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I remember reading a story in "Trust Me, I'm Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator" where the agent of an author wasn't getting any good marketing coverage for his client's new book, so the agent starting pulling the "angry consumer" shtick, calling/writing into different media outlets (bloggers, radio, etc..), pretending to be pissed off about the book. No one had heard of it, but eventually some of them started writing about how insulting & disgusting it was, just based on the agent's complaint.
It worked. No publicity is bad publicity.
edit: Since people are seeing this, you should read this book. The guy (former American Apparel advertising exec) did this tell-all book because he saw the media's standards dropping and his industry's tricks starting to be used in things like politics. It will destroy your confidence in ever believing anything you read on the internet, reddit definitely included. Good for honing your bullshit detector.
edit 2: I am not affiliated in any way with this book. You are not being manipulated ��
As much as I wanna say this guy is a douchebag/idiot and karma will come back around... that’s not how the internet works. We’re all giving him free press right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285
If you're interested in reading about this and other subtle strategies used to influence, I suggest you check out the book influence: the psychology of persuasion. It's one of my faves. It details:
- Reciprocity
- Anchoring
- Scarcity
- Decoy effect
- Similarity bias (fear of difference)
- Small commitment to influence longer term commitment
- Making efforts difficult to increase eventual satisfaction (Ikea effect)
All very interesting stuff that you can see in action every day.
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You should read Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It brilliantly digs into the media ecosystem and explains exactly why you are right.
Spoiler: media went through this in the early 1900s when newspapers were sold individually. Subscriptions to papers is what Bred modern journalism as a virtuous pursuit like we understand it.
That hard yank on the emotions drives urgency. Too hard a yank is 9 times out of 10 your clue of a financial scheme.
Recommended reading, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion"
>I wonder whether online work changed things because there are few occasions for people to have conversations that socialize them into the ethical expectations of the profession.
Journalism didn't have ethical expectations a hundred years ago, because every story was sold on 'hot sheets', cheap 2-page papers sold by newsies. The most sensational headlines made the most money and there was zero accountability.
Then for 50+ years, journalists became dependent on monthly newspaper subscriptions and reputation and audience trust became paramount. Suddenly, ethics were necessary to do the job.
Now, news is all click-driven and we're back to zero accountability. Trust Me, I'm Lying is a great book about our current era of news and how it can be manipulated.
Social proof in action. Long queues signal that if other people are willing to wait for the food, the stall's food must be good. It is a form of heuristic people use to make decisions about what is good or not. However, the long queue could be a result of slow cooking process, or the stall used to be good so but because the cook changed, the standard went down but people still queue based on the reputation of the stall. The book, "
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Dr. Robert Cialdini discusses this and other interesting behavioural psychology themes.
Also if you queue for a long time, by the time you get your food, you are very hungry so anything tastes nice!
> it's like they think i'm only on their site to earn rubies
They're nudging you for continuous interaction. The idea is to get you to make it a routine.
Relevant book recommendation:
https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788
You should make a 30 sec animated explainer video. Video needs to be much simpler and end with a call to action. People don't need to understand the science: "Get paid to poop and help people." That's enough. https://www.fiverr.com/categories/video-animation/whiteboard-explainer-videos Also hire someone on fivver to do the voiceover.
You should also contact everyone again and ask them why they didn't respond. Otherwise you'll only keep guessing as to why. And actually a 2 to 5 % response rate for cold emailing isn't that bad. You need to treat this like a startup. Look up startup marketing tactics. https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369 Recommended book.
For the uninitiated - 'Hooked - how to make habit forming products' is on pretty much every start-up's bookshelf in Silicone Valley.
https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788
+1 for this. "I'm not a programmer, but I work well with them and can translate for them to non-technical people." is exactly what a PM is. You might find this book valuable.
Yes, there's plenty of great reads, e.g., Storytelling with Data.
At a high-level, I emphasize the following to my direct reports & clients:
- The normal English reading order is left to right, top to bottom
- 1 in 12 men are colour blind
- The colour wheel is your best friend
- "The best design is as little design as possible"
- Bar/Column charts with fewer than ~8 dimensions make great alternatives to slicers
- Your skill as an information designer correlates to the amount of white space in your reports
- More than 3 visuals per report (excluding things like cards) should start raising alarm bells
You are right. And it doesn't apply only to TV, but other media as well.
There's an excellent book about the subject: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Io consiglio vivamente il libro che sto leggendo in questi giorni: Robert Cialdini - Influence - The Psychology Of Persuasion.
Spiega molti meccanismi con numerosi esempi, copre anche quello di cui la ragazza cui fa riferimento OP è rimasta vittima.
Hey, I just graduated from IIIT BBSR, now I'm at IIT BBSR doing research. If you need detailed guidance please PM me direct or I usually attend Quora Meetups ( Reddit BBSR subreddit is dead ) or Dev Meets in BBSR. We could meet in person for a nice chat.
Here's a short outline on what I think you should do:
Individually:
- ACM ICPC is really important. Focus on this. So is Google Code Jam.
- Focus only on C/C++/Java and Python. 4 Years won't still be enough. For making your website/portfolio you could learn HTML/CSS and JS. For some frustration and joy, add a functional language, my top pick goes to Haskell.
- Find a passion. Competitive isn't going to take forward very far as it's basically solving solved questions. It's practice. Passion in a field of CS or maybe something applied.
- Open source contributions and designing habit forming products. Check this book by Nir Eyal which goes by the same name.
- Read Code Complete 2, Pragmatic Programmer, make stackoverflow your Facebook. Don't answer if you can't, but read. Read. And code.
- Apply for Internships! Startups are nicer as the team is small so you'll learn a lot of new things.
Group/Social stuff:
- ACM ICPC is a group event. Finding 2 friends in your college won't be difficult, I guess, who share the same passion.
- Teachers aren't just bad in your college, they are present at every college. Ignore them and let's rather be graceful than sulk with remorse.
- You have the whole city to explore. Go grab an Ola/Uber and visit institutes or email Profs you want to work with. BBSR has really nice people provided you search right.
Above all, don't do something because it's the trend. Do if it's fun. Sorry for the brevity and not much of an expert advice on the job/software product market as my career is mostly research and a bit of entrepreneurship.
For the very best of times,
Ankit
https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/
“I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it.”
Maybe there's an online copy, but if that seems insightful, you may enjoy this groundbreaking book:
https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X
I learned many of those mental tricks through sales experience.
You will never win an argument by presenting your facts and proving that your adversary is wrong. They will never admit that no matter how clear your argument is (unless you are arguing with someone whose job it is to be open minded e.g. scientists)
You will get much further by influence and persuasion. Influence by Robert Cialdini worked very well for me in this regards.
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Check out the book "Hooked"
https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788
It's largely an instruction manual for how to build super addictive apps, and driving these highly emotional dopamine responses is a big part of it.
This is hardest thing after you find your target market to focus on.
Testing, testing, testing. I read somewhere once that "the best marketers are the best at experiments and doubling down on what works". Every company is going to be different. You might even find channels that work for you but don't work for your competitors.
Just remember that each channel has different feedback loops. For example, direct sales gives pretty quick feedback while SEO can take months to years.
This might be a little outdated for new bootstrapped SaaS's but this book gives you a good framework to work from: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369
To answer your questions... I think it's a solid yes.
The speed which new products and services are launched is so high, that "build it and they will come" simply doesn't apply. I'm still struggling with that as I'm a technical founder with no marketing counterpart. And I'm done building a great service (user's words), and it doesn't get any traction.
But speaking of traction, a book that helped bring some clarity is Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth because it explains 19 generic channels and a strategy to reduce the noice in every field and do some focused marketing on channels that actually work.
There is literally a very popular industry pop book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. This sits on the shelf of every software product team everywhere.
It does have a chapter discussing the ethics of persuasion though. It's not a terrible, evil book but that that title should tell you everything you need to know about the approach to designing user experiences and the cutthroat jostling for a larger user base.
It all comes down to nice behaviour because it's a great way of exploiting the social principle of [reciprocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology\)).
If someone's being nice to you, giving you compliments, flirting with you, giving you free stuff, they want something. Maybe not right away, but it creates an expectation that the "niceness" should be returned.
An example of this is people seeking donations. They'll give free gifts to make you feel obligated to give something back.
Check out the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. He goes into various ways that our behaviours can be influenced, and talks a bit about how to handle being manipulated.
Part of growing up is realizing this is simply how the world works. Most things are transactional. There's always an exchange, a give and take involved on some level.
Key point to note is that it doesn't work for sex. You can't negotiate attraction. My personal opinion is that this is why people that are successful in business, typically, aren't successful with women, and vice versa, because they require opposing strategies.
Hi SpaceTaco - happy to be here!
There are a lot of resources out there but I think fundamentally you should understand what a product manager is and what a product manager isn't. I have interviewed quite a bit for junior product manager roles and whether it is a role for someone straight out of university or someone with a year or two of product management experience, I like to see intellectually curious individuals who can work well together in a team environment (i.e., communicate effectively), are empathetic to the end customer, and can start to think about how to invest time and resources.
Tactically for interviews, two resources I found pretty helpful when I was doing PM interviews was Cracking the PM Interview and Inspired but there are plenty of other online resources out there that can help! If more is needed i am happy to link to some online resources I found useful.
It's not us.
"Gossip" can bind groups, and it can tear them asunder. The hedgies have clearly hired top tier social engineering talent. It's a $10 word for troll and others.
I would suggest reading the seminal "Influence" by author Cialdini. It's a fascinating, highly readable pre-woke, ie, real science, examination of social human behaviors.
>https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X
Looks pretty nice! But you can save a lot of time by doing a propper mainlining. You will yield about 80-120g per plant, so you need less soil, less space, less water control and of course it's way easier to keep insects/ bacteria etc. away.
Maybe take a look at this book, I learned a lot about soil, light, ph... the list is long man :D
But well done for the first try.
As noted, do SFAS selection preparation and you'll be ok physically. Read Influence and Verbal Judo.
Also, DM me if you have other questions.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini amazon