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> If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot"

This concept is discussed at length, and backed up with scientific studies, in the excellent book Influence, by Robert Cialdini, PhD. This particular concept he calls "Social Proof", and it's one of about 8 major categories of influence that he discusses in his book.

Incidentally, dropping the PhD on the end of his name is another one of the forms of influence. While reading the book, I couldn't help but get tons of ideas for a marketing campaign involving social proof. The concept is of course much broader than seeding donation hats. In the book he even gets into the elements of how the Jim Jones tragedy went down, and social proof is at the core of it.

Here is a video of the author outlining the major categories of influence. http://youtu.be/HOypv1AqYu0

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movemen...

"With help from some surprising footage, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. (Hint: it takes two.)"

I tried this with a blog I used to run. Back when RSS subsriber count actually mattered, I faked the subscribe button to show that I had 15,984 subscribers instead of 134.

I would get just 1 subscriber every day earlier. After the change, I started getting 3 a day with the same traffic.

When I was working on developing a site, before it had its own domain setup, I used FB like code for another domain just so it would work. It was a popular domain with tens of thousands of likes. I didn't change it right away while I got the site up, one of the early testers was super impressed how many likes my site had though. Despite being connected to a completely different domain. It was social proof that was never actually checked. I updated to my own domain and nobody has ever cared since, sadly.

Excellent observation regarding the street musician (busker) faring better with a little grease visible to potential audience / donors!

I'd like to point out that the music industry has long been a bastion of other techniques as well, some more underhanded than others, depending on one's moral compass. The notion of Payola is still alive and well, and has changed with the new music and marketing avenues. I'm not in a position to name specifics, but there's word of payment for review / features, which seems the most blatant. Personally I can attest to navigating all sorts of sketchy "Promote through us!" type operations that may or may not be doing legit advertising...

Getting a network of Twitter or Soundcloud followers - or appearing to have one - is a pretty standard objective, which I guess why there exist services or short-cuts to those ends.

It's the same thing as posting a "tear off this phone number" page on a bulletin board. You always tear off a tab or two when you first post it, to make it look like people have shown interest.

I run studies. Guilty as charged. The key is to remember to how many you tear, and to always tear the same one off (5th from the right for me), so you know which poster locations are getting actual traffic and merit re-posting later.

That must depend on what you are advertising.

Looking for cheap appartmnts near a university, I would always go for the ones that didn't have lots of numbers taken, as it meant there was more chance I would be first to get it.

which site do u use for your search?

this was back n the days of pen and paper ads on a noticeboard

Homeless do the opposite of the musician really, throw a coin/bill into their glass and they will take it out and save it somewhere else.

"Nobody has donated, have some compassion" works for some.

They often (usually?) will leave some small change though.

Panhandlers are common targets of theft, which may explain stashing most of what they get in various places less exposed.

Yeah, there are a lot of factors into how much you leave in the pot. Grandparent's post was just one of the pressures to leave more money, though one that most people aren't aware of.

Yep. You don't want to be the guy with $100 in a cup held out in front of you. Remember, it's almost as easy to dip a bill out as it is to dip one in.

I like when they pick out the pennies from my donations and throw them on the ground. I then pick them up, because the pennies are valuable to me.

You have a home to stash the pennies in to save them up. Someone who lives on the street can't carry around pounds of pennies around until they have thousands of them to exchange for larger currency. Pennies might have value long-term, but they are worthless if you can't stash them in bulk.

Disclaimer: Canadian, we abolished pennies because they are worthless and a pain in the ass. ;)

I used to go to a cafe where they often had a $20 bill in the tip jar near the cash register. I always felt like that bill hadn't been left by a customer...

They'll exchange smaller bills for bigger bills if they need them, or if the tip jar gets too full.

source: worked in an ice cream shop

When you look at the book reviews on amazon it really looks like amazon doesn't care about integrity in the review system.

For example if you search for 'learn java', there's a total joke of a book at the top with torrent of fake 5 star reviews.

The first one I read even calls Java, 'the javascript' at one point.

It's an insult to decent authors and to the people who go to the trouble to write reviews that amazon allow this

Edit: I just realised why I found the names of the editor and illustrator familiar!

Ruby C. Perl and Ada R Swift

I stumbled upon a book by James Franco on Amazon.com a long time ago, and it had a 4-star review on the search page and on the product page.

I thought this was bizarre, because I just happened to have read reviews of it on literary and nonliterary sites giving it extremely poor reviews.

I clicked on "See all # customer reviews" on the Amazon page and the average rating on top immediately went down to 2 stars.

I thought this was a glitch, so I tried to access the product/book page a different way. The same thing happened to all of them.

There were always the same amount of reviews, as well.

About 6 months later I looked up the book again, and the "mistake" was gone. But I had taken a screenshot of it the first time, and there was only two more reviews. The 4-star average appeared on every page.

I look for it now, and it is back at 2 stars like it always was. The book in question is Actors Anonymous.

But you also could do an extra effort to impress a small number of customers and ask for reviews personally. Buy fake reviews is not the only option here.