Acronym

We're going to jump right into this week's roundup with a quick look outside the association sector with two posts in the world of social psychology, a personal favorite of mine.

I'm going to start with the Psyblog and it's post on "3 Universal Goals to Influence People." In associations, power, even at the top, is widely distributed. The ability to influence others is crucial. To complement that, I jump to David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart blog, where he pulls on a thread in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and talks about price anchors. He's trying to educate consumers. From an association standpoint, you should consider what kind of anchors you are using with your members, and are they appropriate.

And before we jump to some of the excellent conversations happening in the association blogosphere (does anybody use that term anymore?), I wanted to call attention to the fun graphic in The Cosmonauts blog that tells you what your font choice says about you.

From the association world, I was interested in Dave Lutz's post on Midcourse Corrections that gives some excellent tips to think about when considering virtual tradeshows, an increasingly hot topic.

What has to be the winner of the most comment-worthy post came from Elizabeth Weaver Engel, who's post TEDWomen - Really? touched some nerves.

Another post you'll want to read the comments on comes from Tony Rossell, who draws some interesting conclusions on email communications from a recent study by Marketing General.

Pesonally, Mizz Information Maggie McGary wrote a post I wanted to comment on about the value (or lack thereof) of social media interning.

Here's a good one. Nobody chronicles association examples in the association social sector as good as Maddie Grant. I loved her look at PRSA a while back, and have even used it in presentations I've given (thanks Maddie!). This week she had another good one, a look at MPI's program of attracting social influencers. Well done.

And finally, I'm putting a teaser post in here. As of this writing, there's not an additional post yet, but I'm looking forward to reading Joe Sapp's posts on having a new CEO for the second time in two years. Now you have to write the posts, ok Joe?

Finally, jumping back outside the association sector, you probably heard about the Old Spice Hunk, I mean guy, I mean campaign. Wildly successful at generating buzz, it was criticized as a social media flop because it didn't generate sales. Not so fast, says AdFreak.com.

So that wraps up this week's edition of Quick Clicks...

What?

Football predictions?

Ok, here's a post about why all football predictions are hooey, and now you can make fun of me for the completely geeky, nerdy sports stats blogs I read. I'm heading to a Nationals game now. (Seriously.)

PS - my prediction: the Washington football team will not make the Super Bowl. Probably. (Hey, there's nothing like the eternal hope of the fan.)