Sally Hogshead: Speaking Reel from Sally Hogshead on Vimeo.

Sally sits down with social media icon Jason Falls to explore persuasive messages, and learns how Twitter is changing the way we communicate.

Sally sits for a chat with Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer to find out how Twitter might be helping us communicate better.

Your brain is starting to think a goldfish. Why? Find out in our latest juicy Slideshare.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with New York Times bestselling author Chris Brogan to talk about what fascinates him.

Filmed live outside the #UnGeeked conference in Milwaukee. (Woot woot!)

Most companies want to be loved: they want passionate customers, enthusiastic vendors, devoted partners, and loyal employees. Yet, very few companies actually are loved. Most companies are tolerated at best, and at worst, ignored.

Why? Most companies are too forgettable to be loved. They’re too vanilla, too dough-boy, too milquetoast, too watered-down (or any other kitchen metaphor you prefer).

If you want your company to have passionately devoted customers, partners, and employees, then you need to inspire strong emotions. Once you inspire strong emotions, you can convince people to love your brand—and, eventually you’ll also get a few haters, critics, and naysayers.

Let me say something that might be rather shocking: it’s okay to have a few people hate your brand. It’s necessary, even. If you’re not eliciting a negative response from someone, then you’re probably not very compelling to anyone.

In other words, folks, get out of the middle of the road.

Avid fans may be a small slice of your overall base, but they’ll do much your marketing work for you. They’ll post content online, sure, but they’ll also buy your products, buy your stock, talk about you with their peers, and work harder to spread your brand message.

If your company wants to develop a stronger emotional bond with others—if you’re interested new business, higher sales, and better talent—then the goal is not to avoid controversy and passion, but to avoid creating legions of people who simply don’t care.

In the Milken Conference session, “Developing Your Brand for Online and Mobile Audiences,” the panel briefly touched on how the importance of online content, especially content posted by consumers themselves. Posting content is a good measure of energy around a brand, because it takes effort; this content can take many forms: commentary, praise, video, tweets, or random blog chatter. But in any case, consumer-generated content is a hallmark of high participation with a brand.

When describing a minor detail about online content, the panelists actually made a very eloquently point, something far more significant than uploading videos or commenting on a Facebook fan page. And this is the matter of lovers, haters, and those in the middle:

This first day of the Milken Conference was filled with a daunting array of success symbols: black Armani suits and black Town Cars, entourages of assistants, and the CEO paparazzi (whose flashes exploded in glittering unison each time a session began).

Yet within all the discussion of growth, leadership, and innovation, there was another omnipresent topic hidden into the discussion, one that remained largely ignored, even as it lurked in the corners of every CEO’s mind. The topic was hinted at, skirted around, and implied. Yet rarely was it actually mentioned by name.

This, my friends, is the topic of failure.

At a conference by and for some of the world’s most extraordinary thinkers, leaders, and winners, the general thematic focus was success. Yet perhaps a more valuable topic to explore might be the opposite: the pursuits gone horribly wrong. The bungled policies and mangled balance sheets. The mistaken hires and botched turn-arounds. The screwups so royally idiotic that they drove an entire Board of Directors to collectively gasp in disbelief.

Perhaps no one wants to be the buzzkill, and delve into the precarious economic precipice that so many small businesses perch atop right now. We don’t need to study failure when so many newspaper headlines— so many of our peers—seem to teach us daily about the topic. Yet a hard look at failure, and lessons therein, could just be the session we all need right now to attend.

What lessons on failure might we learn and apply from Day One of the Milken Conference?

1. Sometimes, the most powerful catalyst for success is failure.

To understand why failure ultimately leads to success within a system, let’s take a look at the parenting theory of “natural consequences.”

As children, we learn best by naturally and directly experiencing consequences of our actions. For instance, once you touch a hot stove, you learn not to touch hot stoves in the future. It’s painful, yes, but also necessary to grow more intelligent in adapting to a changing environment.

In a session named “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” Carly Fiorina, Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate, California and former CEO, Hewlett-Packard, described the upside of failure within a system. “This economy has been built on risk-taking and innovation. There will be a bunch of ideas that fail.” Fiorina described the necessary failures of previous setbacks, pointing to previous examples of concentrated industries going through very difficult times, such as the dot-com bust, in which there were “thousands upon thousands of lost jobs in one concentrated area, causing great hardship. There was no government bailout. And the industry emerged stronger than ever.”

Fiorina also cited how virtually the entire airline industry had to go bankrupt, with countless employees, supply chain departments. Yet the companies went bankrupt, they renegotiated contracts, and emerged stronger and better.”

Consequences—even failures—help us grow stronger in our decision-making as a whole.

2. Fail successfully.

Not all failures are created equally. Ron Bloom, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department, and White House Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy, touched on this point. Previously, “we didn’t have ability to fail a bank in a controlled way.” And this was the dilemma facing us with bail-outs. “We had no other way to deal with failed institutions other than to nationalize them. Or to completely let them go into uncontrolled failure (such as Lehman Bros). Given the hands that both parties had, we worked way through in reasonable way.”

3. Expect, and prepare, for personal failures.

As small businesses, we must be supported in innovation and growth, in order for the whole system to succeed. As CEOs, we must be prepared to fail occasionally on an individual level, in order for the company to innovate. Otherwise, we play it so safe that we kill any chance of innovation within our companies.

On a personal level, our personal fear of failure can often work spectacularly against us. We tend to think that, as with everything else, we can pull ourselves out. Achievers become clinically depressed far more so than the average worker, because we expect so much more of ourselves.

Failure isn’t easy.

But greatness isn’t easy, either. It’s not supposed to be easy. That’s what makes it worth doing.

[This article published as a "live blog" from the Milken Conference by Vistage on April 27, 2010]

The most valuable tool in closing a sale? Trust. (No contest.) But trust doesn’t come cheap. Even with years of dedicated consistency, trust is tough to earn, and easy to lose.

In my book, I describe 7 different universal forms of persuasion. Trust is one, of course, but not the only one. What’s a faster way to attract customers?

Meet lust: an instant form of attraction.

Once you successfully add lust to a pitch, customers pay a higher price point (my research shows that in some cases, twice as much). They’re also more willing to go out of their way to obtain your product, more enthusiastic in talking with colleagues about it, and best of all, more likely to reject your competitors.

Trust retains customer relationships over the long-term. Lust, on the other hand, helps you captivate them in the first place. Care to know how to add this zing of attraction to your sales?

Three ways to turn “sorta-kinda-maybe” into “absolutely-positively-yes”

1. Make the Ordinary More Emotional

Over time, a straightforward pitch can become stale. A competitive claim can feel cold. Even the most trusted process can begin to seem, wellyawwwwn! a little boring. But when you bring a jolt of creativity to a presentation, or inject a playful wink into your marketing, you’re creating an instant emotional connection. You’re lowering barriers of resistance, increasing your influence, and allowing your prospect to absorb your message.

2. Add warmth

Do you know how powerfully a smile can shift a conversation? Even subtle cues can turn common meetings into persuasive experiences. Real estate professionals often use sensory cues such as baking bread or brewing coffee when showing a home to buyers, because these nostalgic scents cue unconscious memories for many buyers. A brilliant combination of both trust and lust.

Use trust to decide what you say. Use lust to improve how you say it.

3. Create “Lustomers”

What happens when you turn a cold prospect into an “I gotta have it” sale?  You’ve created a “lustomer” – a customer who lusts for your product or service. The more passionately someone feels about you and your product, the more successfully you’ve transformed a customer into a lustomer.

You’ve been a lustomer before, probably without even realizing it. Think of those times when you’ve been excited about making some particular purchase a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, tickets to a basketball game, or even a sportscar. (For me, it’s an Apple iPad. I’m practically drooling to buy it.) In these situations, we’re no longer just regular customers, and the sale is no longer just a regular transaction. Thanks to lust.

What about you? Are you currently using trust in your sales? Or lust? Or one of the other personality triggers? I developed an online test to measure your fascination, the F Score personality test, to reveal what naturally makes you most persuasive.

Trust still reigns supreme. Always will. But while trust drives long-term relationships, lust drives them straight to your door.

[This article by Sally Hogshead, published by Jeffrey Gitomer in his weekly Sales Caffeine on April 20, 2010]