I woke up this morning, flipped over, and reached out to feel for the hard edges of my rectangular device. My eyes were scanning for the glaringly red bubbles of notification. My fingers were swift, acting on strong muscle memories to swipe and tap on the usual social media, news feed, and messaging apps. I... Continue Reading →
Why you hate teaching your parents to use technology
It’s a feeling like no other when you look into the eyes of the dearest people who raised you while resisting the animal urge to rip out the keys from the keyboard and thrash the mouse across the room. If you are older than 20 years old at the time of this post, you know... Continue Reading →
How to Drive Action
You’ve led your audience all the way to the edge of the cliff and made them lean forward. All that's left is the final push. The action stage is where you play the double role of facilitator and cheerleader. Make it easy. Tell them exactly what to do and reduce the effort of understanding how... Continue Reading →
How to Arouse Desire
At this stage, you’ve hopefully gained the trust of your audience. They ‘like and want’ what you are showing, but you need them to ‘need and love’. Do you just keep doing more of what you were doing before? Make them laugh more? Make them trust you more? Make them more curious? Teach them more... Continue Reading →
How to Sustain Interest
So you’ve managed to make your audience notice you. Maybe this just means you got a click on an email headline or stopped a thumb from scrolling an Instagram feed. But we all know what a big deal this is, given the billion other things that humans can pay attention to these days. So give... Continue Reading →
How to Seize Attention
Attention is an endangered species. Do this wrong, and you would have never crossed your audience’s minds. You will also have wasted all efforts on preparing everything that follows. The aim here is to get focused attention. So let’s cut to the chase before I lose you. Ways to get audience attention: 1 Call them out... Continue Reading →
Achieving AIDA – How to Persuade People Effectively
AIDA is the model for persuasion. It isn’t groundbreaking. It just describes the way we are. But it is timeless because we will always be this way. It stands for attention, interest, desire, and action, and it describes the stages the buyer goes through from first being aware of the product or idea to the... Continue Reading →
Why men love watching sports more than women?
Men and their love of watching sports…bothers me a little. Because no matter how hard I try, I just can’t relate. All those times I sat with friends around the TV armed with junk food and beer to watch a game (ok maybe like 3 times), I felt I was living a lie. Secretly, I‘d…
What is creativity, really?
You might say: ‘Really, who doesn’t know what creativity is?’ Like I did. But given this is a word that’s thrown around way too much, I was surprised to see more than a dozen ways it is interpreted, and the countless contexts in which it exists. It made me realize this post would be longer than... Continue Reading →