Here’s another obvious but overlooked aspect of communication: you’re selling emotion.

We are emotional creatures. We feel first, then think – and this is wholly right and as it should be, because to feel primal fear is to ensure survival. You don’t analyze how many claws the lion has, you feel the fear and run like hell.

Knowing this, knowing that we are emotional creatures first, think very careful about your work in marketing, advertising, and media. In all of your work, in all of your campaigns, you want to target an emotion as the hook that attracts attention, convinces the prospect, and converts the customer. In all of your media, you have to decide what end emotion you want someone else to feel, and plan your work accordingly.

I’ll give you a few examples.

In the Financial Aid Podcast and my work on FAFSAonline.com, the free FAFSA application prep site, I focus on the emotion of reassurance. When you’re done, I want your fears to be mitigated, I want you to feel a little more confident that the financial aid process is manageable, that you can do and accomplish everything in the process, and that it’s not the mind-boggling maze that others market to your fears in order to get you to buy, sign on the dotted line, and hope everything will be all right. Quite the opposite. I want you to feel reassured, a little more secure, and resolute in your ability to navigate the process.

In Marketing Over Coffee, the emotion John Wall and I go after most often is conspiracy. Not tin foil hat stuff, but the sense that you’re in on the secret. You’re a part of the secret club of Marketing Over Coffee, you’re there with us in the coffee shop as we talk over stuff that’s of interest to us. You know the special handshake, the secret sign, and all the privileges that come with being on the inside, with the “in” crowd.

Look at a product like the Pet Rock from the 1970s. Who in their right mind would have predicted that this phenomenon would have taken off? Actually, looking back, there’s absolutely no surprise that it did, as it markets to the dual emotions of convenience and guilt. You know someone who’s endured the childhood trauma of losing a pet. You also know people who are so absent minded they’d lose their own reproductive organs if they weren’t integrated in them. Pet rock’s marketing to the emotions of knowing you can’t possibly hurt your pet rock, nor do you have to be responsible in any sense.

Examine the feelings generated by many of the well known folks in social media. How does Chris Brogan make you feel? How does Gary Vaynerchuk make you feel? How about Ann Handley, Pete Cashmore, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Perez Hilton, or Justine Ezarik? I guarantee you that if you know of any of these folks, the answer is never “nothing”. They all create emotions in you that make the sale.

Heck, how do I make you feel?

Look at your own products, services, and communications. Ask yourself what your audience is currently feeling. If the answer is nothing, you’re in a heap of trouble. (this, by the way, is what most of us feel when reading press releases) If you don’t have a core emotion as part of your marketing, advertising, and communications strategies, stop everything else and go think that through.

You’ll feel better for it.

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Resonance:

Mechanical resonance is the tendency of a mechanical system to absorb more energy when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system’s natural frequency of vibration (its resonance frequency or resonant frequency) than it does at other frequencies. It may cause violent swaying motions and even catastrophic failure in improperly constructed structures including bridges, buildings, and airplanes a phenomenon known as resonance disaster. – Wikipedia

Resonance, demonstrated at the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State, 1940:

Resonance disaster can occur in more places than the physics of bridges. Resonance disaster – and success – can occur in media.

Take an example like United Breaks Guitars. This video would have flopped miserably if the airline industry’s service was superb. No one would have spread the message. But the video and campaign resonated with people, deeply. People who had bad experiences with airlines and luggage spread the video like wildfire, and the mainstream media (many of whom are frequent travelers themselves) boosted the video even more.

Media resonance is when a message matches the pre-existing message within the audience and as a result the power of the message’s absorption is amplified, in the same way that an opera singer’s voice can match the resonant frequency of a crystal glass and shatter it, or the wind-induced vibrations can collapse a bridge.

Resonance is at the very heart of what messages are sticky, what messages spread, what messages will go “viral”. A message that resonates with its audience will be amplified by the conditions within the audience and rapidly escalate beyond anything the message creator anticipated.

How do you determine resonance as a marketer? Lots and lots of research and human life experience. Research using tools like Google Trends, Google Insight for Search, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and any other mood or sentiment indication tool to determine not only what’s on people’s minds, but how they say it. Deeply examine your own life experiences for things that piss you off, things that delight you, things that resonate with you, and extrapolate your own experiences to larger human characteristics. Look at messages on Twitter that are retweeted and become trending topics for what resonates about them. Watch the long-standing hit movies that retain their hit quality decades after release. Immerse yourself in what resonates with people and you’ll have a very good idea over time of what messages will resonate and what messages will not.

Here’s the devil of resonance: most of what you market, your products, your services, the things you have for sale, probably will not resonate with people. Sorry. At best, a majority of people will be somewhat interested in what you have. Your job is not to make them care, because you can’t, any more than you can force a bridge’s resonant frequency to change (you can’t unless you tear it down and rebuild it). The best you can do is figure out what latent resonance is already in people and rethink how you present your products and services to more closely match an existing resonance, or build a new product on top of existing ones that does match the resonance of your audience.

Good luck finding your resonance.

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A tweet from Amber Naslund this morning reminded me of an interesting lesson.

@ambercadabra: Ah, o’Hare on a Monday AM. So many friendly people. Ahem.
@cspenn: Watch footfalls. It’s an easy way to pass time in crowds.

What did this mean?

Footfalls are, simply put, how people walk. Some people walk as if they’re gliding across the floor with grace; others look like they’ve just newly risen from the grave as zombies. All of the walks and footfalls are unique and are signatures of our past and present. Watching footfalls in a public space gives you great insight into the people around you.

What’s interesting about the footfall from a ninjutsu perspective comes from a lesson in the middle level material of the Koto family tradition. There’s a moment in someone’s walk, after their foot has been placed or committed but before their weight has been transferred, during which you can strike them with relatively little force and knock them back or on their butt. Strike them sufficiently hard enough at that moment and you might even put their lights out, because the body is wholly expecting the footfall to be completed as several million previous ones were – with transfer of weight and progress forward.

When something interrupts that deeply ingrained habit, the body has almost no idea what to do, and it’s in that moment of confusion through what should have been an orderly, predictable transition, that the ninja technique displays its power. You’re not going head to head with the person’s strength (after their weight has transferred) and you’re not attacking from too far away (before they’ve stepped) because they’ll react and adjust. Only in that moment of transition do you get an opportunity to truly take advantage of someone’s habit and knock them into next week.

We as a society, as a culture, as a world of business are going through a similar transition and disruption now, especially in media. Our media footfalls are used to the broadcast model, where media broadcasts the message and the consumer receives it passively, then goes out and buys things they don’t need. The transition and disruption of new media has thrown a ninja strike into traditional media’s footfall, and it’s falling on its butt as we take advantage of its confusion.

The lesson moving forward is simple (but not easy): as new media becomes mainstream, as new becomes mundane and habits form, look for the footfalls. Watch to see what traditions and rituals appear, watch their timing like you watch people in the airport, and you’ll know when to disrupt them, when their moment of transition becomes your moment of opportunity. More important, as you keep an eye towards the future, look for services, technologies, and ideas that will be the ninja strike to other present day footfalls in your industry or niche. Learn the ideas and you’ll have carte blanche to take over that niche while everyone else is catching their balance.

Keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground!

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The crash in Qazvin, Iran (July 15, 2009):

Flight 93, Pennsylvania (September 11, 2001):

Bear in mind the plane that crashed in Iran was a TU-154, roughly the same size as a Boeing 727 (slightly larger). 157ft long, MTOW 220,000 lbs.

The Boeing 757 is is 155ft long, MTOW 255,000 lbs.

Shouldn’t the Flight 93 impact site show roughly similar characteristics as the TU-154 site? Anyone with aerospace engineering credentials, please comment.

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Do you know what happens when you set foot in the ocean?

In that brief moment, you touch the world, all of it, because every drop of water that touches your feet has touched every shore, every beach ever.

So it is with the Internet, with social media, and with the news. When you check the morning news in your country, do you just check what’s happening in your nation, province, or city? Or do you take advantage of that little copper or fiber wire in your wall that is your footstep into the world?

I try to make a habit of checking headlines from major news sources every day to see more than one perspective. On my morning news-stand (fed into Google Reader and Calibre for the Kindle as well):

• BBC News
• The Boston Globe
• Bloomberg
• Reuters
• CNN
• The New York Times
• Daily Telegraph
• Montreal Gazette
• Toronto Globe and Mail
• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Asahi Shinbun
• Al Jazeera
• The Jerusalem Post
• Xinhua

If you don’t already read the headlines or news from a country other than your own, start today. It’s free to do and will give you a much wider perspective on what the world thinks is important. As recently happened with President Obama’s speech in Cairo, while the American media was occupied with David Carradine’s death, the rest of the world was mulling over the President’s words. If you read only American news sources, you might have missed some very interesting reactions elsewhere.

Are you deeply involved in social media? If so, chances are you’ve got at least one follower or friend in another country. Might be useful to know what’s topping the news where your friends are, too.

What’s on your news-stand?

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Attention is incredibly scarce. Why? There are so many ways to divert it. Father Roderick Vonhogen once famously said that the Catholic Church isn’t competing with Islam or Judaism – it’s competing with ABC, CNN, YouTube, and Facebook. The same is true for you, your company, products, or services, and your industry. You are competing for the same 24 hours a day that every other form of media is competing for. The fact that you’re reading these words at all is something for which I owe you thanks because of the myriad other ways you could be spending your time and focus right now.

It used to be in the old days that the easiest way to buy attention was to trade it for money. On a large scale, you bought attention from media outlets. On a small scale, giving away your stuff for free was a great way to trade money for attention. Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. Everyone and everything is the media, which means that buying up attention in media is virtually impossible. Giving away something for free is so commonplace that consumers have grown to expect free as a cost of your doing business rather than a kindness.

So what’s left? How do you still get a consumer to spend some attention with you?

There are two parts to this mystical formula. The second we all know well – have stuff worth talking about, worth paying attention to, worth sharing. Vintage marketing advice. Sometimes that’s enough – in the rare cases when something “goes viral”, or explodes in popularity, word of mouth is enough. The catch is this – in order for people to spread it, they have to know that it exists. That brings us to the first point – how do you get someone’s attention long enough for them to become aware of your existence?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is advertising. Interruption marketing. It’s still a necessity until you reach the critical mass of consumers needed to start spreading the word, a bit like getting a campfire started. After a certain point, you just throw wood on it – your quality products or services. But in the beginning, no amount of wood thrown in a pile will ever turn into a campfire without that initial flame.

What gets that fire started? Well, you can still buy advertising. That doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it does still work if you have the budget. What if you don’t have the budget? For good or ill, social media and social networking amplify Malcolm Gladwell’s Connectors – people who are hubs of their networks with hundreds or thousands of friends, connections, and followers. Find those people, connect with them, invest your time in politely interrupting them, and if what you have is worth paying attention to, they’ll help you get the attention of their networks.

The very best connectors are the connectors in your vertical. While it’s amazing and impressive that my friend Chris Brogan has 65,000+ friends and followers on Twitter, if you’re, say, an independent musician or a freelance photographer, your work will be of interest to only a certain percentage of Chris’ audience. Better to spend your time looking for the Connectors in your vertical, your niche, who have audiences keenly interested in what you’ve got to share.

How do you find those Connectors? That’s a topic for another time…

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