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Internet Psychology from Graham Jones

Welcome to another weekly digest of material from my website grahamjones.co.uk. Enjoy. On your website this behavioural effect can be used to good impact. Instead of saying you might also like these when you refer people to another page, use your analytics data and say things like 64% of people who read this blog post, also went on to read this one. Or on a sales page, something like 72% of people who bought this item also went on to buy this product too. In other words, rather than using generalised people liked this, be more specific to the actual page that people are on. This will lead to provincial norming kicking in and more people doing the things that you would like them to do.

People do what other nearby people do


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/74bLZq7_Z5g/peopledo-what-nearby-people-do.html

Web Links to Be Banned by EU


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/VJaULedkiBk/weblinks-banned-eu.html

Your website probably has all sorts of things on it you want people to click on or do. You might want them to download something, sign up for your newsletter or press a buy now button. But how do you convince people to do these things? The answer is strangely revealed in some new research about the use of towels in hotels. In this study, researchers from the University of Luxembourg wanted to see if there was a way they could encourage people to use fewer towels in a bid to make the hotel more environmentally friendly.You will probably have seen notices in hotel rooms that say things like If you wish to re-use this towel, please hang it up; if you want fresh towels, place towels in the bath. However, it seems that such signs are not that encouraging people notice them but still like fresh towels every day. In the Luxembourg study, however, the researchers compared two different notices. One said 75% of people in this hotel re-use their towels where the other said 75% of people who have stayed in this room re-use their towels. Guests who stayed in the rooms with the room specific notice reused towels 40% more often, resulting a real drop in laundry bills for the hotel. So what is the psychology of this? It is known as provincial norming which basically means we tend to adopt the behaviours of the people closest to us, people who are in our province. Shocking news has reached me this morning from a friend who works at the EU. He tells me they are drawing up plans to ban all links on the web. Within a year from today it will be illegal to include links on any web pages or blogs you produce without prior permission from the owner of the links. It follows on from the EU ban on cookies, which has led millions of web pages asking you to click on a pop-up item confirming you agree to links. It is part of the EU clamp-down on privacy. The legislators in Brussels have argued that linking to someone elses website is a similar invasion of privacy and therefore no links should be included in web pages without the prior permission of the owner of that link. The initiative, drawn up secretly over the past year, is known as the Actual Permissions Required In Linking (APRIL). According to my friend in the know, an announcement was due to be made yesterday, but the press release had not been signed off in time. So the announcement has been delayed until today.
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However, because I had been told in advance I contacted the Federation for Online Open Linking (FOOL) to find out what they thought. They told me: This is a disaster. It undermines the entire purpose of the Internet. We may as well close it down and go back to pen and paper. Looking at the EUs plans, though, I suspect that is not going to happen. Rather like the EU Cookie Directive which effectively means that every website currently shown in the EU is illegal, the APRIL directive is unlikely to have any significant impact. I suspect, though, it will lead to a major new industry in gaining link permissions, which could rival the entire SEO industry in terms of size and importance. Perhaps I will be able to report on that in exactly one year from today.

equivalent of turning the lights down to dim we just cant see as much. The problem for web designers, though, is how do you include all the necessary information without leading to load blindness? When you only have a small amount of information presented, added extras lead to distraction. So if you design a simple web page with one banner advert, for instance, the advertisement distracts the visitor, leading to loss of attention on what you might be wanting them to read. However, if you overload the page with extra furniture the distraction level appears to drop therefore suggesting that you might get more engagement. But this new study suggests the opposite it implies that your visitors dont actually see as much as you think they do. The overload of information is effectively closing their eyes to what you want them to see. What this study is really suggesting to us as website owners is that we need to think carefully about the pages we produce. Too little visual information can lead to distraction, too much visual information can lead to load blindness. Either way, many web pages could be getting traffic, but not actually having the required impact. It could explain why bounce rates are so high, on average; people simply do not see anything when they land on the pages because there is too much to see. It is not the extent of the information that is the problem you can have web pages with thousands of words on them. It is the amount of visual information that can be seen in a glance that is the issue. Too much furniture on your web pages could mean that people simply do not see what you want them to see.

See other stories which I published on 1st April:


2008 Are you a morning or afternoon Internet marketer? 2009 Psychologists produce psychic social network 2010 Facebook to create new language 2011 Advertising Psychology Research In London 2012 Facebook Optimises Ordinary Links 2013 Web pages can now produce subliminal advertising For more information on this story please click here.

Why you need to redesign your web pages


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/OoPwLAwauOc/needredesign-web-pages.html

Most businesses could collapse in the next decade


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/blANcVfMmWw/ businesses-could-collapse-next-decade.html

Lets face facts: the digital world is fundamental to all businesses. Even if you sell offline or operate mainly in the real world, the digital world has an impact on your business. Whether it is for communications, such as email, or as a starting point for buyers researching your business, the Internet is central to customers. The problem is that most businesses themselves use the Internet as a nice-to-have and not as central to their business. When I speak to Chief Executives and point out this difference they nod their heads in agreement. But then they say it is impossible to change their business to focus on the Internet because it would involve too much change. Now, though, they are in for a shock. The highly respected consultancy firm Forrester has said that unless businesses make this change they will face an extinction event within the next decade.

Most web pages include lots of furniture, such as branding, navigation, images, advertising and lists of other useful things you might want to look at. Indeed, when we land on a plain text web page we tend to think it is something from the dark ages of the early Internet. These days we expect colour, graphics, video, useful links and so on. However, new research suggests this could all be working against us, as website owners. Neuroscientists at University College London have identified a phenomenon they are calling load blindness the more information that we see, the more we dont see it. This is a particular problem in certain professions such as being an airline pilot or a surgeon, where lots of visual information has to be processed. However, it is clearly also an issue for web pages. What the researchers found was that when we are presented with lots of information in one go, our awareness for that information decreases. Indeed, the scientists found that the impact was the

They are saying this because their latest research shows that only 21% of companies have a clear vision for the future use of digital
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within their business. Thats in spite of 90% of firms agreeing that digital will revolutionise their sector within the next 12 months.! And they are not the only consultants sounding the warning bell just three months ago Capgemini published their own research suggesting that businesses simply have to make the Internet central to their company, regardless of their sector or industry. According to Forrester, businesses are now just bolting on the Internet to their existing business structures. But what is required, they say, is a complete re-set a fundamental shift in the way businesses are structured and run. Business leaders I meet are totally unprepared to do this because of the seismic shift required. Yet the warning from Forrester is stark: do it or die. When you look at successful businesses online they are mostly businesses which focus their firm on the Internet Google, Facebook, Amazon for instance. But it is not just technology-based companies like these online startups which have embraced digital as central to their business. Back in 2012 Starbucks transformed itself into a digital centric company. Business leaders, used to a non-digital world, find it hard to make the transformation necessary. So, what is the solution? The first step must surely be to conduct an immediate review of the kinds of people setting strategy and plans for your company. The data from Forrester and Capgemini both point to the need to use the services of those digital natives in central roles in your company. The future of your business could well depend upon giving the strategic reins to your grandchildren.

the subject, where before it was invisible, plus it reminds people of things they had forgotten about. In the past two years, for instance, I have written four specific blog posts on the need for establishing an internet routine. Even then, 80% of my visitors have yet to read any of them! And that means I have the chance to write the same information again. Even if what you want to write about was once new and is no longer seen as news you can still make people think it is new. This was seen in the past few days with quite wide coverage of a neuroscience study which showed that brain cells can die if mice are deprived of sleep. The media coverage followed the publication of the research paper in the latest edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. All very interesting, you might think. Except you can find a very similar study in the Journal of Physiology from 11 years ago! True one is talking about cell death in mice and the other is talking about reduction in cell proliferation in rats, but essentially it is much the same thing sleep deprivation affects your brain cells. In other words, we have seen lots of media coverage for an item which is not really that new. If you are a neuroscientist you might consider the latest research as confirmation of earlier work or an interesting twist on a wellworn subject. But to non neuroscientists this seems as though it is brand new. And even if you saw the news 11 years ago, the chances are you had forgotten it, so this seems new. Something is new when we hear about it for the first time or dont previously remember hearing about it. For instance, I recently repainted my office. That is new information to you. But it is not new information to my family or my neighbours. New depends not on the information but on the audience. That means you can write the same subjects time after time after time because each time you are appealing to a different audience, or members of an audience who cant remember the last time they heard it. So, dont go saying you cant come up with ideas for new content. Just look back through your old content and write about that.

Your Old News is New News to Your Web Visitors


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/GXlHSmibEGo/yourold-news-is-new-news-to-your-web-visitors.html

One of the reasons why many website owners struggle to produce regular content is because they cannot think of new ideas to write about. Every time they come up with an idea they remember they have already written about that subject before, so they cross it off their list. The problem with this line of thinking is that it is focused on yourself as content producer and not on the audience. For a start, not everyone reads everything you publish on your website or blog. If you write about a topic once, theres a good chance that many people may miss it. Furthermore, even if someone does see an item once, they often need it to be repeated in slightly different ways before they get it. In other words, writing about a subject more than once is a good idea, not a bad one. It brings recognition to
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