Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century.  Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have you heard of Brian Keith Voiles? Probably not, but if you have eyes you’ve seen his ad campaigns and you probably even bought products that he created ad campaigns for.

Would you like to have the formula he gets paid $12,500 to put into use for Fortune 500 Companies?  Are you curious as to how this formula is used to influence your buying decisions?

Well then, today’s your lucky day, isn’t it? You’ll notice this formula whenever you read a sales letter or an ad. Remember that the key to writing a sales letter is that the job of every paragraph is to make the reader want to read the next paragraph.  Now that you know this you may catch yourself thinking of this when you hypnotically continue to watch an infomercial or read an enticing offer.

This is the secret skeleton used to write the most successful ads that grab your attention and motivate you to give out those credit card digits.

1. ATTENTION – Write a headline that GRABS your reader. Fear or curiosity are good places to start. For example: “Ex-Truck Driver Makes $21,815 a Month Doing What You’re Not”

2. INTEREST – List the benefits of your product or service. Acknowledge their problem while showing you have the solution. Show that you’ve been where they are and you can help them.

3. CREDIBILITY – Mention referrals and references of how others have benefited from your product or service.

4. PROVE – Show testimonials with full names and cities or countries. Offer a risk-free guarantee.

5. BELIEVABLE – Give your full contact information. Make it easy for them to buy with no hassles. Let them know why they should trust you.

6. SCARCITY – Have limited offers, special time sensitive sales, discounts on a few products in limited quantity.

7. ACTION – Ask for the sale. Make it simple.

8. WARN – Let them know the pain they’ll experience if they don’t use your product. i.e. If you’re selling a wrinkle cream let them know how dry their face will be and how much deeper their wrinkles will get without your product – if that’s true. Don’t lie.

9. NOW – Tell them why they should buy right now.

That’s it. Now you’ve got the skeleton that the best copywriters in the world use.  If you’re a marketer this won’t be gold, it will be platinum.

If you’re a consumer, this is a platinum shield to help you take a deep breath and question if you REALLY need that product or service before parting with your hard earned cash.  Read the formula a few times and you’ll start to notice it in the structure of commercials, the language of print advertising and the content of major marketing pitches that effectively get you to buy whatever they’re sellin’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Laws are not selective, unless you’re either rich, powerful, a celebrity , politically connected, or know someone who is when you break one.

Gravity is a law. It works 100% of the time with no excuses whether you like it or not.  In fact, you don’t have to buy a book or movie to see how it works; nor do you have to believe in it.  Gravity is a law of physics and doesn’t care what you think. It just does it’s ‘gravity’ thing and you cannot fight it and win.  Ever.  No matter what.

Attraction, the new age kind rather than the law of physics kind, is an emotional or electromagnetic force that does not occur consistently but appeals greatly to our greed, arrogance and inherent need to feel special.

If there was a Law of Attraction then the millions of consumers of the law of attraction and Oprah viewers worldwide would be manifesting every material desire for their health, relationships, careers and financial material wealth that the NYT #1 Best Seller, The Secret, promised them rather than there being a global recession.

Have you talked to a law of attraction believer lately?  How’s it working beyond believing results will arrive at some soon yet undisclosed time after years of practice?

Obama could mandate that every American citizen has to think better thoughts so we can attract our way out of economic crisis and have everything our hearts desire.  Yeah, an army of attractors, that’s the ticket.  Someone get that idea to the Treasury Secretary stat!

Good Emotional Marketing = Many Believers and More Manifrustration

Forget for a moment that the stars of The Secret are seasoned professional marketers who became even more rich and famous after inventing The Secret as a brand, and are about to unleash a sequel to get even more rich and famous.  (Cash cows have got to be milked, even in spiritual capitalism, right?)

Forget that the unfulfilled promises in The Secret just happen to be for the four things every psychic and marketer happens to sell you hope for – money, relationships, health and avoidance of death, lets look at the definitions of attraction from Dictionary.com that apply:

5.Physics. the electric or magnetic force that acts between oppositely charged bodies, tending to draw them together.

6. an entertainment offered to the public.

For #5 note that it says “oppositely charged” which is contradictory to the Secret’s formula of aligning yourself with what you want to attract.  So maybe thinking about poverty is the true road to attracting wealth. hmmm….

Also for #5, there is a “tendency” rather than a law (i.e. – a principle based on the predictable consequences of an act, condition, etc.: the law of supply and demand) though for #6 we’re getting closer.

It is practically a law that the public will pay to be entertained – especially if that entertainment makes them feel like they are special.

Instead, most people practicing the law of attraction techniques live in constant hope and manifrustration which ironically was the same state they lived in before buying into the marketing campaign for the law of attraction.

It Works Fine, You’re the One Who’s Broken

The scapegoat is that when the law of attraction doesn’t work there’s an easy answer; the law works, but YOU are the problem.  You’re not believing hard enough.  (You and the tens of millions of others who aren’t getting results.  Would you keep taking a drug with results like these?)

This is what bothers me the most.  It’s the same crazy making blame game that people get in multi-level marketing and sales rooms with no proven sales system.

Remember that you only need a handful of success stories (or actors reading their lines) on your infomercial to appear successful and deflect the fact that 99% of your customers didn’t lose weight with your plastic exercise device.

How many people do you know of who appear to have great relationships, material wealth, successful careers or great health?  Out of those people who enjoy the results promised by marketers of the law of attraction, how many do you think practiced the principals in The Secret?

Most successful people I know have been so busy taking action to create results that they didn’t have time to watch the Secret movie much less buy into it’s superstition.  A couple of them do have vision boards and the like, but they use those tools to remind them of what they’re working so hard to achieve while taking massive amounts of action.

Notice that the correlation of success to taking action, reviewing results and taking more action (very concrete steps) is much higher than the correlation of success to ‘believing the right thoughts’ – which is pretty damned nebulous.  Who determines what thoughts are right and whether they’re ‘right’ enough to attract what you want?

Note that magnets attract 100% of the time by being in proximity to what they naturally attract, metal.  A magnet needs to be close to it’s target (humans do this by taking action) and it does not attract anything else like sand, carpet or plastic (which would be what for humans?  Bad jobs? Mean people? Losing money?)

The Secrets to Success

Sorry Charlie, the secret to success is that there is no perfect formula to follow that anyone can sell to you.

See, there are also people taking tons of action and not getting results with or without playing The Secret game.  Heck, you may even know some or be one of them.  Look in the mirror real quick and check.

Why aren’t they succeeding?  Luck, timing, how they did in the womb lottery (being born in L.A. gives you a better shot, though no guarantee, at success than being born in Uganda), how rich and powerful their families were or weren’t, whether their talent was nurtured or not, who they did or didn’t  meet as they grew up, how industrious their attitude is, and so on.

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success,  Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else or Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets to really wake up to this.

Can the principals work?  Maybe.  Are they the principals most successful people throughout history have used?  No.  Will they work for you? Magic 8 ball says “probability doubtful.”   Will a little focus and a lot of action give you a better shot at achieving your goals? Probably.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing

The mind makes up meaning and is not very good at it.  That’s it’s job like a teenager’s job is to push their parents buttons.  That’s just how the wiring works.  Deal with it.

In hindsight, you will probably attribute your success or lack thereof to a misguided conclusion that getting up early, practicing the law of attraction, going to a good school or whatever explains your situation.  The truth is that many factors, including many we miss, contribute to our perceived failures and successes.

Do your thoughts create your reality? Well, thinking positively and consciously is never a bad thing, but we’ve all experienced both great and terrible circumstances without either consciously believing that we could or couldn’t experience them.

Did most of your happiest moments occur after intense practice visualizing them?  I didn’t think so.  How about your unhappiest? Uh huh.  And you’re moderately not-so-notable experiences?  Okay.

If You Believe in the Law of Attraction it Can’t Just Work for the Stuff You Like.

Are children molested, adults contracting cancer or drivers getting in car accidents because their thoughts attracted that experience?

Did the US Airways flight crash into the Hudson with no casualties because the passengers were attracting an exciting yet non-lethal experience in an airplane?

Or maybe it was because the pilot was skilled and had been flying since he was a teenager which enabled him to react in the best possible way to a random life threatening occurrence.

Or maybe we’ll never know because our brains are experts at making meaning out of the first possible plausible explanation it comes up with or is exposed to.

Did every single one of the 9/11 victims or the millions of Iraqi’s killed in the last 8 years envision those experiences to manifest them?  If some of those 9/11 victims would have told someone their visions of planes crashing into buildings maybe we could have prepared better.

Law of attraction? Nope.  Theory of attraction? More accurate by definition.

If it helps you to take better action in your life great.  If it’s another late night infomercial emotional crutch to provide false hope, not so good.

Ask your doctor if the law of attraction is right for you and then remember that results WILL vary.  You can count on that.

One of the best marketing books ever written is Seth Godin’s latest: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

In reading this book I was reminded of the tribes I’ve gravitated to and been a part of throughout my life.  They ranged from a church youth group, cliques in school, friends who liked the same music, peers working in the same industry to people who shared similar interests, ideas or beliefs.  Think of the tribes you’ve ran with as you grew up, moved to different cities, started a family (or not) and changed jobs or careers.

The idea of tribes is nothing new, but with social media like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, tribes are larger and more powerful than ever.  And because they are self-chosen groups based on relationships, the likability, and trust factors that lead to persuasion coalesce much faster than traditional marketing campaigns searching for eyeballs.

In the last week someone created a Facebook group for a teen night club I went to in the 80′s.  This idea had someone else start a photo page for the Las Vegas 80′s music scene I was a part of which in turn caused me to start a Facebook Group for KUNV, the radio station the scene was based around where I was the Program Director.  I’ve reconnected with over 50 people in 3 days from a long lost tribe that’s over 20 years old because of the connective power of Facebook to rekindle and build relationships.

In the 2008 election the Obama campaign had the highest number of followers on Twitter, over 100,000.  This was a large part of making their campaign successful.  They got their messages out instantly to their target market (who all opted in voluntarily) multiple times each day.  This was one major factor in making the Obama tribe feel that they were a part of the action.  And they were, even the ones who don’t know Twitter exists.

There’s a lot more that will be said about the power of tribes and how we’re now in a time of leaders (anyone in the tribe can lead others) and followers rather than a time of managers and employees or people with big titles giving orders to others.

Just read Seth’s book.   It’s a fast engaging read with information broken down into simple ideas and story chunks.

Read the review from Publisher’s Weekly here: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and read Seth’s awesome blog

“Tribes is a must read for all of us. It’s up to each one of us to lead in today’s new kind of world.”
—Former U.S. senator Bill Bradley

Click here to view the embedded video.

This book review was contributed by Lena Phoenix:

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a book about randomness, a topic that most people, unless they happen to be mathematicians or have a strange fascination with statistics, probably don’t think too much about. As a species, in fact, we generally prefer not to dwell on randomness, but rather to assume that we are in control of much more of our lives than we actually are.

In this new book, physicist Leonard Mlodinow attempts to show why underestimating randomness is really not a good idea. He lays a foundation for this discussion by outlining the development of mathematical and scientific thought on the topic. When humans assumed all outcomes were due to the whims of the gods, there was no need for a concept of randomness. But that didn’t stop gamblers from trying to improve their odds in games of chance, and it is to them we owe a debt of understanding on the topic.

Mlodinow spices up some rather technical discussions about development of the theory with interesting personal history of the major players (including a guy who figured out his baker was cheating customers by compulsively weighing his bread for a year and noting the differences from random distribution) and numerous fascinating studies on the topic. Along the way, he makes a compelling argument that the human propensity to see patterns where there are none can get us into a great deal of trouble, as anyone who has ever lost money in the stock market has probably figured out.

It’s not just gamblers and investors who would benefit from understanding these concepts, however. Mlodinow also shows how misunderstandings of randomness and statistics can affect jury trials and medical studies and makes a compelling argument that the success of an individual business is usually far more impacted by randomness than it is by the personal talents of the CEO or movie studio head.

Much of what Mlodinow discusses in this book is highly counterintuitive. That, combined with the above mentioned desire to believe we are masters of our fate, explains in part why we so often underestimate the effect of randomness on our lives. But acknowledging the power of randomness does not disempower us, Mlodinow argues. Rather, it allows us to focus on the aspects of our lives over which we really do have control, such as how persistent we are, and not take so personally the random luck–both good and bad–that touches all of us.

This book review was contributed by Lena Phoenix:

I was not at all in the mood for another non-fiction book about human behavior when my husband asked if I wanted to read Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior before he returned it to the library. I half-heartedly decided to scan a few pages before saying no, but I was quickly sucked in to a fictionalized re-creation of the last few hours in the cockpit of the KLM flight responsible for the 1977 Tenerife crash that claimed the lives of 583 people.

Though this book looks at research from social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior in order to explain why humans often make highly irrational choices, it does so in a compulsively readable fashion. The authors are good storytellers who know how to engage the reader as they explain surprising findings from a whole host of diverse research.

Though I was already familiar with how fear of loss and commitment to a position can have devastating effects on investors, I enjoyed reading about how these in-built habits played out on the football field and on anthropological digs. People responsible for hiring others will benefit from the chapter explaining the flaws of the “first-date” style interview, and pretty much everyone would do well to read the stunning findings on how negative attitudes about aging can affect one’s health.

The chapter in which the authors discuss how our innate capacity for altruism can be undermined by financial incentives is also fascinating, as is the authors’ discussion with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on the impact of a lone dissenting voice on our highest court.

In the epilogue, the authors summarize their main points and offer a few hints on how to avoid being negatively impacted by some of the factors most likely to sway us to make questionable choices. Though I’m not certain how easy it will actually be to overcome the multiple evolutionary habits that cause us to make irrational choices, it was still terribly fun to read.

Yesterday Alan Greenspan told congress `That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” This is a great example of how we are blindly influenced by the way our brains make meaning in the world.   What we consider to be evidence is just our mental filter looking for agreements to prevailing ways of thinking.

In the best selling book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, a similar example of this is given.  Every day that goes by with a turkey being fed and taken care of is another piece of evidence that life is good and will only get better.  But in reality, every day that goes by is bringing that turkey closer to it’s death. Every day is great up until the day before Thanksgiving when all that evidence seems to have been false evidence appearing real.

The same can be said in reverse.  How many times has your life not seemed like it was going in a very good direction, but over time it got much better?  Haven’t we all worked dead end jobs, been in bad relationships or had money trouble?  For most of us these circumstances shifted for the better as time passed.

A friend of mine is a fan of the British childrens book series about Tin Tin.  I’m told that he has a saying about how things are a certain way …until they’re not.  That’s the truth in a nutshell.  Our relationships, health, emotions, world views, beliefs and finances can turn on a dime for better or worse.  And that’s a reality that we deny in a massive consumer culture where we are told that anything can be had for the right price.

The Alan Greenspan example is interesting because in hindsight regular people like us can tell that allowing people to have mortgages they can’t afford, allowing banks to charge 30% interest that can’t be repaid, allowing investors to gamble by buying short sale stocks betting on which companies will fail, and many other practices that led to the current financial crisis are pretty insane.  Somehow though, Greenspan and the other expert economists couldn’t see this train coming down the track because everything looked like it was going great…until suddenly it wasn’t.

A great lesson we can learn from this is that everything we believe to be true and lasting may change overnight.  Another friend of mine was in the first September 11 crisis. Yep, the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973. The one that put the dictator Pinochet in power, who is now being mentioned again because John McCain met with him.

My friend was working for the government that was overthrown and within 2 weeks most of his friends were dead and he barely made it out of the country alive because neighbors were all turning each other in out of fear that the military would come after them.  Chilean’s never thought that could ever happen to them just like we never thought tax payer money would ever bailout hugely successful investment banks.

That friend’s name is Julio Ollala and today he is known as one of the grandfathers of the coaching profession, the founder of Newfield Network and is known internationally as a master at helping people transform their lives.  Great things can come out of the ashes of perceived crises.

It’s good to remember that we blindly influence ourselves when we believe that we know how the world is or how the future will play out.  We don’t, and it’s dangerously arrogant and naive when we play that game, as we’re all prone to do at one time or another.  This is one way we practice marketing on ourselves.

In acknowledging that we really don’t know a lot, and what we think we know is liable to change without notice, we move towards the peace that comes from acceptance and gratitude for how today is …until it isn’t.

This book review was contributed by Lena Phoenix:

Kluge is a slang term for “a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.” In this new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, psychologist Gary Marcus argues that the human mind itself is a kluge, and then goes on to discuss how this explains why you can’t remember the name of that woman from your yoga class when you run into her at the movie theater.

The basis of Marcus’ argument is that evolution was working with the tools at hand when it whipped up the more complex parts of our brain and that the result—while generally functional—is often far from optimal. In each chapter, Marcus details various maddening brain systems ranging from memory to belief to pleasure and offers intriguing reasons why they so often fail to work as we would like them to. In the chapter on choice, for example, he points out that we often make highly irrational decisions when it comes to money because our mind is basically trying to wing it with a system that was developed not to deal with money but rather with food. Anybody who has ever found themselves staring at the result of some financial indiscretion will well understand that evolution is clearly still working out the kinks on that one.

Marcus is not shy about highlighting the fact that klugey nature of our minds does not bode well for arguments in favor of intelligent design. As he discusses how we adapted our existing physiology to deal with the increasingly complex demands of language, it does make one wonder why—if there was an intelligent designer involved—the adaptations to the larynx that gave us more control over our vocalizations also dramatically increased our chances of choking to death. It does seem like there could have been a better way.

Though this book does revisit some territory I was already familiar with, his fundamental premise was compelling enough that it added a new dimension of understanding to the things that frustrate me about my own brain. In his final chapter, Marcus makes a good argument that we all need to understand the sloppy shortcuts evolution made with our minds so that we can better defend ourselves against the tendency of advertisers, politicians, cults and the like to exploit the flaws in the system, and he concludes with a useful, 13-point listing of concrete steps we can take to counteract the built-in weaknesses of our klugey brains.

Have you watched your local nightly news lately?  Probably not if you’re like most Americans under the age of 61, but you’ll still get my point.  I’m guessing you’ve watched more financial news in the last month than usual in reaction to fear around money, stocks and the economy in general.

I accidentally saw the first few minutes of local news recently and noticed that it looked just like it did when I was a kid and my parents watched it.  They have the same formula as always: An intro with visuals that include flashing police car or fire truck lights and an audio track of a reporter talking in that ridiculous reporter-sing-song voice telling you that the content they’re sharing is VERY important and significant.  If they’re lucky they can splice some security camera footage into the piece too for an extra scary effect.

I’m sure they still cover the weather at exactly 17 minutes after the hour too, but for the sake of this post we’ll stick with the intro.  News, whether it is on broadcast or cable television, on the web or in newspapers, generally leads with some story aimed at reminding you that the world is not a safe place.

It’s probably even a little worse since they created the oft-used phrase, “In a post-9/11 world…”  The truth is that we don’t live in a country where suicide bombers are blowing up cafes and you’re more likely to get hit by lightning or win the lottery without a ticket than to be harmed by a terrorist in America.

This truth is exactly the same now as it was 5 years or 50 years before 9/11.  That’s just a fact and it has nothing to do with how much our president has or has not protected us or that you aren’t allowed to carry a regular sized can of shaving cream on to an airplane anymore.

It has to do with the low number of terrorists who have the inclination or means to harm us.  We don’t live in Columbia or Israel where terrorist violence is a reality. We live in America where impoverished drug addicts with guns are actually a bigger threat than terrorists.  And when was the last time you or someone you love was car jacked by a crack addict or directly threatened by a terrorist?  That’s my point.

Back to the media, it’s not that they like to scare people.  (At least I hope not.)  It’s because consumers are reactionary creatures that respond to emotional content.  That’s also why they always ask the asinine question of, “How do you feel?” to the woman whose son got killed an hour ago in a car accident or the guy who made the 3 point shot to win the basketball game.

Have these interviewees ever given a surprising answer even once in the history of the world?  Nope.  Guess what, the guy whose house burned down says “I’m in shock and upset that I lost everything, but I’m grateful that my family made it out in time.”  Surprise!  You never here him say, “I’m excited and going to Disneyland on the insurance money.  It’s a godsend that my shack is gone and I can cash in!”

The fact that many news consumers forget is that the news is a product.  Therefore, if you study advertising you’ll understand why the product of news is sold with the same methods as selling the product of beer or the product of voting for a politician.

Consumers are emotional creatures that unconsciously react to advertising.  Add to this fact that people react more strongly to negative advertising than positive advertising.  If my news program makes you afraid by making you think crime is up it concurrently attracts you to watch my news because you think I’ll give you information on what’s happening that will make you feel safer.

I create the problem that you should be afraid while positioning myself as your answer to feel safer.  It’s the same schtick for self help gurus who tell you they have the answer for your health, relationship and money issues.  The day you feel safe is the day you lose dependence on being a daily news consumer and the day you believe your life is not broken you lose the desire to spend money on books, CDs and seminars to fix yourself.

Ironically, crime in America has consistently been going down for well over a decade even though most people who regularly consume news think it’s always going up.  If you see a petty crime reported as the lead story every night the images of flashing lights repeated daily is what your brain remembers.

Perception is reality when you’re being blindly influenced.  If they want good ratings they need to give you a perceived threat so you’ll tune in to “stay informed.”  It may be worthwhile to question how informed you really become blindly consuming what others determine is “news.”