

What excites me tremendously these days is the connectivity and the mobility that the future world will have, which we are already seeing emerge through smartphones. I have the power of thousands of computers in my pocket - because when I type a query [into a handset] it really takes thousands of computers to answer that query.

The study had professional marketers evaluate 400 Facebook ads against six traditional criteria for advertising creative: Whether the ad has a focal point, how strong its brand link is (ie: how easy it was to identify who the advertiser was), how well the tone of the ad fits with the brand's personality, how noticeable the ad is, how effective it is at getting its point across, and whether there is a "reward" for reading it (ie: Did it make you feel good? Did you learn something?).

The study found that the ads that performed best were the ones that also did the best job of hewing to advertising fundamentals, especially focal point, brand link, and tone. The most important criteria, says Bruich, was that the ad needed to have some kind of reward.

Narratives are powerful leadership tools. People remember stories more readily than they remember numbers, and stories motivate action. Recent research showed that levels of charitable donations rise when donors are given statistical evidence of a problem, such as children living in poverty, but levels of giving rise even higher when donors read a story about one poor child.

Stories should be evidence-based, meeting a plausibility test. They should be principle-based, with enduring truths embedded in them that won't shift on a whim. They should permit action that is open-ended, creating not-yet-imagined possibilities.

Be a focused sentence. Not a convoluted paragraph. Can your readers describe you in one short sentence?

"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."