Yesterday, a friend forwarded me a trending news item:
“A Nine-year-Old Girl Has Disappeared After Using Moisturizer That Makes You Look Ten Years Younger.”
Unlike me, my friend has a kid, so the fact that he forwarded me this story might just be a symptom of early-onset dad humor. But maybe not.
Maybe it’s a sign of something much deeper… much more sinister… and much more significant… at least if you are interested in persuasion and sales.
Because check it:
I read another news item yesterday. It was about a study that came out this past December, from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
These MIT management experts were studying the spread of misinformation online. The question they were studying was this:
Are people who are more digitally literate — for example, who know how Facebook recommends stories — any better at coping with online misinformation than unwashed digital illiterates?
Answer:
People who were digitally literate were much better at gauging accuracy. They could tell apart which stories (about politics and corona) were true and which were fake.
But…
That had nothing to do with which stories the digital literates ended up sharing.
In other words, these digital Steve Urkels were just as likely to share fake stories — which they knew to be fake — as the digital illiterates — who believed them to be true.
So there you go. Maybe that explains why my friend, who is very digitally literate, shared that obvious hoax about moisturizer with me.
But more seriously:
The researchers concluded that “measuring digital literacy might be useful for identifying social media users who are vulnerable to believing misinformation.”
That seems naive and shortsighted to me.
To me, this study just shows that the apparent truthfulness or fakefulness of what you say… doesn’t matter much in whether people engage emotionally, and in other real-world ways, with your ideas and content.
Maybe you find that shocking. Or maybe you find it obvious. Because it’s really just a re-statement of the ancient direct marketing truth:
All decisions are made emotionally, and are only primped and preened afterwards with a bit of logic.
Maybe remembering this truth will help you when you try to convince people to buy from you… or just to share some of your content.
For example, my Copy Riddles optin page. One last time, I’d like to invite you to share it.
Maybe by now I’ve stirred up sufficient shock, outrage, or perhaps amusement in you that you want to share this page just because.
But maybe you need some logic. In that case, I also have a bribe for you. For the full details, take a look here: