Make room on your bookshelf next to Blink
I just finished a great book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
How do I know it was great? I found myself constantly pausing my iPod to leave messages on my handheld dictation machine (or my "little dictator", as I like to call it.)
The book is filled with great little stories about how everyone from presidents of the United States ("we’ll put a man on the moon and bring him back safely within 10 years") to everyday people ("there’s more grams of saturated fat in bucket of movie popcorn than in six Big Macs") have found ways to make their messages stick.
The authors have also named six elements that make things sticky. For an idea to stick it must be:
- simple,
- unexpected,
- concrete,
- credible,
- emotional and
- must tap into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
They have chapters on each element with examples of how others have used these elements in the past and advice on how you can use them in your own messages.
The reason I found myself taking so many notes was because so much of what they had to say directly related to Web design and online communication. There was a section that discussed how people often provide too much information because they want to provide total accuracy. Unfortunately, it’s this goal for accuracy that actually diminishes the core of the message. A better approach is to give just a bit of information, then a little more, then a little more. It focused some of my thinking on home page Web design and what site owners could be doing to build a more effective home page.
There was stuff like that in every chapter, but I want to save some of it for later posts, so I can claim all the credit for myself.
If you’re a small business owner or need to present ideas to a group of people, Made to Stick
