Self Aggrandizement and Puffery

You've heard of Catch-22. But Public Law 134?

The 1951 law says federal government officials can't engage in covert propaganda or spend public funds on it.

In the nearly seven decades since Public Law 134 was passed, government attorneys have vigilantly called for the law's enforcement, particularly its ban on self-glorification, which Congress calls "self-aggrandizement and puffery."

Those attorneys must be awfully busy.

Superman was a Content Creator

We often forget a significant fact.

When disguised as mild-mannered Clark Kent, the Man of Steel worked as a reporter for the Daily Planet.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to content creator Matthew Grocki for reminding me Superman was a content creator.

It's Offical: I am Not a Schmuck

The ever-vigilant voice inside my head has been silenced.

Ta-dah!

It turns out, I'm not a schmuck.

I'm a micro-influencer.

And I'm hot.

CMOs want me.

A "micro-influencer," according to word-of-mouth marketing agency Mavrck, is an everyday Joe who engages 500 to 5,000 followers around a topic.

CMOs want to curry favor with me, so I'll "co-develop" social media posts that steer conversations toward their products.

And in terms of ROI, micro-influencers like me are mightier than he-man size influencers. 

"Micro-influencers generally have the smallest reach, but also have the highest engaged reach," according to Mavrck. "More importantly, they’re generating authentic conversions among like-minded consumers, individuals with shared connections to the micro-influencer that are far more powerful than the superficial engagements and conversions you may get from a paid advertisement, blog or impersonal public endorsement."

Take that, Kanye West!

A CMO can incent me to co-develop posts by giving me the VIP treatment, showering me with gifts, discount coupons, or exclusive offers.

Every time I'm incented to act, on average, three of my followers become the CMO's customers, the company says.

"Micro-influencers are your best brand asset you didn’t even know about," Mavrck advises.

How about you?

Are you a micro-influencer?

Fragmented

Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not understand each other.

— Genesis

Division is nothing new in our nation, but media was always a glue that bound us.

Its fragmentation comes like Yaweh's wrath:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not understand each other.

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Hard and Sticky

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

― Anne Lamott

How often have you been told to make your content easy?

Easy to skim, scan, and swallow.

Easy's best.

Not always, say two Princeton neuroscientists.

They've shown disfluency―the processing by the brain of hard-to-read content―increases the content's impact.

Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer asked 3,400 subjects to take problem-solving tests and found the subjects repeatedly scored higher when the tests were disfluent (i.e., printed in hard-to-read typefaces).

"Disfluency led participants to adopt a more systematic processing strategy," the researchers concluded.

Additional neuroscientific evidence indicates hard-to-read content triggers an alarm in the brain that activates the prefrontal cortex responsible for careful thought.

The harder we have to work to understand a piece of content, the stickier it becomes.