Communicate Like Drugs

Ryan Van Etten — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:27:27 +0000

Communication is a drug. Active ingredients: Force, Information, Relevance, Entertainment. Across any medium, from email to blog, newsletter, tweet, text, status, song, or video, when you communicate you want to deliver verbal Valium. Two elements of F.I.R.E. is the survival minimum. Three is a gateway drug. Four is mainline euphoria. Molecular composition, drug facts, and suggested uses below. Warning: F.I.R.E. triggers action.

Street value.

Like drugs, great communication has high street value. It absorbs into the bloodstream and hits the heart. It expands the mind. It makes people feel better. It elevates emotions, influences behavior, and reshapes thinking. It has chaotic side effects, and it’s highly addictive. It can destroy you. You want more. When supply is scarce, the price goes up.

Art attacks.

A medical degree or a beeper won’t help you prescribe drug-like communication. You don’t need to be certified, you need to be certifiable—voices in your head. Listen to the voices, because they keep their ears to the streets of imagination. To be someone’s cure, it takes art, heart, and a finger on their pulse.

Be someone’s cure.

Say A.J. is on your mailing list. What would get him high? How would he react to this drug? What brainwave-bending experience would it take for him to peer-pressure his friends into taking a hit? What would make it matter to him, or make him love it? Experiment like a jaded teenager.

Imagine you’re a doctor. Allison is a patient in your office. You can ask questions and hear her story. You can feel her pain. You can recognize her symptoms and make a diagnosis. It’s all harder through email because you can’t see or hear the same way. You might not know if you caused an allergic reaction. You have to take empathy to the next level—you have to be human. You have to show your own emotion.

F.I.R.E.: chemical breakdown

Information is facts, news, or intel. Entertainment engages emotions, without which information has a short life span. Announcements are cyanide without a story. Be vivid. People remember stories. Entertaining stories open the emotional connection. Information blended with entertainment is a powerful memory mix. Ref.: list of emotions

Relevance is the catalyst to the reaction. Relevance is the reason. Force is the purity of the dose. Force is all about time. Force can make or break you. It’s the reason for warning labels. Information overload is overdose. Better efficacy and absorption rate are obtained when you don’t dilute the punch. Be concise. Time it right. Land every punch.

mnemonics
Force—impact t.i.m.e.
Information—k.n.i.t. what you know.
Relevance—without it you s.l.i.p.
Entertainment—open the c.a.s.e.

Emotional Attachment To Music

Ryan Van Etten — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:26:46 +0000

Terry McBride—CEO of Nettwerk—talks here about imagination. He argues that with music, context trumps content because music creates emotional bookmarks in our mind. Simply, the song is an emotion. These emotional bookmarks are significant because they enable us to travel backwards in our memories to when we experienced the music. Consumers are in control of the music industry, and access rules:

Excerpts From Terry McBride’s TEDxVancouver Talk

04:25: We hear a lot of discussion about “content is king.” Well we have to have content, granted, but content comes from your imaginations. But it’s the context that is now king. I mean think of what’s happened withinside the music business where over the last ten years, through litigation, through legislation, the business has tried to change the behavior of tens of millions of teenagers. When are we ever going to learn we cannot change the opinion of teenagers? We keep trying it generation after generation and you’d think that we would learn from history. You cannot litigate behavior and you cannot legislate behavior. What you can do is listen to it, and listen well, and understand behaviors. If the music business could accept the fact that a song is an emotion, then they’d understand that the monetization of that emotion is the business.

09:53: The iPod’s over. Apple knew that. They created something new—it’s called an iPhone. An iPhone is about behavior. It’s not about owning content. It’s about behavior. And then when they opened up that app store to allow everybody else to put their ideas in, that’s when it really took off. I mean eighteen months ago that business didn’t even exist, and now they’re doing 6.6 million downloads of applications a day. From zero. All they’ve done is crowdsourced the imagination of the world. So let’s crowdsource the imagination of that world to save the music business.

Human Brain Connections by ethanhein on flickr

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