Entries fromJanuary 2008

Yesterday, I came across an article on the Sullivan Nod, a sales technique most frequently used by bartenders and waiters in order to get the customer to pick a specific item on the menu.

To perform this technique, they nod their head slightly (around 10-15 degrees) when they mention the specific item. This subtle gesture subconsciously reinforces their recommendation to the customer.

Although I can’t find any statistical study to backup this assumption, customers are said to be 60-70% more likely to choose a specific item when the Sullivan Nod is used. However, what I’m really interested in is how these individuals use a subtle form of communication to provoke a specific reaction from the targeted recipient.

Propaganda is created to influence the minds and actions of people, in order to generate a response that achieves the goal of the propagandist. Politicians and governments often use propaganda to obtain support/compliance for their policies.

Propaganda is similar to marketing/advertising in many ways, particularly in the way messages are selectively formulated to emotionally engage the recipient.

In a way, its quite easy to apply these devices to your promotional campaigns.

This doesn’t mean that you should deceive customers or readers by providing false or misleading facts but rather, that its useful to situate your marketing campaigns within frames which appeal to your audience’s interests.

The main reason why people subscribe to blog feeds can be explained in one sentence: Readers subscribe to blogs when they provide an informational or entertainment value so great that it would be a loss to not subscribe to it.

People are self-serving most of the time. They monitor content to be informed, educated and entertained. We are all consumers.

Visitors may also subscribe in order to be updated on your content, in order to use it as a networking tool or a source of inspiration for their own articles

This article should have been published yesterday but I was incredibly busy throughout the week and so didn’t have the time to write. Let’s jump right in to this week’s advice column.

Dosh Dosh reader Akemi Gaines wrote in last week and asked one simple question: “How do you measure the success of a blog?”

Here’s one way to define success: It is something that is achieved when you meet or exceed the goals you have set for your blog. Sometimes this definition of success is socially influenced. How much does your vision of success rely on comparative value and the views of others?

Twitter is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages of less than 140 characters through different mediums like IM, cellphones and the web.

It has a social element as well, as it allows users to befriend and monitor each other’s messages or updates. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public and private.

It is similar to an IRC channel although messages are displayed less rapidly. Some have called it a slower version of internet messengers.

Online awards are fun, especially when you get to win something. Search Engine Journal’s Search Blog Awards 2007 recently concluded and Dosh Dosh placed first in the Breakout Blog and Best Social Media Optimization blog category.

Thanks a lot to everyone for voted! Performancing also picked Dosh Dosh as the Editor’s Choice for the Most Improved Blog of 2007 at the Performancing’s Blog Awards, which was nice.

Last week I wrote about the benefits of an advice column and mentioned that I would be starting one every Friday on Dosh Dosh to answer questions sent in by readers on related topics.

Today is the first advice column and I’ll like to keep things kinda casual. I won’t be writing long and well researched articles. Instead I’ll try to answer everything from my personal experience because I think that’s what really matters when you’re offering advice.

The first question comes from Cenk: “What are some of the most important things that a new blogger should know before they start blogging?”

I recently wrote a beginners guide to social news websites and this article follows up on that by offering a list of the social news websites you can use to get information and web traffic.

There are a great deal of social news sites on the internet, sometimes too many. Most of them are dormant and are no longer active, largely because they were poorly marketed and hence, never had an active community of users in the first place.