You turn and look when someone calls your name. Why? Messages that metaphorically call out your name cultivate feelings of personal relevance. And that is more likely to lead to engagement and behavior change. What is the metaphorical equivalent of calling someone's name with social media? Tagging is one mechanism. Take the campaign that the Gift of Life donor program, an East Coast–based organ and tissue donor program, used to promote its Facebook page. The organization had a camera crew of volunteers and staffers at its big annual fundraiser, the Dash for Organ & Tissue Donor Awareness. They took photos of supporters holding signs with facts about their organization and organ donation. The crew then gave each person a sticker with information about how to find the photos on Facebook. Participants went to Facebook, became fans of the page, and tagged themselves in the photos. Every photo they tagged appeared in their news feed, which would be seen by all their friends, people who presumably would share similar interests. It worked incredibly fast: page views jumped from 11 to 800 overnight.

Facebook is a powerful medium for fostering—and continuing—a personal connection. One organization that does this particularly well is the Somaly Mam Foundation, a nonprofit that helps survivors of sexual slavery. The organization, which supports rescue, shelter, and rehabilitation programs across Southeast Asia, where the trafficking of women and girls—some as young as five—is widespread practice, was founded by Somaly Mam, an activist and a survivor. Without Somaly, this cause could have been relegated to a faceless issue—one that feels distant, difficult to even imagine. However, through social media, Somaly, who lives in Cambodia, has reduced the distance (physical and otherwise) between her and the rest of the world. Through Facebook, Somaly interacts with individuals all over the world, responding to comments on the page and providing personal insights from the perspective of the girls in Cambodia. The personal interaction builds an emotional connection between Somaly and those who follow her work.

Note that eliciting emotion is vital to crafting personally relevant messages. Think of emotionally charged images that grab your attention—for example, any one of the images of the Twin Towers falling on 9/11. A large part of our response is due to our wiring. Brain-imaging studies reveal that when people are shown emotionally intense pictures, they are more stimulated than if shown emotionally neutral pictures,^[78] and they spend more time looking at them.

Whether you're selling shoes or soliciting donations for your favorite nonprofit, employing visuals, words, or concepts that personally resonate with potential customers or contributors will make them care about your effort. One of the most universal "hooks" that resonates with people is the simple matter of how they spend their time. By referencing time, marketers have found that they can tap into more favorable attitudes—and sell more.^[79]

We put this theory to the test with C&D's Lemonade Stand. With the able assistance of our sons, Cooper and Devon, we experimented with how to best engage customers using three different signs. The first sign read "Spend a little time and enjoy C&D's lemonade." The second read, "Spend a little money and enjoy C&D's lemonade." The third sign was neutral, simply saying, "Enjoy C&D's lemonade." Only one sign was displayed at a time, and customers were given the option of paying whatever they wanted for each glass of lemonade. When the first sign—the sign emphasizing time—was displayed, twice as many passersby noticed the stand and bought lemonade. They also paid twice as much as when the money sign was displayed. Simple and subtle rewording led to more people stopping and looking, twice the conversion rate at twice the average price, yielding four times the revenue.

One of our favorite real-world examples of the power of the Time-Ask Effect comes from the software industry's Mozilla Foundation, a community built almost entirely around donated time.^[80] Dedicated to the idea that the Internet is a public resource, Mozilla uses a collaborative and transparent process to nurture a global community of volunteer developers who build and enhance open-source products, such as the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client. They don't ask for money as much as they ask for time. Mozilla's invitations to join the community and donate time catch people's attention and feel more personal; volunteers and employees consistently talk about the degree to which Mozilla speaks to them—uniquely. The concept of personal time investment has yielded a community of deeply loyal users. In addition, the Firefox browser is widely considered to be more secure and have fewer bugs than the Microsoft product—a fact that is largely credited to the dedication of its huge network of professional and amateur testers, who pore over the computer code to detect and address problems.

In an overmessaged world with overwhelmed subjects, your message must surprise. So why are so many of the techniques used by marketers, by definition, formulaic? Too often strategies and tactics are mimicked in a predictable way. Such retread strategies are more likely to fail. Something is new and original, and thus attention getting, only the first time you hear it. Why only the first time? Because humans are biologically wired to be attuned to surprise. Researchers such as Emmanuel Donchin have identified a brain-wave pattern called P300 that occurs when the human brain notices something surprising or something that grabs attention.^[81]

The element of surprise in marketing has been particularly effective in influencing viral behavior. In a study that analyzed successful and global viral marketing campaigns, researchers discovered that surprise was the dominant emotion identified by consumers within each campaign.^[83]

You need to be original to grab attention. As Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, argues: "The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And once that remarkable thing is taken—it's no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.... You can't be remarkable by following someone else who's remarkable."^[84] You need to develop a metaphorical purple cow, a cow that looks different enough from all the other cows in the pasture to surprise passersby lulled by the sameness of black and white. Think of what differentiates Sam Adams beer from Budweiser, or Yamaha (electric keyboards) from conventional pianos. Further, Godin layers on a need to focus on distinctive "original" niche audiences. "The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That's broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out."^[85] Bob Sutton, author of Weird Ideas That Work, argues that one mechanism is simply to reverse the rules; observe what others do—and then do the opposite.

Consider Coke. In 2009 the company was looking for a new way to connect to young consumers. Spending on traditional media or Super Bowl ads would be predictable. Instead they veered far from what could have been anticipated and delivered "The Happiness Machine." Just before final exams, Coke installed a vending machine in a university cafeteria, but instead of dispensing normal sodas, the machine dispensed unexpected surprises. When a student paid for one Coke, she got many Cokes ... and then got other treats as well: flowers, a pizza, balloon animals, and even a ten-foot-long sandwich.

The students in the cafeteria were delighted by the surprises, and as they shared the treats with fellow students, the good will was tangible. Coke posted a video on YouTube and advertised it with a single tweet ("Would you like a Coca-Cola Happiness Machine? Share the happiness ... share the video. http://CokeURL.com/HappinesMachine"). Within two weeks, the video had been watched 2 million times. Although traditional Coke ads, such as those placed on American Idol, would reach a larger audience, Coke's initial data suggest that the Happiness Machine has had a much more meaningful impact with consumers. Coke spent less than $50,000 on the video and proved the power of surprise as a tool to establishing a deep emotional connection.^[86] One student responded, "I want to give it a hug!" In the words of another: "Thank you Coke."

Show, don't tell. Don't underestimate the importance of your visual identity. As a species, we remember 85 to 90 percent of what we see, but less than 15 percent of what we hear.^[87]

When it comes to social judgments, physical characteristics often determine whether we notice—and they shape our impressions.^[88] Baby-faced people are thought of as honest, warm, and more approachable.^[89] People with masculine features (large jaws, prominent brow ridges) are perceived to be more dominant.^[90] What is your product or campaign's "physical appearance"? Consider Apple's white iPod earbuds. Prior to the iPod, nearly all earbuds were black. White earbuds not only made the iPod stand out but also may have helped create a perception that more individuals owned iPods than actually did, as distinctiveness can create the impression that something is bigger than it is^[92] or more widely adopted than it is.^[93] And if the friends and acquaintances of iPod's target customer all appeared to have invested in iPods, that consumer might think it worth considering as well, or so Apple designers hoped.

One example of a campaign that successfully relies on visual images to conjure up a spectrum of strong emotions is Rock the Vote, whose mission is to engage and build the political power of young people in order to spark progressive change. Rock the Vote had been around since 1992, but didn't achieve explosive growth until social media offered it a means of direct communication with college-age unregistered voters. In its initial year, it registered 350,000 young people; in 2008, by leveraging an online, mobile, and grassroots outreach, it massively grew that number to more than 2.6 million.

Just how did Rock the Vote do it? The organizers created a viral campaign by utilizing graphic (fear-based) images to portray such issues as rape, abortion, gun control, and capital punishment. The goal: to grab attention and shock youth into voting. The campaign has achieved staggering results, including running the largest youth voter registration drive in history in 2008. The organization's volunteers, staff, and partners crossed the country (sixteen states, twenty-three artists, one hundred stops, fifteen thousand miles) in colorful buses to promote voter registration, education, early voting, and action. Some 251,000 voters signed up for its mobile activist list, 1.6 million joined its email list, and 5.7 million visited its website. The impact? Some 22 million eighteen-to twenty-nine-year-olds—more than ever before in U.S. history—voted in 2008.^[94]

Or consider Nike, who partnered with (RED) to launch the (RED) laces campaign on World AIDS day. Nike created eye-catching (RED) shoelaces, donating 100 percent of the sale proceeds to fight AIDS. Working with Twitter, the company came up with creative ways to promote the movement, including turning red the text of all tweets that included the hashtag #red or #laceupsavelives. To ignite the Twitter community, Nike enlisted social influencers—including Serena Williams, John Legend, Ashton Kutcher, and Chris Rock, among others—to tweet or retweet an item with those hashtags. Within one day, they reached over ten million people with their message, turned more than half a million tweets red through the use of the promotion's hashtags, and made Worlds AIDS day a top five global trending topic on Twitter, driving sales of the (RED) laces and ensuring further reach well beyond the followers of a particular set of influencers.

Precisely because the advertising landscape is so cluttered and it's so difficult to grab anyone's attention, marketers have been playing with images to surprise, startle, and occasionally shock their audiences. This effort takes a number of different forms. For years, researchers have theorized that people interpret visual images in ways that transcend the literal picture.^[95] This tendency of people to view images as symbolic was successfully exploited by an earlier series of Apple advertisements, Think Different, in which icons of artistic creativity and innovation—Albert Einstein, Joan Baez, and Pablo Picasso, among others—were meant to suggest that anyone who used Apple products would find themselves in the same illustrious company. MasterCard's Priceless campaign does much the same, by presenting images of life experiences that money can't buy.

Researchers attempting to analyze the effectiveness of visual advertisements found that the visual techniques used fell into three categories. Juxtaposition consists of two different images next to each other, fusion combines two separate images, and replacement refers to using an image to evoke another image in the mind of the audience.^[96] Replacement is the most complex and effective form of this visual shorthand, which is designed to grab attention and thus persuade. One classic replacement ad, used in the 1980s, depicted an ill-seeming, debauched-looking middle-aged man with the caption "Smoking is very glamorous." The absent image it was supposed to evoke, of course, was that of a beautiful young man or woman—the kind of man or woman typically found in a smoking advertisement.

The case for including images is compelling. In one study, D. L. Nelson showed that pictures and words hold different places in memory and that pictures trump words in terms of grabbing attention because they're composed of lines and curves that are more complex, and therefore distinctive, than the lines and curves that compose words.^[97] Along similar lines, a study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that in presentations, when information is conveyed orally, people retain only 10 percent of the content. But when a presentation includes visuals and words, the number increases to 50 percent.^[98]

All this demonstrates that attaching your message to powerful visual images gives your audience the ability to think in a deeper manner about your message, about how it relates to them personally. What visual images do you own?

Design your campaign with the primitive brain in mind. You're likely already familiar with the attention-grabbing power of sensory-based images.

A number of top brands have created marketing campaigns based on concepts that have evoked one or more of the senses, including Absolut Vodka, Starbucks, and the Four Seasons Hotel chain.^[99] Just think about color: Lance Armstrong owns yellow; Coke owns red; Breast Cancer, pink. Each of these colors not only grabs your attention but makes your visual experience with the brand that much more memorable.

Scents also have a powerful role to play in grabbing attention. In one experiment, college students were asked to examine one of two types of brand-name pencils, one that was unscented or one that smelled like tea tree oil. Two weeks later, the average student could not remember a single attribute of the scentless pencil, but remembered more than three attributes of the scented pencils.^[100]

Sound—and in particular music—is another critical tool. Although much has been said and done to tap the power of sound (think Intel chime) or music (think YouTube videos that you share with friends), less is known about why certain music grabs attention. Research from Stanford suggests that, surprisingly, it may not be the type of music you use for your campaign or brand that grabs attention, as much as it is the pace of the music and whether changes in music are worked in. The research team demonstrated that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions, and updating the event in memory.^[101] Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements when seemingly nothing was happening. When the expected progression of music doesn't occur—that's when the brain starts paying attention. So don't just include sound and music—consider how you are using those tools to make a visceral connection.