 So welcome everybody to PR Tech Wednesdays, the weekly webinar where thought leaders discuss the latest in messaging and communications. If it's Wednesday, it's PR Tech Wednesday. I'm your host, Eric Schwartzman. We do this every Wednesday from 12 to one, it's free. And you can sign up and attend the live chat at PRTechWednesdays.com. So if you're watching on Facebook, if you're watching on YouTube, if you're watching on LinkedIn, if you're watching on Twitter and you wanna ask questions and participate in the chat, just go to PRTechWednesdays.com, sign up and you can join the live discussion. Our guest today is Joseph Rahm. He is an American author, blogger, editor and physicist who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming. He's a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the world's most influential climate blogger. He is also founding editor-in-chief of Progressive News Advocator, aggregator, front page live, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and was chief science advisor for the Emmy award-winning documentary series Years of Living Dangerously. He served as acting assistant secretary of the US Department of Energy and has published several books on global warming and energy technology. And I'm grateful to have him with us here today, Joe, welcome. Well, thank you so much for having me. His latest book is How to Go Viral and Reach Millions, which I liked as much as my dog did. As you can see, my dog got ahold of it and kind of ripped it up there, but I was still able to get through the whole thing. Your dog ate your homework, is that? You can see by the highlighting how much value I got out of this book. This is the book I totally needed to read. It is all about the science of virality. And that's what we're going to discuss today. Starting with this question, Joe, you have a PhD in physics from MIT, which qualifies you as smart as they get. Why did you leave science for communications? Well, that's a great question. Needless to say, it's a very long story. I think the two things that I would say are first, I was raised by writers. My father was a newspaper editor and my mother was a freelancer and an editor and so I've always been interested and obviously engaged in politics and communications and had the benefits of two great editors. I also saw they weren't very well paid. So that's why I went to get a real, I don't say real skill, but a skill and my uncle, great inspiration to me, brilliant, brilliant physicist, still going strong at the age of 94. So I studied physics, he inspired me, but it's really, I came to realize both writing and physics are about the same thing, which is explaining stuff. And so I ended up getting, I was always interested in current affairs and because that was always a subject conversation, I became very interested in climate change and clean energy. And ultimately was acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. And then I consulted with companies like Nike, Johnson & Johnson and IBM on how to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But then my brother lost his home in Hurricane Katrina and one mile inland, he got a 20 foot storm surge and he asked me, should he rebuild his home? And that's when I started talking to climate scientists and reading the literature and that's what got me realizing two things, one of which was the climate situation was more worrisome than I realized and climate scientists and scientists in general weren't doing a great job at communicating. So that was the point where I realized, okay, I'm gonna stop doing consulting and all that and I'm gonna focus on communication because I can do both the science side and the communication side or at least I thought I could. That was 15 years ago and I have learned a great deal seeing what works online and what doesn't work. I've probably written two or three million words online and written thousands of headlines and seen how they performed. And so I came to realize that everything I learned getting a PhD in physics was exactly the wrong thing from a point of view of communications, be as factual as possible, never talk about yourself personally, be literal, use numbers and be quantitative. And obviously in the political realm, if it wasn't clear before, it should be very clear now that those facts are not what persuade people and I've spent 15 to 20 years studying the art of communication, what makes content go viral, what makes people click on content and then stick around to read it. So that's sort of the short version of the story. So in your book, How to Go Viral and Reach Millions, you offer a grand unified theory of going viral. Tell us about that. Well, what I came to realize is obviously we all want to be persuasive. Every time we say something, we want to persuade people. So there's been a lot of study of what makes things persuasive. At the same time, we want our content read by a lot of people or our words heard by a lot of people. And what I came to realize was that the factors that people describe as important for effective viral persuasive communications, sometimes people would say, oh, you have to tell a story. Sometimes people would say, oh, you have to trigger emotions. Sometimes people would say, oh, you have to do a lot of testing, test your headlines and see what message works. And what I came to realize is all of the factors and I talk about them in the book are really the same thing. Fundamentally, what you're trying to do when you're communicating is to tell an emotionally compelling story. And the emotions are what trigger people's interest because they trigger memory. And I think the best way of putting it is this. Humans develop all these shortcuts because mental shortcuts, because 25% of our metabolism is used by our brain. So we've developed a lot of shortcuts so we don't have to do a lot of thinking. And one of the major shortcuts, over 100,000 year evolution of our brains and language is that stories are the way we make sense of the world. Because you're put on this world, you don't know what to do, you don't know why you're here, you don't know what your purpose is, you don't know what to do in a number of situations. So the easiest and most valuable shortcut you can have as a human being is if I'm presented with a novel situation, have I ever been in this situation before, or do I know someone who has, what did they do that worked and what they do that didn't work? So what happened over 100,000 years of evolution is stories became the roadmap for how our minds collect information. And over that period of time, the development of language, what happened was people started telling lots of stories and certain stories survive thousands of years like the stories and the heroic journeys of the Eleanor and the Odyssey or those in the Bible. And those stories were of a certain form, which I discussed in the book, that's the, we can get to that at the end, but therefore that's it. But the basic notion is that the stories that are emotionally compelling all have a certain format, which is they start with exposition and then there's a conflict or a turn and then there's a resolution. And if you can write consistently stories in that format and use the elements of a memorable storytelling, then your content will be memorable to people. And it is that which is memorable to people that we believe is true and that we are persuaded by. So the sort of the grand unified theory is the same things that work today in modern marketing. And the same things that work today online in viral social media are that were understood and developed over thousands of years of language and turned into the ancient art in modern science and viral storytelling, which is sort of what my book is. It's funny cause we're taught in school that factual logical arguments based on science are more persuasive than stories. And the SAT, right? This test that we take in America that helps colleges place us has this backbreaking vocabulary test. Yet as you write in your book, it's the one and two syllable words that are more powerful, memorable and persuasive. And here's some historical examples that you include in the book. To be or not to be, lend me your ears, I have a dream. And then you give some popular examples as well. Just do it, got milk, king of beers, the few the proud. The few the proud. Yet we're taught and encouraged to use big words in our lexicon, particularly when we're writing. So is that a mistake or are big words less persuasive? They are generally less persuasive. The multi-syllabic words, the ones that end in T-I-O-N, all those Latinate endings, as my mother used to say, what you're trying to do, and I have a chapter as you know, the short words, when this is something Churchill emphasized a lot, which is that the shorter words are older in the language and therefore they sort of touch people more. And the big abstract words don't connect with people. And so yes, I think that there's no question that when you look at ad copy, the headlines of ad copy tend to be short words. There may be one big word that sort of gets emphasized, but it's always contrasted. And the vast majority of the great slogans, the great speech here, one of the points I make in the book is that Shakespeare's Hamlet arguably the most viral work of art ever in terms of the degree to which it's been reperformed and we quote lines from it like to be or not to be. The average word length of Shakespeare's Hamlet is 3.99 characters, 3.99 letters, which is say this masterpiece of language is all done with very short words and yet we are educated once you get past middle school, my daughter is now in middle school and she's about to enter high school and high school and college and graduate school, this is where you're taught the wrong way to communicate. And it took me a very long time getting a PhD in physics to unlearn, but the advantage was I had to be very conscious about it. So it's enabled me to sort of been able to explain some of it. And I think that the most important thing for people to remember is the vast majority of content that they produce disappears forever. 19 out of 20 of the things that you write today no one's gonna get past the headline. That's the reality, 95% of the content that you produce today, no one's gonna get past the headline, that's sort of an amazing thing. It doesn't mean that it has to be that way, but that's just the way it is for the overwhelming majority of communications. They disappear, they're gone forever, they don't live on, but there's characteristics of the things that do get repeated, that do live on, that you can understand and learn from. You write that it's no accident, brands like Best Buy, Dunkin' Donuts, Chuck E Cheese, Bed Bath and Beyond, Krispy Kreme and Gold's Gym are so memorable. What's the role of rhyme in viral messaging? Yeah, I think the simplest and most basic way to be persuasive and memorable is just to repeat stuff. So repetition has always been one of the most powerful means of persuasion and one of the most powerful means of getting people to remember things. And again, what we remember, what's most easily accessible in our brain, the stuff that's at our tip of our tongue, that's the stuff that we tend to believe is more true and that's how we make decisions. So you've described a whole bunch of, that's all alliteration, Dunkin' Donuts, Krispy Kreme. That is the elemental repetition of the first letter in a word. And there's no question that repetition of words, of letters, repetition of words and then repetition of the ending of words, that's where you get rhyme. And obviously rhymes are among the most powerful way of remembering things and the best example of that of course is this 95 of the top 100 most viral videos of all time on YouTube are of a certain category. And that category is pop songs. So yeah, pop songs are built around rhymes, rhythmic storytelling using the figures of speech, especially things like rhyme and metaphor, that's what pop songs are. And that's why they can stick in your head sometimes all day, sometimes for days, as I'm sure people know, you get this song stuck in your head. Well, there's a reason it gets stuck in your head. It was designed to get stuck in your head. And you write that rhyme impacts not just memory but also belief, right? You say that the phrase woes, unite foes is different than the phrase woes, unite enemies only in words, they mean the same thing. But the first one woes, unite foes is more believable than woes, unite enemies. Why is that? Yeah, that was a social science study. And I try in the book how to go viral and reach millions to see some of the things we might intuitively believe with social science studies to either say, hey, you're right, or so the short answer is that rhymes stick in the memory and it's just considerably easier for the brain to remember things that rhyme in some sense it because there's less to remember, right? Because they both have the same ending. So the example I use is if it doesn't fit, you must acquit the classic line by John Cochran in the O.J. Simpson trial. Yeah, just if I can, that's really interesting because the one place you figure that logic, a logical argument really is warranted is in the courtroom because people are going to make a decision based on the facts. But you argue that, Johnny Cochran with this phrase if it doesn't fit, you must acquit actually uses rhetoric in this case, rhyme and repetition to cement that fact in the mind of the juror and ultimately exploit the doubt that did he do it or did he not and come away with a win for O.J. Simpson. Right, and this is again gets back to the mental shortcut. Humans, most humans are not simply equipped and are not willing to use, I don't want to use all this brain power to analyze a whole bunch of facts and then come to a logical conclusion. That requires a lot of brain power, whereas if I have a mental shortcut and one of my mental shortcuts is, as I said, if something memorable, it's more likely to be true and that's what the social science has shown. And interestingly, as you know from reading the book, rhetoric was literally developed by the ancient Greeks for the purposes of persuading people in a courtroom. That was why rhetoric was developed. And because as Athens, ancient Athens, what 600 BC, 500 BC was democratizing, they switched from trial by magistrate to trial by jury. Now magistrates, they could be perhaps evaluate things according to the law, but these juries, by the way, were 400 to 500 people and majority decided whether you were guilty of killing or treason. So once they switched to trial by jury, this group of people arose called rhetoricians who would write speeches for people or at least train them how to be persuasive. And that is what Aristotle and evolved to Cicero, all of the skills of sounding credible, sounding persuasive, this is what rhetoric is. And rhetoric is again, for those who don't know, it is basically the key part that I talk about is the figures of speech, things like repetition, rhyme, alliteration, metaphor, irony. These are the things that persuade people, not logic. And repetition you write is also at the heart of the Bible starting with Genesis, right? And God said, let there be light and there was light and God saw the light that it was good. And also in the beginning, there was the word and the word was God and the word was God. So I guess you're saying that the Bible was intentionally written that way to help people remember it. Absolutely, cause you have to remember people couldn't read, right? The overwhelming majority of people could not read until relatively recently in human history, the Bible was meant to be read aloud. The Bible should be thought of as the oral tradition developed over hundreds of years, thousands of years. These are the stories, these are the ways of getting people to remember things. And it is literally those memory tricks. Cause remember the ancient Bards, they had to memorize two hour long epic poems. So they needed things like rhyme, right? If you're gonna, if I'm gonna come to your town and tell you the story of the Iliad, that's a really long thing. And I better have a whole bunch of tricks for remembering it myself. Those happen to be the same tricks that get you to remember it. So those memory tricks, those were the things that got codified into rhetoric by the ancient Greeks. And I think that this is a, and that's why this is a skill that can be acquired, which is to say, if you study these things and apply them, even if you have a PhD in physics, you can learn how to communicate the way. And by the way, this is the way regular people communicate. That's the other point. The average person uses six metaphors per minute, right? And I'll tell you, the book does a great job breaking it all down and making it understandable. But let's, let's draw the connection now between, you know, rhetoric and social media. What does rhetoric have to do with viral messaging? Well, fundamentally, you want, if you want your content to go viral and you need people to first click on the content, they have to first, you have to grab them. And then once you grab them, you have to keep them, right? I mean, that's the essence. Ultimately, you want a third thing, which is you want them to do something. But in order to get them to do something, first, you have to grab their attention. Second, you have to keep their attention. And that's what I call clicky and sticky. And so the same skills that are needed to make content go viral are precisely those that work, that are the ancient art of viral storytelling. And literally, and that's, like I said, all of your listeners right now, 95% of the stuff that they put out regularly disappears forever. And no one reads it beyond the opening line, so the opening headline. So yes, your job is I need to grab you quickly and then I need to keep you. And of course, the easiest way I would say is someone who's written a lot of headlines over the years is to promise you an emotionally compelling story. If I can promise you that, and then you're gonna click through. And of course, I need to deliver it. If I don't deliver it, then you're gonna be upset and you won't come back to my site. But if I can, so my job is to be able to know how to craft an emotionally compelling story and then craft a headline that in as brief as possible grabs people with the key words and key promises of what the story is about and what the key emotion is. Because again, this also comes down to emotions. What I'm, the many studies show that what goes viral are things that trigger certain emotions. And the three most important are awe, anger, and anxiety from a marketing point of view. And I don't wanna leave out humor in general, but from the point of view of if I'm trying to market stuff to you, those are the three main awe. Certainly explains the success of the Tiger King. Yes, yeah, right. For me, that was awe and anxiety. Yes, yes. And look, we like awe, the amazingness of something novel, right? That we like. The Tiger King satisfies a number of emotions, particularly Schadenfreude. And the emotional releases we clearly get from watching people who are so just self-destructively bizarre. That there's something about that that the people just like to watch that. And I think partly it's the satisfaction of knowing that they're not that person. And that's much of reality TV. Joe, in the book, you give the five rules of going viral. Take us through the five rules of going viral. Yeah, and the five rules of going viral, and I'm gonna, let me just turn to him so I can, so the first rule is to tell a story. And I, when I advise people on public speaking, I say, if you, whatever your speech is, whatever the audience is, if you went up and did nothing but tell stories, you would be a better public speaker than 95% of the people out there. And I quote, one of the things I like to quote from Jeff Bezos' 2018 shareholder letter, where he said, we don't do PowerPoint or other slide-oriented presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. So even Bezos, most successful brand, the most successful richest man in the world, requires storytelling, narrative storytelling, at all of his business meetings. Why? Because that's the way his customers think. That's the way everybody thinks. So number one is storytelling. And in particular, I say you need to use the end, but therefore formula. Number two is the figures of speech. In particular, repetition, irony, and metaphor. And if you use those consistently in your storytelling, that's how you get a memorable and emotionally compelling story. And that's what the third of the five is, you have to trade your emotion. In particular, one of those three emotions that I mentioned, awe, anxiety, or anger. And then you want to use memorable elements. And these can be memorable phrases, words, phrases, stories. In other words, when you're deciding, what am I gonna repeat? Well, I have a dream. Okay, that works. That's a very inspiring thing. So certain things are more inspiring and better to repeat than other things. So you need to understand that. And finally, message testing. You have to test your message. And having tested hundreds and hundreds of headlines in my life, in real time online, using big data software. One thing you learn is until you do the testing, your idea of what people will click on and what they actually click on is just a guess. And in some sense, the main theme of the book is that we've now, because of the advent of social media and big data, we have moved from the realm where the vast majority of people had to guess what the winning message was, to now you can know with high confidence what the winning message is. And that's really a first because of the inexpensive of testing things online through social media, compared to what David Ogilvy had to do in the sixties. You wanted to test messages, right? You'd have to spend millions of dollars, take out different ads in different headlines, in different newspapers, right? And run it for days and see if you could see some difference in same store sales and things like really, really monumentally difficult. But testing is the most important. And as I have a whole chapter on testing, and as you know, David Ogilvy, the guy who's sometimes credited with modern marketing, he never did fewer than 16 headlines for any ad that he did. And he said the single most important thing in all of marketing is testing. Well, let's talk about testing for a minute. So when I was sending an announcement out to my email list of folks who are opted into this event, for today, I put out these headlines. I'm gonna launch a poll and I would like you guys to tell me which one do you think got the most, which one was the winner here? Of all these different headlines that these are email subject headlines, but I sent out an announcement about Joe today, which one do you think was the most sticky and clicky as you say in your book? And as everyone's sort of voting on these, why don't, I know right now you are, you have this website called FrontPage Live, which is sort of like a progressive alternative to Breitbart News and you are testing headlines there. You are rigorously testing headlines. You are using advanced data science and big data tools to measure headlines. And I was hoping maybe you could give us a look at that and show us what works and what doesn't when it comes to headlines. Sure, sure, let me do that. Let me, it's, my screen is sometimes messy, but let me just make sure I want to. And while he's doing that, I will tell you that the winning headline was MIT Physicist on Virality. And you know, it's no shame to have guessed wrong because the ones that you guys clicked, those were the first ones I tested. And I had such a poor response on those that I went to the second one, the MIT Physicist, then I tried the latter three. And of those three, it was MIT Physicist on Virality that outperformed in those first three. So, and you just never know, you know. If sometimes I don't have the time to test a headline and I never get the same kind of response as I can never guess which one is gonna work the best. So what you're saying, Joe, is that like, even if you understand rhetoric, even if you use irony and repetition and rhyme, that's really just table stakes, right? That really just gets you to the place where you can test. Right, absolutely. And, you know, like I said, even working as I did for years at Think Progress where they did headline testing regularly and we had professional social media people, two full-time social media people who did nothing but come up with alternative headlines to whatever I or another writer put down. Even they, their average click-through rate was three to 5%. You know, there's an interesting component to digital communications that doesn't exist offline. And that is sort of the record that lives on after it's been distributed. You know, last week I did a panel on racism in America and I got less engagement on that particular panel on social media than any title I've ever done before. And I guess it goes back to that old statement, you know, in business, stay away from politics, stay away from religion, stay away from gender preference, gender identification, you know, all those things because if some, and I had heard from a friend of mine, you know, I was watching it on LinkedIn but I didn't want to click because I didn't want my boss to see. It's like people were actually afraid of offending their racist boss or their potentially racist client and they didn't engage for that reason. When I was thinking about how I was gonna share this event on social media, I had thought, well, wait a minute, so here's an MIT physicist who most people would think is probably has a bias towards science over belief, yet he's saying that people who study the Bible are better at rhetoric than those who don't. And so that was sort of my share, you know, here's an MIT scientist who's gonna tell us, you know, why believers are better online than nonbelievers. And even that didn't get a lot of engagement probably because people are afraid to touch anything related to religion online for fear that it'd be on their profile that they liked or engaged with that type of content. Yeah, so let me see if I can grab the screen here. Share screen. Great. Oh, you disabled it. Um, go ahead. Sorry about that. No worries. There we go. And you are now seeing my screen. Yes, I see it. So this is the front page of FromPage Live, the website. We launched that in June 24th of last year. So it's literally just past the one year anniversary. The website is the embodiment of what I write in the book. In the first year, we had 50 million page views, so which is good because I write a book on how to go viral and reach millions. I better be able to put out a website that get millions of page views. And what you see here is, and this is political, I know we're gonna sort of break your rule. This is content written from a progressive point of view, although as I like to say, I spent 15 years writing about climate change and I thought I was just writing about what the science said and somehow it got turned into a political, liberal perspective. So we definitely try, work very hard to be factual and be truth-tellers. So I think what, the main thing that we're doing differently is in the specific case of headlines, is we do real-time testing of our headlines with our audience. That is to say, it's crowdsourcing, literally. We will put up, might put up any one of these stories. We post it and then I will, and I'll show you in chart beat. And I'll go over now to, sorry, gotta do it the old-fashioned way. So now chart beat is the tool that you use to sort of measure your, it's where you get your KPIs, your key performance indicators, what's working and what's not. Right, chart beat, so chart beat is, the main dashboard of chart beat is simply telling you at any given time how many people are on your website and what they're doing. So in this case, there's this post here, cowards are complicit, which I'll get to. This is the post that's generating, this post has generated in the past hour or so, this post has generated 12,000 shares in one hour, 90 minutes. So obviously that's pretty good. This is the headline, it's a tough headline. You're either a coward or you're complicit, GOP group stunning new ad rips Trump over Russian bounties. This is actually based on a ad put out by a Republican group, the Lincoln Project. And it is quite interesting that we're able to make this content go viral more than we are typical Democratic ads. Why? Because Republicans, I'll just be blunt about it, Republicans historically have been more, made use of what Madison Avenue understands works, which is emotional viral, emotional storytelling. And now this headline was not the original headline. So why does this post do so well? Well, the answer is that using chart beat, I can actually run three or four headlines at the same time, and when you come to our site, front page live, you're randomly assigned one of those headlines. And then chart beat, I mean, that is to say, when you see our front page, you're gonna see one of those headlines randomly. And chart beat is gonna keep track of which ones you click on. And actually chart beat provides you two pieces of information it provide. And I'm gonna switch over to the headline testing here just to show you. And I'm gonna take the headline test. The original headline for that post was Lincoln Project releases two stunning anti-Trump ads, betrayed, and which side of history. And we did real time testing of this for, this is the duration of this was an hour and 17 minute test. And there are three numbers that you get for each. You get the number of total trials done, you get the click-through rate. On the far right, this is the click-through rate. So this headline, the headline that won had a 10% click-through rate versus most of the other headlines had only about a four or 5% click-through rate. The second piece of thing that you get is this other percentage, which is the percentage of people who when they clicked on it, stuck around for 15 seconds or more, which is called a quality click. That's the world that we live in today. The most powerful program for doing headline testing for the past decade says, if you get people to stick around for 15 seconds or more, that's success. That's another piece of information people should have. You just don't have a lot of time to grab people. And once you do grab them, they're not gonna stick around for very long. Now what's interesting here is the headline. You're kind of playing with a different, you're kind of playing a different game than the GOP because what you're doing is you're rewriting headlines, but they're factual headlines, right? You can't just make them up. Right. What's more persuasive, fact or fiction? Well, look, anything that's done in the form of a story using the figures of speech and is going to be equally successful. However, if I could write fiction, fiction's obviously easier to write. I can just make, you could just make stuff up, right? That's the point. And people love fiction, right? I mean, the minute you leave work, what do you do? You watch TV, you go to a movie, you go to a theater, you listen to a true crime story, whatever it is, but the point is we all run to fiction. We love fiction stories. And yes, if the people who can make things up and this was what the Russians did in 2016 with what was then called fake news, right, is they understood that if you could viralize a phony headline if there's no gatekeeper, the gatekeeper used to be Facebook. And I don't wanna go into long discussion of Facebook, but Facebook actually had gatekeepers on content until the spring of 2016, then they stopped them and then we had this surge of fake news that everybody knows about. And now finally, four years later, Facebook is starting to put a little bit of restriction on the content. But yes, I mean, this headline here, you're either a coward or you're complicit, is actually this video from, the reason why this video ad from the Lincoln Project is so compelling is because they've got a guy who is a Navy SEAL, I believe, military veteran who founded this military veterans group who is now an emergency room doctor. And he basically, he goes on and he just tells Trump, he just reports the story that's been in the news, which is that Trump and his administration were told that the Russians were putting bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan. I'm sure everyone has heard this story by now, that the general story went viral a few days ago. And he just says, look, Trump, either you're a coward because you won't speak out against this practice and take action against Vladimir Putin and the Russians for putting bounties on our soldiers or you're complicit with Putin. So he says, you're either a coward or you're complicit. And so this is a factually accurate story. That's what this ad does. I mean, you are doing the repetition and you are doing some extent of rhyme. I wanna talk about metaphor for a second. Because you write that metaphors enhance our memory because one, they create a place in our brain for an alternate concept to reside and two, they involve us in decoding the meaning. And you give some historical examples, all the worlds of stage, wear my heart on my sleeve, iron curtain. And you also give some pop cultural examples of metaphor, like a rock, Chevy, like a good neighbor, state farm is there, think different, Apple computer, Intel inside, Intel. What advice or frameworks can you share on creating memorable metaphors? Well, I think, and then by the way, there's a third reason why metaphors are so powerful, which took me a while to realize. People may know that in some of the theories of language and persuasion, the neuro-liquistic programming, the notion that there are people who are auditory, there are people who are visual, and there are people who are kinesthetic. You've probably heard this. This is the essence of- The story of multiple intelligence. Yes, and this is what Tony Robbins built his empire around. And I'm pretty much an auditory person. I'm very much a word-oriented person. I can remember the lyrics to dozens of songs. Could I tell you what the hair was, the hair color of someone I met yesterday? No, no, but some people learn auditorily. Some people learn visually and some people learn kinesthetically by doing. I think this is pretty well established. So, but when you're communicating to people, you have to communicate to all three, even if you know which one you are. I'm an auditory person, but there's far more visual people than auditory people, as far as I can tell. I have to be able to communicate to them. Metaphors are almost all- They're generally visual, you know? And as you say, I'm gonna read some of Shakespeare's, all the worlds of stage, the dogs of war, jealousy is a green-eyed monster, to wear my heart on my sleeve, a tower of strength, music is the food of love, right? So these create a visual picture. And that is another way to get people to remember if they're visual people. So yes, it is incumbent on you as the communicator. I often don't say this because I tend to think it's obvious, but it is incumbent on you as a communicator to communicate with everyone in your audience where they are. And if you fail, if they walk away not remembering what you said, it's not their fault. That's on you. You know, that's your job as a communicator. I gotta try to communicate to as many people as possible. And so, metaphors are very powerful because they're visual and also because they're little stories. They tell you something you know very well is like, something new that you haven't experienced is like this thing you know very well, right? So I'm accessing a lot of information that's already in your brain. And so yes, that's why these, when you say all the worlds of stage, okay, the world's a complicated place. What is the world like? Well, I'm gonna simplify for it. I'm gonna make, compare it to something you know very well. You've seen a stage, you've seen performances on a stage. I'm just saying, life is nothing but a stage writ large. Okay, I've communicated a staggering amount of information in very few words and I've created this memorable picture and I've made you think and as the social science literature is also quite clear. If I can make you do a little bit of mental processing it's gonna stick in your head more. So the very act of you having to imagine a stage and then imagine the world being a stage I've made a neuronal connection, you know and if that gets reinforced it'll actually be you know an actual new piece of new way of looking at the world for you. But Joe, those are very simple metaphors and I would imagine you know it's easy to get carried away and try to make a metaphor that's so difficult to decode that people just ignore it. So how do you make simple metaphors? Well, I think you very much have to know your audience. That there's no question that you know if you give the same talk regardless of the audience then you're not serving your audience well because the audience has different basic sets of knowledge. So if I'm talking to scientists I'm gonna try to use scientific metaphors. If I'm you know talking to nurses I'm gonna try to get into medical metaphors. Just to push back on that for a second. So when you're talking to scientists you're gonna use scientific information yet scientists are gonna be just as predisposed to rhyme and rhetoric just as the jurors are, right? To rhyme and rhetoric and metaphor and ad-literation. Right, no, no, yes. And you also say in the book, two-fifth of Americans are barely literate. And you're telling us now that no one reads it beyond the headline. And I'm sure that that's true of scientists too that are working on a PhD and don't have time to get too deep into the story. So is it, even if you know your audience do you really know your audience? Well, look, scientists are a challenge but I will cite scientific studies. I will also make analogies and metaphors that are scientific in nature because I went through scientific training. So, you know, I, but there's no question that every different group has their own things that they believe as truisms. And you know, it is always difficult when you're challenging someone's truisms and scientists have a whole bunch of truisms about communications that are just wrong. And, you know, I think that, again, I would say go back to the Bible. You know, the Lord is my shepherd, right? I mean, that's, you know, the most famous Psalm, you know, Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. That whole Psalm is an extended metaphor of the Lord as your shepherd. And that's another point about metaphors is that if you, you know, in a perfect use of a metaphor, you're gonna extend it. It's gonna be such a good metaphor that the things aren't alike in just one way. They're actually alike in multiple ways. And, you know, so I am definitely a fan of the use of extended metaphors. And I often talk about songs, you know, like Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, which is just an extended metaphor as love, love as a bad, as a bad romance. A lot of songs are extended metaphors. And yes, but no, look, I take your point. There's no question that ultimately what is going to work on the vast majority of people is the same. And that's why if I write a really viral headline with my audience, the chances are it's gonna be viral with a great many people. And I'll make one last point about virality because you might say, well, what's the big deal in difference between a 10% click-through rate headline and a 5% click-through rate headline? It's just a factor of two. Does that mean only twice as many people are gonna see the green headline versus one of the others? And the answer is no, it's a very nonlinear effect. What a 10% click-through rate headline tells you, and by the way, this headline probably had a higher click-through rate. It declared a winner after an hour and 17 minutes. But if it would have just kept running, it might have been higher. But the point that I want people to come away with is that when you have a very clicky headline, then not only do people see it and click on it, but they wanna share it, because everybody wants to put the engaging content on their site. This is what it means to be viral, is I've shared with you something, a phrase, a quote, a meme, a video that you think is gonna be engaging to your audience. So when I do a 10% click-through rate headline, I can create a chain reaction just like in a nuclear reactor, and it just keeps going and going. Whereas if I have an average or below average headline, it just dies on the vine. No one wants to share it. So this is the recipe for the stuff that goes super viral. And this is the recipe for things that were very effective. For instance, in the 2016 campaign with Donald Trump, we talked about metaphors. But you write about a lot in the book, and you write that post-election analysis found that in a handful of swing states where Trump exceeded his polling numbers, the states that made him president, these were precisely the states where his social media engagement was the highest. So I guess, are you suggesting, I mean, that really it was social media that pushed him over the edge, that he won the presidency based on his social media communications campaign? I think there's no question about it because as you know, Hillary Clinton had a lot of money and spent heavily on TV. But she was outspent two to one over the last six months on Facebook. And the thing about, I don't want to say TV is a complete waste of money, but TV reaches a very broad audience and the beauty of what, I mean beauty, what Facebook has allowed you to do is literally target veterans over the age of 65 within 20 miles of Tallahassee, Florida. So if I can figure out through testing what message they like, I can hit them with that message. And as I discuss in the book, a long discussion of this, because trying to understand why Trump won and what he was doing right and the Russians and other people were doing right online, at least in terms of virality was a major driving force for writing this book. And is that in fact, they were testing 40 to 50,000 ads per day. 40 to 50, when you're testing 40 to 50,000 ads per day, semi-automated, you literally know what is the image. I mean, they're testing different background images. They're testing different headlines. They're testing literally different color button for click here to donate. So does this group like a triumphant Trump picture or an angry Hillary picture? Do they like one of these 10 headlines? Do they like a green button or a blue button? And does it matter if they are these veterans who are over 65 within 20 miles of Tallahassee or whether they are occasional voting African-Americans in the Philadelphia suburbs? Or they're a young Bernie Sanders voter in Madison, Wisconsin. So you can see if, yeah, anyway. The book is, How to Go Viral and Reach Millions. I posted a link in the chat room. I mean, as you can see, as I showed you if you've logged in late, I mean, I got so much value out of this. I was highlighting, making notes in the columns. And as I showed you too, my dog enjoyed it as well. I left it on the table. And when I came back, I saw that he was really digging into it. He really enjoyed this book as well. That is a figure of speech, digging into it with his teeth in this case. I wanna thank Joe so much for joining us today. And I wanna invite you all, we're gonna be dark next week. We're coming back on the 15th. And we have a Gen Z panel. So we have a panel of 15 Gen Zers who are going to basically be a focus group. So I'm not driving the show. You show up with your questions, show up with your campaign ideas, ask them anything you like. They're gonna be here for you. And I'm really excited about that. And again, I wanna thank Joe for joining us and thank all of you for joining us. Again, if you're watching on Facebook, if you're watching on YouTube, if you're watching on Twitter, if you're watching on LinkedIn, go to PRTechWednesdays.com and sign up. That way you'll get an announcement each time we have another webinar. And if you miss it, you get a link to the replay. Or if you wanna join us, you can, you can ask questions. When there are questions, I bring people on the screen so we can participate in a discussion, a lively discussion. But this was a great discussion today. This was a jam. You know, this is the type of stuff you don't know about, you don't hear it, it goes by you. You know about it, you have a real advantage in how you communicate and how you go viral. So Joe, if people wanna get ahold of you, where can they find you? Well, you can get, you can reach me at joe at frontpagelive.com. You know, that's the, if you go to frontpagelive.com, you will see a way of sending in information if you get to the mass head. But it's joe at frontpagelive.com. You know, obviously please do by how to go viral and reach millions. It's on Amazon. If you like it, please review it on Amazon because- I will. I definitely will write a review. Yeah, as you know, it's again, it's social proof. You know, we all look at products, books. You get a book with four and a half stars. I might read it, book with two stars. You know, so- And five stars, you know, they obviously bought the love. So it's gotta be four and four point something to be believable. Indeed, indeed. And at least Amazon has clamped down on this. I've learned a great deal about Amazon. By the way, for people, since I have done a little bit of studying, Amazon does not credit a five star review where you just say awesome book as much as any review that's over four lines because they want some evidence that you actually read the book and have something to say about it. They do absolutely quote, they generally don't credit as much in the average if you aren't a actual purchaser. So just interesting things I pass on. Joe, this could have been in my opinion a three part series. I mean, I have a bunch of questions here I didn't even get to ask you. So maybe you'll entertain me on a phone call at another time. I would absolutely love to come back, absolutely. Thanks, Joe. Thanks everybody. And we will see you on the next PR Tech Wednesday. Bye-bye. Bye, thank you.