Weekend Media

I bought a copy of Seth Godin’s the Purple Cow two years ago before leaving on a trip to Kathmandu, Nepal. I was going for a two month stay because of a seminar and wanted to do some airplane reading because it was a long flight.

In my haste to leave, I forgot about the book and left it at home. By the time I went back home, I wasn’t really in the mood to read it and so left it on the bookshelf, where it got dusty.

Some of you might have already heard of TED, an annual conference which gathers entrepreneurs, thinkers, artists and academics from the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design.

Held annually in Monterey U.S.A, the TED conference is a four day affair with 50 speakers, each giving an 18 minute presentation. Tickets for these talks are regularly sold out well in advance.

These talks are available online at the TED website in the form of video and audio files you can view/download. There are over 150 talks from the archive and more of them are added each week, so it’ll be good if you bookmark the site or sign up as a free member (which also allows you to comment on the videos).

Three years ago, PBS Frontline produced The Persuaders, a 90 minute documentary which examines how the cultures of marketing and advertising not only influence what Americans buy but the way they view themselves and the world.

Giant corporations spend billions of dollars by employing an army of copywriters, consultants, linguists, anthropologists and ad gurus, all in a bid to influence what the average citizen thinks.

Their end goal is simple: to craft messages which persuade people towards a favorable course of action. They not only want you to do what is most beneficial for their goals (trust me/buy my product) but also to believe that you’re doing the best thing for yourself under all circumstances. And they’re actually succeeding.

It is late afternoon and the sun is setting. Professor Oldman is quitting his job in a University and has invited a group of fellow colleagues for a farewell gathering at a cabin in the remote woods.

They engage in polite talk and try to probe the reasons behind Oldman’s sudden departure. The truth soon emerges when Oldman makes a shocking confession: he is an immortal man who has lived on earth for the past 14,000 years.

Robert Cialdini is an influential social psychologist who is an expert in the systematic study of persuasion, compliance and negotiation.

He is most famous for his book, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, which outlines the six weapons of influence: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

I’ve read Cialdini’s work a long time ago and his writings on the practice of persuasion are universally useful for people of all professions and backgrounds, especially business people, marketers and even politicians.

Imagine you were in America during the 1920s, a time when it was still taboo for women to smoke in public.

How could one encourage an entire nation of women to start buying and smoking cigarettes regularly? Edward Bernays, the father of the Public Relations industry, knew just what to do.

Bernays hired a group of young female models to march in a New York City parade and tipped off the press, telling them that a few women’s rights advocates would be lighting ‘Torches of Freedom‘ in protest.