Archive for the ‘Book Summaries’ Category

Thank You for Listening by Marc Wong

Saturday, June 29th, 2013

Thank You for Listening: Gain Influence & Improve Relationships, Better Listening in Eight Steps by Marc Wong (©2012) will help you learn how to put someone else’s speaking, thinking, and feeling needs ahead of your own. By so doing, you will build trust, earn respect, and gain influence. Marc’s eight steps are practical, and the book is an enjoyable read. Click the icon at the bottom of any page to purchase this fine book.

That’s Special: A Survival Guide to Teaching by Dan Henderson

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015

That’s Special: A Survival Guide to Teaching by Dan Henderson tells the story of a special education teacher who is still surviving in spite of some pretty wacky student behaviors he has faced along the way. Dan follows real stories in each chapter from this career with tools that other teachers can use to survive in difficult situations. If you click at the bottom of the page and buy the book, 10% will go back to local schools.

Still Surviving

When educators tell real stories of what students do and how they deal with it, they are often told by the listener that they should write a book. Dan Henderson is one of those teachers who followed through. In addition to helping rookie and veteran teachers alike, this book will help parents understand what teachers have to deal with when faced by troubled students. In Dan’s case he was given the most troubled and thanks to his persistence and some trial and error, he is still surviving.
The special children Dan deals with are the one’s who have not fully accepted social behavioral norms. While most are eventually classified for special education services, some are not. The trick is to socialize these students so they can learn and prosper rather than dropping out or being suspended. While Dan’s experience is limited to elementary school, I can assure you that much of it certainly applies to older students as well.
Each of the ten chapters starts with a real story about a student Dan has worked with. While they can tear at your heart, Dan tries to see the humorous sides of their stories. When I dealt with difficult kids I tended to do the same thing, and I know it helped me survive. I can fully relate to Dan’s stories as I was a principal in a school where 20% of the students received special education services and many exhibited behaviors that would make them candidates for this book. Following the stories, Dan offers what he calls tools. This is advice will help teachers deal with and prevent the kind of behaviors described in his stories as they promote their own sanity and survival.

The Tools

Tool 1 Conduct a student survey. This is perhaps my favorite tool. It suggests that you start the year by conducting a student survey. The goal is to find out as much as you can about a student like their interests, what they like about school, and what they don’t like. If possible find out what makes them angry and how they calm themselves down. Dan offers some specific questions you can use.
Tool 2: Create a Behavior Management System. Dan recommends that rather than taking something away that you refuse to give them something. For these kids it is essential to take breaks that feature physical movement. (Doug: I’ve posted many pieces of advice along this same line.) Like others, Dan knows that exercise will improve mental performance. When you threaten consequences, you must follow through, but you also need to give kids a chance to redeem themselves. This allows a chance for self-regulation. Try to reinforce positive behavior and let students know that what they do is their choice.
Tool 3: Build Routines and Respond to Needs. Dan believes that routines are important for the students he serves. He also has a system, which includes a request box, that allows students to let him know what their needs are. He even has an emergency signal for students to use. Needless to say, the routine allows for lots of movement and brain breaks and this type of student needs routines.
Tool 4: Positive Reinforcement: Here Dan gives eight methods he uses. You might not agree with all of them, but I’m sure you will find some good ideas here.
Tool 5: Tracking Data: Teachers need to keep track of what students know and can do. Dan recommends pretests so you know where students are starting. Your data sheets should be organized by standards. There is no mention of state test data here which makes sense as I don’t find it very useful.

More Tools

Tool 6: Creating Centers or Stations: Centers allow kids to move and can be rigged to differentiate instruction. They also allow more time for individual and small group instruction. Technology can be involved here with computer activities, assessment, and direct instruction via videos.
Tool 7: Differentiate Your Instruction: This is the holy grail for teachers. Ideally each student gets instruction at their own level. In addition to his centers, Dan gives many ideas here about how to reach this goal including multiple lesson plans or multiple approaches within the same lesson.
Tool 8: Check for Understanding: If you lose a student early on, the rest of what you do is not likely to succeed. As you find out which students understand each item, it will inform your efforts to differentiate as you move forward. It is also necessary to know which students have the necessary prerequisite skills and knowledge.
Tool 9: Higher-Order Thinking: Just because students have a special education tag doesn’t mean they can’t engage in real thinking. Open-ended questions can help. Projects can elicit thinking as well. In some cases letting students to work on projects together works.
Tool 10: Make Your Lessons Fun! Look for good learning games and try to inject music when possible. Real-world connections can also make things fun and interesting. Make sure that students believe that their intelligence is not fixed and that you care about them personally. Be sure that the students’ best work is on display in school and on the classroom blog.

Reflections

If you were considering a career in teaching special education students and read Dan’s stories, you might think twice. After reading about his tools, however, you should see how it can be a rewarding option thanks to his tools and your own hard work and caring. If you know anyone working with these types of students or considering it, see that they get a copy of this book.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood I Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Anxious
The Anxious Generation: Hoe the Great rewiring of Childhood I Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt warns of the harm done to children who live in a phone-based world with limited opportunity to play and connect with the real world. There is serious research to support banning phones in schools and keeping kids off of social media until they turn 16. This could well be the most important book I have summarized out of well over 200. Every principal, teacher, and parent needs to read it.

Introduction<: Growing Up on Mars

Jonathan uses the analogy of letting your kid live on Mars or giving them a smart phone with limited or no constraints. The people of generation Z (born after 1995) are at ground zero for increased mental health problems caused by overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world.
While there wasn’t research when the tech industry foisted technology on this generation, we have it now. It shows that kids with smart phones are more depressed and depression increases with more use. It’s more harmful for girls who favor social media, but it is also a problem for boys who get lost in games and porn. Childhood has gone from play-based to phone-based.

Part 1: Tidal Wave – 1. The Surge of Suffering

In 2010 the iPhone 4 was introduced, the first cellphone with a front-facing camera. The Android version followed the same year. That year, the Instagram app was introduced. Although it was popular, it took off when Facebook bought it in 2012. The years from 2010 to 2015 are considered to be, by the author, as the years of the Great Rewiring of Childhood.
It was these years when rates of anxiety, depression, self-harming, and suicide increased from 67% to 134%. Anxiety happens when you perceive threats. This is normal. What isn’t normal is perceiving many threats that aren’t real. Depression is marked by sadness and not feeling pleasure. These are things that seem to happen to kids when they have constant access to the Internet.

Part 2: The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood – 2. What Children Need to Do in Childhood

Human children grow quickly until about two years and they grow slowly until puberty. The brain is about 90% of its final size by age five. Then it spends a lot of time making new connections and losing old ones. Play is children’s work. Children deprived of play can come out socially, emotionally, and cognitively impaired. When adults are involved, play is less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Experience, not information is the key to emotional development.
Unstructured time with friends plummeted when students moved from basic phones to Internet phones. Parent distraction with their phones interferes with the bond between parent and child. Synchronous activities are essential for development. Social media draws students into endless hours of asynchronous communication. Phone-based activity can seem more like work than play. Using social media shapes children to the culture of the sites they visit. Conformist bias motivates children to copy what they see and prestige is gained by people who pile up the most likes.

3. Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play

Since the 1990s, parents have tended to overprotect children from the real world and under-protect children from the online world where more dangers lurk. Human evolution has been shaped by two behavior modes. The discover mode is one where you detect opportunities and explore them. The defend mode features identifying threats and finding ways to escape them. The more time a child spends in the discover mode the happier and more sociable they will be. By overprotecting kids we doom them to lots of time in the defend mode.
Beginning with Gen-Z, children were given less freedom including outside play. When they started showing up on campus in 2014 counseling centers were overwhelmed as students grew up spending too much time in defense mode. They hadn’t learned to deal with stress so they weren’t very strong. They lacked the risky play that would keep them in discover mode. We need to keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. They need to expect challenges from the real world. Safety-ism crushes play and the power it has.
(Doug: You won’t learn how to deal with conflict and frustration without experience.)

The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life by Anya Kamenetz

Monday, March 12th, 2018

The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life by Anya Kamenetz reviews the scant research on the subject and provides others’ stories and her own experience and advice. In short, she advises you to enjoy screens not too much and mostly together with your family. Parents and educators are well advised to read this book.

Part 1. Kids and Screens – 1. Digital Parenting in the Real World

How worried should we really be about kids and screens? Where is all of this heading, and what should we actually do about it—now, in the “real world,” a phrase that as of the early twenty-first century still has some meaning? These questions have resulted in this book. Anya belongs to the first generation of parents who grew up with the Internet. Now she is raising two members of the first generation growing up with screens literally at their fingertips. For this book, Anya surveyed over 500 parents along with as many experts on the subject that she could find. While real research is lacking, this looks like the best effort to date to define the problem and propose answers.

The best evidence we have currently suggests that if you are functioning well as a family otherwise, there is a huge amount of leeway in the screen radiation your kids can absorb and still do just fine. The children of lower-income, less-educated parents, however, are both more exposed to screens at younger ages and are more subject to a host of other ills. Hypocrisy and inconsistency in boundary-setting makes for confused, sometimes angry kids—and lots of conflict. A better approach is to discover and unleash the joy of screen time with your kids. Particularly when shared, screen time can have meaningful benefits: creative, emotional, and cognitive. In a nutshell, enjoy screens, not too much, and mostly with others.

2. The (Sometimes) Scary Science of Screens

The federal government hasn’t funded media research since 1982, and needless to say, many questions have presented themselves since then. The research on kids and screens is in its toddlerhood at best. It may seem that experts are just as confused as parents. It’s important to note that in order to get published, research tends to focus on the harms, and you can’t randomly assign babies to watch television or not. What’s happening all over the world is a giant experiment, and there is essentially no control group.

The bulk of evidence we have about kids and screens concerns television. That’s all right because children still do more passive video watching than any kind of interaction with screens. Interactive media is different, but is it more harmful or more benign? What further confounds the research is that well-to-do parents are more likely to limit screen time and their kids will probably do fine anyway. Poor kids, however, are more likely to live in homes where the TV is on all the time, even if no one is in the room. Wealthier parents can hire sitters to entertain the child while the TV is off.

Young children are obsessed by repetition. It helps them learn new words and concepts and provides touchstones of predictability within a chaotic and sometimes scary world. Electronic media satisfies this need for repetition. For tweens and teens, electronic media is a lifeline to the experiences they crave most: thrills, a space to explore independently, and 24/7 access to peers. Excessive screen time can interfere with sleep, which is necessary for allowing the brain to repair itself. Kids who give up exercise for screen time are prone to obesity.

3. Emerging Evidence

Now we take up the matter of low probability, high-risk issues. Some of the worst cases of video addiction stop hanging out with friends, stop talking to their families, stop coming downstairs for dinner, even stop going to school. Poor hygiene and obesity are also common. At some point, they become candidates for residency rehab programs like those offered to drug addicts. Reintegration after such programs can also be difficult.

Here are the questions that doctors ask to determine if there is an addiction. 1. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended? 2. How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online? 3. How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend online? 4 How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online? 5 How often do you lose sleep due to Internet use or game playing?

If it is recognized as a stand-alone disorder, it can be covered by health plans and schools may have to treat it as a disability as they increasingly hand every student a laptop. Screen addiction is usually associated with other disorders like Autism, OCD, and ADHD, but so far we don’t know which causes which. Removal of screens, however, has caused symptoms of disorders to lessen in some cases.

No screens at all before age two, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics was first uttered in 1999. The AAP now says that video chat, and other social purposes like looking at family pictures together, is probably okay for children younger than age two. While there is no evidence of harm caused to kids by screen time. the general consensus is that parents should strive for moderation. Two hours a day or less is a common recommendation.

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The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova
Saturday, October 10th, 2020

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova chronicles her journey as a PhD psychologist and journalist into the world of professional poker. She starts with zero knowledge and experience and with the help of mentors and lots of hard work becomes a poker champion. While the framework for this book is the game of poker, each chapter features generalizations that we can all draw on to add quality to our lives.

A Prelude – Las Vegas, July 2017

We start with a story from the World Series of Poker, which is The World Cup, The Masters, and The Super Bowl for poker players. Anyone can enter as long as they put up the $10,000 entry fee. This can be a lifetime dream for many. As play continues Maria’s seat sits empty while the dealer takes the anti for each hand from her piles of chips and tosses her cards into the discard pike known as “the muck.” She is in the bathroom curled up in a fetal position on the floor after barfing her brains out due to eating some bad guacamole. At the time she understood the line between skill and luck. The message is that you can’t calculate for dumb bad luck and you can’t bluff chance.

Ante UP – New York, Late Summer 2016

Here we meet Erik Sidel, one of the top poker players of all time. Maria approaches him to see if he will mentor her for her experiment, which involves seeing if a psychologist with zero knowledge of poker can have success after spending only a year learning the game. Eric knows that most people who get serious about the game come at it thinking a deep knowledge of math is the most important attribute. He knows that a deep understanding of psychology is more important as the necessary math his not that hard to master. He also sees Maria’s language skills as another key attribute. (She is fluent in English and Russian, was fluent in Spanish and French, and can get by in Italian.) Eric accepts the challenge and it’s game on. You don’t play poker, you play the world.

The Birth of a Gambler – Boston, Fall 2016

Life is a gamble. It may not seem like playing poker, but in some sense, much of life features less control than you have as a skilled poker player. Here we have a conversation with Maria’s grandmother (Baba Anna) who is very disappointed that Maria is taking up poker rather than a “real job.” Skilled stock pickers do no better than chance in the long run while professional poker players routinely outplay amateurs. In poker, the best hand doesn’t always win. This sets it apart from other games. The process of betting gets your full attention unlike making a decision where no bet is involved. This allows you to benefit from life’s decisions as well. Accurate probabilistic thinking is rare, but it is necessary for success in poker. Like people who predict the weather and horse races, poker players get immediate feedback and have no one to blame but themselves.

The Art of Losing – New York, Fall 2016

Eric’s step one is to read the poker books by Dan Harrington, cousin to the golfer Padraig Harrington. Next, you need to watch streams with real hands being played by the best players. Sign up for the Run It Once a poker coaching site. Then start playing for real online for tiny stakes that can gradually get bigger. From there you can proceed to small tournaments and then move up to bigger ones. You need a balance between aggressive and conservative playing so that your opponents can’t figure you out. You also need to keep track of everyone’s stack size.

Here we encounter the importance of learning from losing. (Doug: The concept of learning from failure is found in many of the other books I have summarized.) You have to constantly think, analyze, and stay objective. This is hard to do. This means that you never take things personally as you treat triumph and disaster the same. Disaster can bring true objectivity. Eric teaches Maria that there is no certainty, only thought. There are no right answers regarding any situation without a greater context. Self-awareness and self-discipline should be your twin goals.

The Mind of a Strategist – New York, Late Fall 2016

Maria starts practicing online, but in order to do so, she has to take a train from Manhattan to New Jersey as online poker is illegal in New York State. She picks a puppy as her avatar and “psychchic” as her screen name. She describes a hand she loses and finds that she made a mistake by trying to copy a hand Eric had once and acted aggressively so as not to look weak. Time is an issue online and in real tournaments as it is in real life. In both cases, you want to use the time you have to think things through, but not act impulsively as time starts to run out. When playing you want to be the last one to act as that will give you maximum information.

The military analogy applies here. You need to know the enemy and survey the nature of the board in each hand. Like a general, you need to decide just how many of your troops you need to deploy. Everything from a scout to every soldier you have is in play. Your strategy cannot be predetermined. Another analogy is that of a jazz band where once it’s your turn you have to decide what to play.

If you only bet when you have top cards your opponents will figure that out and you won’t win much. You will lose more as you won’t often have top cards. This is why you have to bluff on occasion. Maria tells the story of getting an offer to write an article about what she was doing. She said no several times until she got an offer of $3/word. Like sometimes in poker, she got more out of her hand then she thought she could.

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The Classroom Teacher’s Technology Survival Guide
Friday, June 1st, 2012

The Classroom Teacher’s Technology Survival Guide By Doug Johnson (© 2012, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint: Hoboken, NJ) is for educators who want good teaching, not technology, as the focus of their classroom. The book outlines pragmatic ways all teachers can use computers, the Internet, digital cameras, and other technology tools to enhance professional productivity. Doug offers ways to enhance current practices and create motivating projects. He helps with project assessments, distractions technology may cause, and safe use for all grade levels. He also takes a look into the future and offers many resources for further study. Click this icon below to get at least one copy to pass around the teacher’s room or just get a copy for each teacher at your school to use as part of your technology training program. You won’t be disappointed.

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The Click Moment by Frans Johansson
Friday, August 31st, 2012

The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World by Frans Johnasson ( © 2012, Portfolio/Penguin: New York, NY) will help you to be more prepared when click moments show up. These are somewhat random events that prepared minds can take advantage of to promote success. The great stories he uses as examples serve to make this a most engaging and valuable book. Please consider clicking on the Amazon icon at the bottom of each page as you read my summary.

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The Connected Educator – Book Summary
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, ( © 2012, Solution Tree Press: Bloomington, IN) introduces the concept of Connected Learning Communities as a three-pronged approach to effective professional development. This is valuable resource that all schools need to make available to teachers and teacher support staff. It contains step-by-step instructions, real-life examples, comprehensive research, a detailed glossary, and helpful hashtags and links.

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The Diffusion of Innovation, 5th ed by Everett Rogers
Friday, February 4th, 2022

The Diffusion of Innovation (5th ed) by Everett M. Rogers is THE book for anyone who wants to understand this phenomena. This is the 2003 version, but it is still very current. I used this book a lot when I was doing my dissertation and revisit the concepts via this summary from time to time. This is my longest book summary so it may take more than one sitting to finish it. I think it will be work your time.

Chapter 1 – Elements of Diffusion

Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages is difficult. Therefore, a common problem for individuals and organizations is how to speed up the rate of diffusion of an innovation. Diffusion is a process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. A degree of uncertainty is involved and the process can be planned or spontaneous. It results in one kind of social change and leads to certain consequences.

Element 1

1) The innovation: It is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new. If it seems new, it is an innovation. The adoption process is an information seeking and processing activity in which an individual is motivated to reduce uncertainty about the advantages and disadvantages of an innovation. The characteristics of innovations, as perceived by individuals, help explain their different rates of adoption.
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Element 2

2) Communication Channels: The essence of the diffusion process is the information exchange through which one individual communicates a new idea to others. Mass media channels are usually the most rapid and efficient means of informing an audience. Interpersonal channels involve face-to-face exchanges. A third form involves the interactions between individuals via the Internet.

Element 3

3) Time: The inclusion of time in diffusion research is one of its strengths. The five steps in the process are: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. There are five adopter categories that are time-based. The first adopters are called innovators. They are followed in time by early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards. When the number of adopters is plotted over time, an S-shaped curve results.

Element 4

4) A Social System: This is a set of interrelated units that are engaged in joint problem solving to accomplish a common goal. Social systems have structure that gives regularity and stability to human behavior (norms). It allows one to predict behavior with some degree of accuracy. The communication in a system also has a structure. Knowledge of the system’s structure is necessary if one wishes to study diffusion within the system.

Some History

A series of independent groups started this research in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Each group was invisible to the others and used different approaches. They all, however, found the diffusion followed an S-shaped curve and the innovators had higher socioeconomic status than did later adopters. By the late 1960’s the independent groups had come together as shown by the increase in cross-tradition citations.

Gabriel Tarde

Tarde was a French lawyer and judge around 1900. He observed that for every ten new ideas that spread, ninety will be forgotten. He also observed that the rate of imitation usually followed an S-shaped curve and that the takeoff in the curve begins to occur when the opinion leaders in a system use a new idea. Forty years later his observations were put to the test by empirical research.

The Nine Major Diffusion Research Traditions

1) Anthropology – The study of how tribes or villages use technological ideas such as the steel ax, horses, and boiling water.

2) Rural Sociology – The study of how farmers in rural communities adopt agricultural ideas such as weed sprays, hybrid seed, and fertilizers.

3) Education – The study of school systems, teachers, or administrators as they adopt teaching/learning innovations like kindergarten, modern math, programmed instruction, and team teaching.

4) Public Health and Medical Sociology – The study of individuals or organizations such as hospitals and health departments as they adopt medical and health ideas like drugs, vaccinations, family-planning, and AIDS prevention.

5) Communication – The study of individuals and organizations as they adopt technological innovations and new communications technology.

6) Marketing and Management – They study of individual consumers as they adopt new products.

7) Geography – The study of individuals and organizations as they adopt technological innovations.

8) General Sociology – The study of individuals and other units as they adopt a wide variety of ideas.

9) Early Sociology – The study of communities or individuals as they adopt things like city manager government, postage stamps, and ham radios.

Other traditions include economics, public administration, political science, psychology, industrial engineering, statistics, and others.

A Word About Education

Unlike some fields, innovations adopted by education are done so by organizations rather than individuals. Early studies were carried out by Paul Mort at Columbia University. He found that the best single predictor of innovativeness was expenditure per student. The stereotype of the rich suburban school as highly innovative was largely confirmed. Mort found that considerable time lags were required. It took kindergartens about 50 years to be completely adopted. Driver training needed only 18 years while modern math needed only 5 years. Both were promoted by change agencies. The insurance companies and auto manufacturers in the case of driver training and the National Science Foundation for modern math.

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The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith
Saturday, December 29th, 2012

The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith with Carlye Adler, (©2010, Jossey-Bass: SanFrancisco, CA). will help you harness the power of social media to achieve a single, focused, concrete goal. The authors also hope you will be inspired to use social media for social good. Think of this as your playbook for moving your cause from awareness to action. To be successful, you must translate your passion into a powerful story that generates contagious energy. Jennifer and Andy draw on abundant psychological research to show you how to do this. They also provide many inspiring stories to make their points and inspire their audience. Click the icon at the bottom of any page to purchase this book.

Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith

They are a married couple. Jennifer is a Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business where she teaches a course on social media. Andy is a principal of Vonavona Ventures, where he advises on marketing, customer strategy, and operations. The book also contains a forward by Chip Heath, coauthor of Made to Stick, and Switch.
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The Dragonfly Model

The Dragonfly Effect, like the dragonfly, relies on four wings that achieve great results when they work together. It starts with focus. This is where you identify a concrete measurable goal. Next you grab attention by telling a personal story with unexpected, visceral, and visual aspects. Then you engage, which is where you empower your audience to care enough to want to do something. Finally, you enable and empower others to take action. To make action easier, you must prototype, deploy, and continuously tweak your approach towards making your audience team members.

Wing 1 – Focus – The HATCH Principals

There are five design principles associated with the focus wing. First is humanistic. You first need to understand who your audience is. Listen, observe, ask questions, and empathize. Second is to make your goal actionable by breaking long-term goals into a number of short-term goals that are small, actionable, and measurable. Third is to make a goal testable. You need to measure progress and success somehow. Fourth is clarity. Goals need to be highly specific. Failures often involve goals that are vague, conflicting, or too numerous. The final principle is happiness. Your goal must be personally meaningful. The prospect of happiness will serve to motivate.

Wing 2 – Grab Attention – How to Stick Out

Aaker and Smith suggest four design principles for grabbing attention. First is get personal. This can be a personal hook, using one’s name, or tagging someone’s picture. Second is to deliver the unexpected. The element of surprise can result in viral behavior, and you need to be original. Third is to visualize your message. Pictures trump words in terms of grabbing attention. You can juxtapose two images, combine images, or replace one with another. Finally you want to make a visceral connection. Do what you can to trigger the senses of sight, sound, hearing, or taste. Use music to tap emotions.

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