Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday

[joshua]

The basic premise of this book is that blogs now drive our media cycle. TV and radio used to fill their broadcasts with newspaper headlines, today they repeat what they hear on blogs. Even blogs broadcast what they hear on other blogs. If something gets printed enough times without being challenged it becomes fact.

The best strategy for creating news is called ‘Trading up the chain’. Trading up the chain involves spawning a story in a number of local blogs and news outlets. before informing mid size blogs about the news. If you link to numerous smaller publications mid size blogs will repeat the news. If enough mid size blogs start to write about a story then it will catch the attention of larger blogs and the story will start to gain its own momentum.

You can encourage this reaction by driving paid traffic to smaller blogs and then informing the mod size blogs about the abnormal traffic spikes related to the story. You can report the story as a number of disconnected anonymous tipsters. you can start and fuel controversial discussion in comment sections with fake profiles of both in the discussion. You can also take news related to your story and advertise it directly at your intended bloggers (through , say, facebook) to bloat the perceived importance of your story.

The bottom line is that bloggers are easy to exploit because bloggers don’t make much money. Critics call blogging “digital sweatshops” for a good reason. They are expected to churn out an incredible amount of content because they get paid in relation to the amount of traffic they generate.

Bribing a blogger with free products, gifts and advertising deals works but dangling a controversial story in front of them is better because it doesn’t leave a paper trail.

If you want to sell a blogger on a story it is critical that you tell them exactly what they want to hear. Nobody has the time -or the motivation- to vet media sources anymore. You just have to make give them something that will spread and make sure they understand why it will spread. This means distorting the news, pandering to extremes and leaving out important information that will make the story less digestible.

The Wharton School conducted a study on Virality that concluded - “The most powerful predictor of vitality is how much anger an article evokes.”. Articles that offend peoples sensibilities are almost twice as likely to get shared than ones that just make them laugh.

Other key tips include:

Deliberately leaving out details when passing on facts so that bloggers are encouraged speculate.

Using Rhetorical questions to say what you want. “Is donald trump a rapist?” (It’s a question, not an accusation, see.)

Linking your stories to trending topics and Most read/Most Popular lists. Connect your story to a celebrity, to a search-engine friendly term and, if you can, alway show them that other blogs are covering the topic.

Telling bloggers you will give them an “exclusive” and they will rush to publish it. You can do this to multiple bloggers and it makes no difference. If you can sell it as leaked or confidential news, even better.

And finally, change information on wikipedia and then refer to it as a credible source. Most of the time bloggers will treat this as a credible source.

[Zannie]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts in your review