Click here to check out the book on Amazon
The first book I chose in my long educational journey into marketing was a book that I’d wanted to read for a while; Since I’d read a guest post from Ryan Holiday on Tim Ferriss‘ blog.
It ended up being mostly what I wanted to hear and somewhat what I didn’t want to hear.
Basically, Holiday explores blogs as a medium from a publicist’s standpoint. He gives a brief history of media and draws parallels between today’s iterative journalism featured in blogs and the sensationalist yellow papers that appeared in the past. Both thrive on one time readers, both feature sensational headlines to garner attention, both are easily influenced twisted and manipulated in the desperate need to fill the news faster than the competition. Holiday studied the techniques used in the past, along with the journalistic practices (and faults) of today’s blogs, and came up with a formula on how to manipulate the media in his favor. This is mostly a combination of doing the work for the journalist (framing, headline, buzz), and starting the story off on small blogs and trading up the chain until it is main stage news. That’s the first half of the book.
The second half is much darker. It reveals the consequences of doing this (some funny examples, a shitload of dark ones), the destructive nature of iterative journalism, the existence of virtual extortion, meaningless corrections, and the downfalls of snark and pseudo-events. Basically, he deconstructs the state of journalism today, which is both questionable and profound from his perspective of the role of the exploiter. On one hand, he knows the system better than the public, and is more conscious of journalistic faults than journalists (why would they admit flaws in their own industry?). On the other hand, he comes off as bitter in a couple examples in the book because his own clients and companies were struck with cases of manipulative and irresponsible journalism. I can see where he is coming from, though, and the irony of it makes it that much more impressionable for me. The overall tone does get pretty cynical, though, so it was key to keep that perspective in mind.
My Rating: 8.8/10 (I learned more about media and marketing here than I have anywhere else)
Quotes:
“Blogs need things to cover. The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 35 days a year. But blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.”
“The web is hopelessly interdependent. Not only is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it.”
“Bloggers have a direct incentives to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to write without having to do any work, to write more often than is warranted.”
“The medium believes it is giving the people what they want when it simplifies, sensationalizes, and panders. This creates countless opportunities for manipulation and influence. I know what the cumulative effect of this manipulation is: Its effect is unreality. Surrounded by illusions, we lash out at our fellow man for his very humanness, congratulate ourselves as a cover for apathy, and confuse advertising with art. Reality. Our lives. Knowing what is important. Information. These have been the casualties.”
“When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this.”
“The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself.”
“I once saw snark as an opportunity to advance narratives in the media cheaply. But I have been burned by it enough, seen enough of its’ victims shell-shocked faces, to know that it is not worth it.”
“We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down. This comes from centuries of knowing that writing was expensive–that it was safe to assume that someone would rarely waste the resources to commit to paper something untrue. The written word and the use of it conjures up deep associations with authority and credence that are thousands of years old.”
“They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.”
“You figured out the best way to do this when you were twelve years old and wanted something from your parents: Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline–or hint at the options–in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it. Make it so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not.”
“When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie.”
“No marketer is ever going to push something with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.”
“But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter–these drive us to spread.”
“All it takes is the right frame, the right angle, and millions of readers will willingly send your idea or image or ad to their friends, family, and coworkers on your behalf.”
