Cover via Amazon

You… are a professional communicator, parent, family member, teacher, friend, or just someone who wants what you say to be remembered. But, you ask, how do you do that, exactly?

MADE TO STICK

In their book Made to Stick (affiliate link), brothers Chip and Dan Heath describe their journey of analyzing messages that have stuck with us. They looked at urban legends, proverbs, and other forms of communication that people across history have been able to remember.

They have been able to identify six characteristics of messages that persist. They even came up with a handy, sticky acronym to help us remember them: the SUCCESs.

Let’s look at these elements and find ways to make our messages memorable, whether they are blog posts, announcements, instructions, or even words on a cover letter or resume.

SIMPLE

Simple messages are not dumbed-down or made stupid. They hit the core of the matter. In the military, the commanding officer does not need to tell the entire unit how to get to the top of the hill before sundown, he just tells them to do it. That’s the core of his message – it’s simple and easy to understand.

Not like some company mission or vision statements, unfortunately.

Complete this proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth _____.”*

You know the answer because it’s a proverb. Again, simple doesn’t mean dumbed-down – it’s got the complexity removed from it.

Twitter is a great tool to help us with this. Can you get your point across in 140 characters or less? If not, then forget about it.

UNEXPECTED

Was the title of this post a bit provocative? In January, the New Media Cincinnati social media networking group held a panel discussion about online. We wanted to get people’s attention. So we came up with the title: “Naked on the Web! How’s YOUR Privacy?” It got a lot of attention.

Our messages need that dash of unexpectedness in order to get attention and be memorable. Think about the urban legend about the guy waking up in an icy bathtub with his kidneys removed. That’s unexpected!

CONCRETE

In order to make our messages clearly understood, we need them to be concrete. When we start talking about how many calories we need in our diet, the number doesn’t mean anything. But show us how much food that is, and we’ll understand. The President can talk about removing $100 million from the US budget, and that seems like a lot of money (it is, relatively speaking). But compare that with the total national budget with a nice graphic visual, and it makes more sense to us.

After the earthquake in Haiti last year, we were given the ability to send a text message and donate $10 to help the cause. Breaking it down in a simple, concrete way, makes it easy to remember and act on.

CREDIBLE

Our messages need to be believable in order for them to be remembered. Doctors and other medical professionals have some built-in credibility by nature of their profession. In some cases, we need to borrow from someone else’s credibility as we share our message.

And sometimes, the average person can have credibility himself or herself. Remember Clara Peller’s character in the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” commercials? She was able to say what we all wanted to say, and that gave the message its credibility.

EMOTIONAL

For our messages to be memorable, they need to hit us emotionally. This is one reason, why, when we see PSAs asking us to help out impoverished areas of the world, they tell the story of a single individual and what our donations would do to help him or her.

Our individual messages may inspire compassion, outrage, guilt, anger, resentment, or any other emotions. I’ve noticed over time that some of the most popular posts I’ve written over here are those that get the biggest emotional response from others.

STORY

Weave all as many of these elements as possible into a story, and chances are we’ll have a sticky message. We remember stories more easily. Children love to be told stories – Aesop’s fables have remained popular over the years. So have the parables that Jesus told.

I encourage you to read Made to Stick. You can get a copy from the affiliate link here, check it out from your public library, or, like my friend Andy did, borrow a copy from someone else. Our SUCCESs in communicating a message that will be remembered by others depends on how many of these elements are in them.

Make them sticky!

Related articles

• Made to Stick Learning (eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com)
• When you communicate – are you memorable? (psychologytoday.com)
• Leadership Hall of Fame: Dan Heath, Coauthor of “Made to Stick” (fastcompany.com)

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It’s time to change some things up on this blog. I’m a tinkerer when it comes to looking underneath my blog’s hood, as it were. So I might break something or something may or may not behave the way either of us would expect.

I’m also changing up the permalinks structure back to including the year and month in the URL, so I bet some internal and external links are going to break.

Bear with me. And just for reference, I’m posting some screen captures of what the blog looked like before I started messing with the theme and layout. I’m not sure how these changes will affect those of you reading this on your mobile device. Since I have a special plugin that handles that, we’re probably okay on the appearance side.

Meanwhile, if anything is broken, please let me know, and I’ll work to fix it. Thanks! – Daniel

Homepage Top - with header, tabs, sidebars

Homepage - part 2 - with sidebar and posts

Homepage - part 3 - with more sidebars and posts

Homepage - part 4 - with embedded video

Homepage footer - with text to include on every page

Related articles

• Tinkering around with Posterous (danieljohnsonjr.com)
• 7 Things Your Blog’s Sidebar Can’t Live Without (hubspot.com)
• Embedding the Output of a Yahoo Pipe in Your Own Webpage (ouseful.info)

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Over the past couple years, I have had the privilege of being interviewed for my thoughts on domestic violence awareness, social media, and searching for a job in the 21st century.  In one case, I was asked to contribute an article to a newsletter.  I have put links to all of these, where available, on the Media page.

[photo credit: photoFunia]

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Daniel Johnson, Jr.

Someone recently asked me to provide a short bio for myself.  I like how this turned out and am going to put it on my About page:

Daniel Johnson, Jr., from Cincinnati, Ohio, has been spending time in the new media playground for over eight years, working on various projects and connecting with others online and in-person. He has 13 years of experience developing solutions that provide information to help people do their jobs and make better business decisions.

As the Founder of the New Media Cincinnati social networking group, he organizes and runs monthly events where people in the Greater Cincinnati area come together to discuss how emerging technologies can be used for fun and profit. Daniel has spoken around the Cincinnati area about how social networking tools can be used in effectively building an online presence.

His super powers include making connections easily and bringing out the best in others, his contagious enthusiasm, and skill in explaining complex subjects in ways that are simple and easy to understand.

For more information, check out http://danieljohnsonjr.com/main/about

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I’ll be experimenting with some various WordPress themes, now that it seems I know enough to get myself into trouble.  Feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments.

Current theme (as of this inital post): DeepBlue

Update: Somehow while creating and/or saving this post, the text appears to be copied onto the previous posts.  I’ve checked the back-end, and the posts appear to be fine. Hmm.

Update: This appears to have been a problem with index.php. I have also changed the header tags to use h2 instead of h3. Little things mean a lot, it seems.

This post originates from http://danieljohnsonjr.com

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Rather than try to shove a boatload of information onto a tiny piece of cardboard and paper, I’m taking a feather out of Christopher Penn‘s cap and putting it here instead.

If you’ve received a card of mine, this is the page should find. It’s all the stuff I wanted to shove on the card.

Daniel Johnson, Jr.

• Lead Developer for a PEO in the Dayton, OH area, specializing in developing Business Intelligence (BI) and Decision Support Systems (DSS)
• Public Speaker, Presenter, and Outreach Organizer, Podcamp Ohio
• Founder, New Media Cincinnati
• Founder, Host, and Producer, Journey Inside My Mind Podcast
• Member, Association of Music Podcasting
• Panelist, The Pod 5
• Blogger:
  • Get That Job!
  • QuotesBlog
  • Journey Inside My Mind Blog
• New Media Consultant, One Voice Domestic Violence Community Awareness Walk, 2007
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/OneVoiceWalk
• http://myspace.com/onevoicewalk
• http://flickr.com/onevoicewalk
• http://twitter.com/onevoicewalk

Contact Services

• Phone/Voicemail: +1-513-373-4442
• Yahoo: danimal0416
• GoogleTalk: danimal0416
• Email: danieljohnsonjr at danieljohnsonjr dot com
• LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/danieljohnsonjr
• Skype: danieljohnsonjr
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/danieljohnsonjr
• MySpace: http://myspace.com/danieljohnsonjr
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=623632641

Websites

• http://danieljohnsonjr.com
• http://journeyinsidemymind.com
• http://getthatjobonline.com
• http://jimmpodcast.com

I don’t think this would have fit on a business card.

virtual+business+card daniel+johnson+jr

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While driving into work this morning, I began thinking about how I’m using this blog and blogging in general. I came up with some open-ended questions for myself, none of which I’m able yet to answer.

• What ways can I merge my social media/new media passion with my job as a SQL developer into a career?
• What purpose do I really want this particular blog, to which I’ve assigned my name, to have?
• Should I separate the new media stuff on this blog from the technical stuff?
• How easy is it for someone looking at my resume to to really see what I’m about? Are folks finding the content I want them to find over here?
• Why do I have and maintain so many blogs? Would it be worthwhile to consolidate and/or “shut down” one or more of them?
• Is Blogger the tool I want to continue to use for my online presence, or is it worthwhile to move it to another blogging platform?
• How can I best communicate the technical aspects of my work in a way that is easy for someone to understand? Do I do this for myself mainly, or do I do this to inform others, too?

If you have any thoughts to share, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

—–
Check out my other blogs:
Journey Inside My Mind Blog
Journey Inside My Mind Podcast
Get That Job! – announcing the new project How I Got My Job!
QuotesBlog
Twitter.com/danieljohnsonjr

Related tags: daniel+johnson+jr

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I recognize that I have a challenge in maintaining this particular blog. As I continue to promote myself across the “internets,” different people will be visiting. What will they find? I want this to be the default landing place for people when they are looking for me. To that end, I’ve recently updated danieljohnsonjr.com:

• Stretched layout with more white space for easier reading
• Added content from my other blog feeds to the sidebar, so you can see the other fun stuff I’m doing
• Every post is labeled, so that you can find and read articles on the same topic
• Comments are always open, so please let me know what you think!

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I recently gave one of my oldest blogs, Get That Job! a makeover. Here’s a link to the specific post where I mention this change, which includes screen shots of how the blog recently looked as well as how it looked in its earliest incarnation.

I like that the new version of Blogger lets you assign labels to posts, and I like how it presents the archives. I think I’m going to explore a way to present items from that blog, as well as my others, over here.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

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