Welcome back. This is module two. I'm Greg Jarboe, and in the first module we learned about all the various barriers to your success, at least the traditional ones. And they included finding the right influencers, and figuring out the right engagement tactics and discovering how you're going to measure success in a way that is meaningful to your executives. Okay, that's what we covered so far. But it turns out that there is a missing ingredient. And it's surprising, because people have been doing these surveys for several years, and it keeps disappearing. You know, there is one other absolutely essential ingredient to success, and we're going to cover that in this second module. And in this module we're going to, as you know, we like to start off with a learning objective, we're going to explain why creating content that an influencer would share with your customers, or your prospects, is actually that missing ingredient. It's the fourth element of success. So you not only have to figure out who those influencers are, figure out how you're going to engage them, measure your success correctly. But it turns out there's another key, and the key is content. So this is an interesting little model, but this is the model for why I know there's a missing ingredient. This model actually dates back to 1939. And I know most of you are going to say, 1939, I thought this was influence of marketing, isn't this a modern, up-to-date course? And it's like yes, yes, but it turns out most of what we think we know about the way the media world works goes back to this formula from 1939. In fact, if you took marketing in college, if you saved your textbook, go up to the attic, pull it out, look it up and I'll bet you will find Harold Lasswell's quote in your textbook. It's almost hardwired into the way we see the world. So, this is one of those situations where you need to unlearn what you have learned about how the media world works before you can figure out how influencers fit into it. So I want to start here. This is a key thing you need to unlearn. And I want to give you the back story on this model of communications. This is, again, sort of the standard way we teach in most colleges in most parts of the world how marketing and communications work. This is the formula, and it was developed by Harold Lasswell. Now, Harold was a professor. And, you know, that's good, but he got pulled into a special project in 1939 by no less than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Roosevelt still was trying to keep the United States out of World War II, but he also recognized that the Germans had a secret weapon that he hadn't figured out. And he was a pretty good communicator, he certainly had invented the fireside chats, so he was no novice when it came to this communications game. But the Germans were using something called propaganda, and it seemed to be working marvelously for them. And what Roosevelt was concerned with is, if we get involved in this war, if we get dragged in kicking and screaming, and even though we're trying to stay out of it, [SOUND] they've got something that we don't. They're using it effectively, and we could get creamed. So, how does propaganda work? And so he pulled in Professor Lasswell, who had written a book on propaganda after World War I. And he gave him a job, a government job. I know, that sounds embarrassing these days. But he put Professor Lasswell in the Library of Congress. That's where no reporter in their right mind would go there looking for a secret committee to try to figure out how the Germans were using propaganda so effectively. That's where Lasswell did his work. And in 1939, all those many years ago, he cracked the code. And he came back, Mr. President, here's how propaganda works. It's actually pretty simple sentence. Why? When you're managing executives you've gotta simplify things, they like things kept short. And he says, it works this way, it's who says what in which channel to whom, with what effect? That's the magic sentence. In fact, that's been called one of the earliest and most influential communication models that is still being taught in American and other colleges around the world today. Who says what in which channel to whom, with what effect? Now. One of the people who was on Lasswell's committee was a fellow named William Paley. He went on to head up CBS Television in the late 40s and early 50s. He's the one who took this model and actually, quote, made it real, and basically established CBS's the Tiffany Network in television. So that's one of the reasons why you find this formula in the textbooks, it had that kind of influence. But let's go back and think about this for a second. Lasswell was asked to figure out propaganda worked, and his formula was actually a government secret and it wasn't declassified until 1948. And Lasswell was finally given permission to publish it. And he understood that if he published, here's how propaganda works, there wasn't going to be much of a market for that. So he took propaganda out and he put communications in, and here's how communications works. And the answer is, a certain kind of communications works this way. Propaganda works this way. One way communication works this way. If you can broadcast your message in a solo direction, hit your audience in a sort of a Pavlovian way until they salivate when you ring the bell, that's how communication works. But it turns out there was other research being done at the very same time.
