Let me tell two stories: one about surfers and one about stockbrokers.

A surfer friend was telling me about what it is like to figure out where to surf on a beach. You pile into a truck with your friends and your surfboards and head out to the beach. Once you get there, you and your friends get out and have a look at the waves. They look good, but the general consensus is that the conditions might be more promising a few miles down the beach. This process repeats itself and a few hours pass. The wind dies down. You go out and hit the waves a bit, but there is the unspoken sentiment that the group would have been better off jumping into the water at one of the first places.

A friend who trades stocks recently lost several thousand dollars on the stock market. He assumed in hindsight that his decision-making had been bad and thus felt dejected that he had not made better decisions. He decided to take the day off and not spend time with his friends. The uptake of our discussion was that the proper format of behavior is to be emotionally divorced from the behavior of your stocks. The market goes up and down, but there is no reason to allow this to impact your self-perception of your decision-making.

The lesson of these two stories is this: decision-making is not a science. Behavioral economists understand humans as being very flawed in their decision making.

Dan Ariely placed six-packs of soda in certain communal fridges on college campuses and placed plates of six one dollar bills in others. The sodas vanished, but the cash did not.

The human mind is not built for the economic decision or the opportunity-cost judgment. So, how should we make decisions?

Quite simply, go with hunches and roll with punches.

To make a sub-optimal decision quickly is often more useful than to make an optimal decision slowly. To be understood as legitimate in the world of business, you must be able to act quickly and effectively. A faster actor can out-run a slower mover: this is the advantage of a small business over a larger one. Slow action is the smoke screen of bureaucracy and the old-fashioned scientific process of making decisions, which has been shown to result in failure countless times.

If you bet on a coin flip with even odds, you have made a zero-sum economic decision. To laud yourself as a saint if the flip is heads or to bash yourself as a dunce if it is tails are irrational reactions. Buying a lottery ticket is a bad decision; putting down a big bet on a straight flush is a good decision. If you win the lottery, you still made a bad decision in buying the ticket (unless you were cheating!) and if you lose to a royal flush, you still made a good decision. Decisions are best analyzed in hindsight based on probability, not on results. This is to say, don’t kick yourself if a good (well-construed) decision goes south. It is completely reasonable to cut your losses if something looks bad, and it is neither reasonable to ride your yacht down a whirlpool nor to jump out of your airplane when turbulence hits.

Each decision is good or bad based on how swiftly and definitely it is made and how good or bad it looks at the time you are making it.

There are some games that are difficult to win, but what matters in the end is how well you play.

Here are a few simple tips that will make you more productive in the next week.

Coin-Flipping

If you come to a decision that is zero-sum: where choice one or choice two doesn’t seem to have any merit over the other, don’t overthink it. Present yourself with a Hobson’s Choice and simply flip a coin, where heads is option one and tails is option two.

“TK”

Says Cory Doctorow: Don’t research. If you are writing and come upon a place where a specific fact or citation is needed, simply write the letters “TK.” These letters appear very few times in common English text, so it will be easy to fire up the search function of your word processor and find this place in your text once you have completed the task of writing. In this way, you will not derail your train of thought.

Change Your Surroundings

To create a mental distinction between a place of work and your home is valuable towards being productive. Go to a coffee shop or use a different computer or area of your home when you are trying to be productive. If this is impossible, change a small detail of your surroundings to create a mental image of difference/uniqueness. Flip something over or bring an outdoors object such as a pine cone or a rock into your habitat.

Think Meditatively

Before engaging in your productive task, try to spend five minutes thinking about the task as a independent unit. If your thoughts stray from the task, do not mentally chide yourself, simply try to return your thoughts to the task by asking a general question, something like, “What is the purpose what what I am doing?” or “How would I define a job well done at (my task)?”

Do Not Overstimulate

It is valuable to engage in your addictive substance of choice (caffeine, tobacco) to stimulate your mind before being productive. It is necessary to moderate intake of any stimulant. Productivity must be understood in the context of a normative quotidian activity, not an abnormal activity or an aberration from the norm.

“Less is more,” a tenet central to the Bauhaus school of architecture, is essentially useless on its own in the context of website or interface design.

Think about a book or movie that you have enjoyed recently. What if a friend asked you to summarize the work in one sentence? It would probably be a very simple task for you to cut a 400 page book or a two hour movie down to one sentence. Why? That work is likely to have a very simple theme. The author of a book or the director of a movie infuses the work with meaning based on the centrality or focus of this simple and fundamental theme.

To design a business model (and, by consequence, a marketing strategy) is to develop a fundamental theme and make it understood to the users.

Minimalism is a design strategy that can be implemented in two ways: top-down and bottom-up.

To implement top-down minimalism is to take something that is busy, muddled, and confusing and to cut out the unnecessary elements: to pare down something convoluted to something minimal or basic.

Conversely, bottom-up minimalism is designing an interface from scratch around a theme (a centrality or focus.)

The advice that I would have for someone who is trying to pare down a confusing interface is to scrap it entirely and build something new, radical, and minimal. It is possible to take James Joyce’s Ulysses and rip out pages and black out paragraphs until it becomes a book about animal husbandry, but this is really nonsensical in view of the fact that it is much more reasonable to simply write a book about animal husbandry.

To put this in context, it is meaningless to apply minimalism unless this is being done in the interest of the central focus of your business’ central intent or theme. To cut a behemoth interface into something smaller is tantamount in uselessness to designing a minimalist interface just to look hip: e.g. without a meaningful, relevant, and clear centrality of focus.

A minimal interface meaningful to the user will have been designed ground-up with the sole and certain purpose of promulgating the message of the centrality.

The growth and spread of a successful meme looks almost like that of a pandemic disease. The initial population is small, but the meme (or virus) grows exponentially and quickly has an enormous effect. Valuable or interesting content can become memetic on the internet and grow very rapidly from obscurity to household name status. The revolution of the printing press was significant in that content could be delivered to the masses, but the effect of the printing press is the flame of a candle compared to the conflagration of the slashdot effect.

A book or pamphlet can only be in one person’s hands at once, and as such there is a practical limit to how many people can read or be in the audience of printed material. Gutenberg may have raised the roof, but Berners-Lee launched it into the upper atmosphere.

It must be understood that there is almost no limit to how many impressions your web content can have if it is unique, valid, and interesting. Most memetic content is fairly inane, even by internet standards: Double Rainbow, the Bed Invader, or Advice Animals, for instance. However, some rare memetic content can serve to inspire.

Inspiration is the affirmative contagion of passion.

That is to say, you or I can feel passionate about something relevant to our works or lives. To feel passion time and again is not all that rare, but it is the ability to infect others with that passion that is so valuable.

To weaponize a meme with passion is to create the positive equivalent of a disease that strikes directly at the human heart. This is not an easy thing, nor is it a common thing, but when it works, it is an unstoppable force.

The variable that subsumes digital communication to face-to-face communication is richness. That is to say, a friend might have an easier time convincing you of something than, in descending order, a motivational speaker, a video recording, an email, or a text message. That being said, each form of communication can strive either upward or downward in terms of its richness: a conversational interlocutor can be either engaging or evasive, or a blog post could either be emotionally charged or pedantic.

To strive upwards in richness in whatever form of communication you are using is to make your message stand out from other messages published in the same medium. To make your passion into inspiration and to make your inspiration into a meme is to engage the audience through richness of content – to speak directly to your audience in the language of emotion and passion.

And if you can do this, it is an understatement to say that the sky is the limit.

The OED defines the word implore as…To beg or pray for (aid, favor, pardon, etc.) with tearful or touching entreaties; to ask for in supplication; to beseech.

There are two types of online marketing strategies – those that implore and those that do not. Imploring, beseeching, etc is old-paradigm. A new-paradigm strategy does not involve this sort of technique.

Says Merlin Mann…

“Friend us on Facebook!” is a social media strategy like “Buy me a malt liquor!” is a charitable giving plan.

The analysis of this statement is that you cannot say to your customers and potential customers: “Give me something for nothing.” To get out of the malt liquor trap, it is necessary to do three things:

1. Concentrate Your Message

…and do not implore. It should be very certain that your social media strategy is focused on having the user do some action, (to follow your social media updates or to learn about a new product/service) but this strategy must exclude nagging the user about this. To create a centrality of focus is something that can be done much more subtly and effectively than with blatant and obnoxious messages.

2. Exchange Value for Value

Rather than simply expecting your user base to generate value for you, you must create a user community. This can be done by engaging users and by providing value in exchange for value. Value, in this context, can have two meanings.

a) Monetary Value

It is simple to hold a community-building contest. Offer a gift certificate or product/service as a prize. One good idea is to hold a Photoshop contest: invite users to submit photos based on a satirical theme. Provided care is taken to moderate the contest, users will produce meaningful and interesting pictures, which can bring value to your social media page.

Another simple social media technique is to provide a coupon (or coupon code) for your product, exclusively to social media followers. Doing this will create an incentive to follow your social media page and can also serve to get social media users interested in new or obscure products or services.

b) Value of Content

In addition to or instead of providing monetarily valuable content, you can provide content that has intangible value: content can be humorous, exciting, or entertaining. This can be as simple as re-posting a witty comment or a video or as complex as commissioning a social media advertisement. Creating valuable content is a very open-ended task, and requires a lot of inspiration and creativity.

3. Engage Users

Determine what your users like and stick with it. Use a statistics tracker, such as Facebook Insights, to figure out which types of postings and content are most enjoyed. Then attempt to innovate with this type of content to make it more popular, catchy, and interesting. Also, attempt to create new types of content and engage users in new ways.

About three years ago, Tropicana changed the design of its orange juice cartons. Because of this, sales of Tropicana orange juice fell significantly. At this point, Tropicana decided after a period of a couple months to transition back to its old logo.

The uptake of that is this – consumers trust established motifs.

Consider this comparison of the change over time of the Coca-Cola and Pepsi logos. Notice how each logo transitions smoothly and slowly as time passes on, the exception being the New Coke era Coke logo.

Let us embark on this thought experiment: a Coke or Pepsi executive from the year 1900 has a vision of his company’s logo in the year 2012. He then orders the entire company to re-brand to the new logo.

At first glance, it would seem that this would be a dramatic and successful marketing decision. The soda company would be releasing bottles which are for all intents and purposes from its own future. How better to anticipate the needs of the market?

I would, however, argue that such a decision would be a catastrophe. Tropicana’s new logo was more futuristic than its old logo – it had smoother lines and a cleaner look. It did not, however, preserve any connection to the old logo. Tropicana did not clean up its old logo, it tossed it out the window.

In view of this, it is not reasonable to assume that a 1900 to 2012 future-scaling would have any success. It is necessary for any process of re-branding take place in the context of a gradual, evolutionary process. Big changes are not only scary to consumers, but indicative of uncertain decision-making.

As such, it is necessary to predict what direction the future will take and then proceed in that direction, but to take slow steps towards it. Many successful brands have developed an ability to do this.

An advantage of the baby-steps technique is that it allows simple backtracking. The Tropicana re-brand drew heavy consumer fire, but no small evolutionary step can cause that degree of controversy. If there is a problem to be addressed with a minor re-brand or an incremental development, the user base is much more likely to behave in a civil manner, and it is must less likely to bring you embarrassment. It is simple to backpedal a step or pace, but nearly impossible to backpedal a plunge.

Each success that a brand has and each advertisement made under it increases the power and legitimacy of the brand. Brands are among the most valuable assets of any company, and to radically re-brand is to squander the brand asset’s value.a

There is one absolutely certain, fool-proof method of winning the lottery, which I will reveal at the end of this article.

Mean time, let’s talk about advertising online.

To spend money on a conventional online advertisement campaign is to buy a set number of impressions, where x number of users will be exposed to the advertisement. It is commonly accepted that about 1 in every 50 users will click on an online advertisement. How many of the users who actually make it do your site then act on the ad is almost completely a function of luck.

Do not allow luck to determine the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Rather, be proactive and draw users to your site through an advertisement-action process.

Advertisement is often thought of as a stand-alone process, its goal only to lead the user to the website and then abandon him, as though in the gift shop of a museum. Instead, any online ad campaign should have a counterpart, a custom-designed web landing page or set of linked pages to which the user should be directed on your server. Here is how to design a complete ad campaign in three steps…

1. Preach to the Faithful

Find specific ways to target users who are specifically interested in your message. Advertise on opinion blogs or forum communities that are related to your product or service. Here, you can feel free to use jargon or specifics in your ad and explain clearly and without marketing-speak why it is worth their money and time.

2. Engage the Interested

Once someone has clicked on your ad, they should not just be directed to a spread of your products or services. Create a splash page with a compelling visual message, a graphic or short movie. Follow this with a simple, one-option, call-to-action…

3. Rally the Troops

Like our page!

Follow our twitter!

Buy our product!

Attend our event!

Organize your community!

Share our message!

It should be clear and certain what you want the user to do. Provide the resources for them to do this, either by linking them directly to the action that they should perform, or by showing a simple numbered (and preferably illustrated) flowchart about how to engage in the process. Make it easy, certain, and helpful.

Current advertising theory might equate user collection to running around in a rainstorm with a teaspoon. Instead, stand below a waterfall with a bucket. Valuable potential users are best found in intentional online communities built around the market or your product or service. Provide these users with something engaging and informative and direct them towards a definite call-to-action.

Only in doing this can you avoid the tragedy of wasted impressions and useless clicks.

Oh yeah, how do you win the lottery?

It’s simple: don’t play.

The odds are bad and the house always wins. So why bother? Don’t play a rigged game. And by extension, recognize that the conventional online ad game is rigged as well.

It is a game best played by making your own rules and creating a better game.

Manuel dos Reis Machado, known as Mestra Bimba, was a South American martial arts master. When he was in his 80s, he was challenged to a fight by a much younger fighter, a man in his 20s. So the story goes, the young man wanted to demonstrate his dexterity and mobility, and began the fight by jumping around and doing several flips in the air. As his competitor was mid-air, Mestre Bimba rolled into a cartwheel and simply stuck out his foot in the trajectory of the younger man. The competitor smashed his face into Mestre Bimba’s foot and knocked himself out. When he came to, he had no idea what had happened and asked Mestre Bimba, “What was that?”

Replied the master, “That was my foot.”

The lesson of this story is that applied elegance can solve any problem. We can apply this lesson towards a common problem: how to gain followers or interest in your online business.

One Message at a Time

It is important to always have one focus or message at a time. Consider woot.com, a website which sells one product a day. No consumer plans on waking up on February 12 wanting a digital camera, but woot is able to allow their potential customers to focus on the one item without being distracted by comparing models, looking up coupon codes, or digging through pages of unrelated products. A further advantage of woot’s model is that if a customer finds a deal to be good, he is much more likely to share it with his friends.

We have discussed how it is important to give the user a Hobson’s Choice, and this choice must always be facing the message that you are presently trying to promulgate.

Silence is Golden

When in the process of making one message known, you must direct all attention to it, and this is done through eliminating messages that contradict the central message. It is appropriate to hold a period of social media silence before a major announcement, which can then be touted on all social media channels, as well as through press releases or other appropriate means. If applied correctly, short periods (2-5 days) of social media vacuum will make your users eagerly anticipate major announcements.

“Jaws Moments”

Once you have established social media vacuums as the lead-in to a major announcement, try holding a social media vacuum for no reason at all. In the same way that religious services fluctuate from intense moments of worship or reflection to light moments of song or uplifting prayers, you may create fervor by shifting your mode of use of social media from constant to sporadic and back. Correct application of this type of technique will confuse users to the extent that they might pay greater attention to your posts or entertain speculation about future announcements based on your style of publicizing.

Per Merlin Mann, “Being consistent is WAY less interesting than being yourself. And if you’re not interesting? Good luck with your Big Consistency Project.”

Elegance comes from knowing when to speak and when not to.

Keep your users guessing.

Think about your top five reasons for making your most recent major purchase.

It is likely that at least one of these reasons will reflect a community-driven item of insight. Did your mechanic tell you how great a certain new car is? Did your IT person at work recommend a certain brand of televisions? Did a friend or relative tell you how much easier a certain household appliance made their life?

Surrounding any product or service’s value is the community of people who derive value from it. Though community is intangible, it greatly benefits the producer of the product or service to have a strong, active, and evangelistic community surrounding the product. Community-creation is a goal of any successful product line or company.

The purpose of asking questions if to create a format wherein posters (whether in blog comments, on Facebook, or on twitter through retweets) can engage in stimulating discourse or discussion. A question fails, however, when too many users post useless comments or negative griping answers. That is to say, a question can either lead to good vibes or bad vibes, and can either hurt or harm the community of users.

A well-placed comment, however, can get users thinking just as readily as a question can, but has less likelihood of backfiring. Think of a comment as a stealth question – intend your comment to provoke discussion, either by challenging your audience to think or by leaving something open for people to jump in on.

A few quick examples of stealth questions…

• Our company is moving towards a design philosophy of x.

• (Employee) just expressed admiration of (competing company)’s ability to do x.

• (Customer) has discovered a new use for product, x.

Note that in advocating comments, I do not suggest that questions are irrelevant. Questions best serve when input is being solicited, but comments better serve to initiate civil discussion. Also, in the context of a question, users are most likely to either answer the question or ignore it, whereas in the context of a comment, users can share their unique reactions or join in the discussion with no preliminaries.

In the interest of continuing discussion, you can ask follow up questions which drive at the heart of what you might have asked in question form, for instance by sharing a social media user’s reaction…

• In response to x, (user) said y, do you agree?

It can be easily understood from this type of question that a continuation of the discussion or intellectual debate from the previous post is called for. This type of question is non-pretentious, intellectually stimulating, and also serves the function of flattering the poster of the comment by highlighting it as insightful or significant.

Comments drive discussion, which drives community, which drives potential consumers to interact with your line of products or services. Questions have a place, which is to challenge users or solicit ideas, but questions disguised in the form of “stealth comments” are a less risky way of generating “good vibe” conversations and fostering a community around your product or service.

Around the year 1600, in Cambridge, England, there was a stable owner named Thomas Hobson. When a prospective customer arrived at his stable to rent a horse, he would not offer the customer his choice of the horses in the stable. Instead, the customer would be offered Hobson’s choice: the sole option of the horse nearest the door, take it or leave it.

In the world of 2012, the common thinking regarding social media marketing is to give the customer a wide range of different options: types of content to receive by email, channels to subscribe to on twitter, or pages on Facebook for different products distributed by a business. We are in a complex digital world, so why should we desire to keep things simple?

In point of fact, most customers favor simplicity in making decisions. Studies show that when faced with an online interface with many buttons, drop-down menus, and options, the user gravitates to the largest and most colorful button, regardless of what its function is.

If a large, colorful, “call-to-action” button is the focus of any user’s experience, all the other information on the web page surrounding is mere peripheral information, and plays a minimal role in the user’s experience of the page, besides to distract him from the main focus. Consider these examples of prominent call-to-action buttons.

Four hundred years ago, an English stable owner had the Arby’s moment that the call-to-action of a stable customer was to obtain a horse. So Hobson cut out all the chaff and pared the experience down to its basic function. And he remains a household name to this day.

The late visionary Steve Jobs also realized this. He ordered the iPhone (and the subsequent iPad) to be designed with only one button, which had the call-to-action of returning the user to the home screen. No matter where you are in any app, the single call-to-action button will quickly and simply take you home. Note how this radical and simple design decision took root in the entire mobile market, such that after the 2007 launch of the iPhone, almost every other mobile device on the market came to look like a clone of the iPhone.

How can you integrate Hobsonian simplicity into your social marketing strategy?

Easy. Just define your priorities in your marketing scheme and create a simple call-to-action for your customers. Do you want them to Like your Facebook, enter a sweepstakes, follow your twitter, or attend an event at your place of business? Make this the entire purpose of the splash page of your site. Make a big, giant, eye catching button linking to that page or action. Give it the 5/5 test: if a five year old cannot figure out the purpose of your social media campaign in five seconds, you have failed.

A real world example: Red Bull’s Facebook strategy. A bunch of colorful arrows leading straight from a Red Bull can to the Like button. And does it work? Red Bull has an obscenely simple call-to-action, backed by creative content and the popular platform of Facebook. These element combine to allow the company to have more than 25 million initial impressions for every post on their Facebook page.

Simplicity in business is a tried-and-true idea, hundreds of years old, and no less revolutionary on today’s internet than at Thomas Hobson’s stable.