Persuasion Tip #3 & #4

Still plundering the Wikihow site for tips, these two pretty much exhausts the most useful tips:

Persuasion tip #3
Empathise and relate to your audience. By making your audience feel like you understand them and are concerned about them they are more likely to listen and possibly trust what you say. Its hard not to like someone who is concerned about you. Follow this up be explaining what you want to achieve in terms they can relate to so they feel like they will achieving something by helping you.

Persuasuion tip #4
Wikihow refers to "six weapons of influence" which were apparently originally defined by Dr Robert Cialdini in his book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." Or maybe it was his other book: "Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive" written with Dr. Noah Goldstein and Steve J. Martin. I dont know because I haven't read them and Wikipedia is not clear.

The Six weapons of influence are:
Authority.
By appealing to authority (name dropping) you can associate your argument with someone the audience may like, trust, admire or respect. By doing this its probable that some of the positive influece will rub off on what your trying to achieve.

Commitment & Consistency.
Apparently once you have obtained a commitment from someone, they are more likely to extend or stretch that commitment to include other obligations than they are to agree to those obligations outright. Kinda scary really. Fries with that anyone?

Reciprocity.
You scratch my back, i'll scratch yours. Simple, but not really persuasive, more like bartering. However, it can be used more subtly, like with free marketing samples or by just being plain nice to someone you are going to need something from at some point in the future.

Sympathy/popularity.
If you make someone either feel sorry for you, or like you, they will probably do something for you. Simple as that.

Scarcity.
If something is rare or in limited supply, we typically covet it and value it higher. Therefore if you create a sense that someone will miss out if they don't agree to what you propose now, its more likely people will become involved. In a game of musical chairs no one wants to be the person still standing when the music stops.

Social proof.
Otherwise known as conformity or peer group pressure. It would seem that people are fundamentally like cattle (sheep in particular). We copy and follow what other people do (I certainly do on the dancefloor!). Therefore, get one person to follow you and it will be a lot easier to get more to follow.