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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Web Psychology - Whiteboard
Friday'

Posted by nathalienahai
All marketers hope to see their audiences move down their marketing funnel,
eventually converting to paying customers. We reach out through social media, we
create content that we hope resonates, and we optimize our sites in hopes of
eliciting certain behaviors from those customers. Psychology, thenâthe
study of mental functions and behaviorsâis a foundational part of what we
do.


In today's Whiteboard Friday, Nathalie Nahaiâthe web
psychologistâexplains some of the more fundamental aspects of people's
behavior online, offering insight into ways we can improve our efforts to reach
them.






Whiteboard Friday - Nathalie Nahai - Web Psychology





For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription


Hi everyone. My name is Nathalie Nahai. I'm the web psychologist, and today
I'm on Whiteboard Friday. So I'm going to be talking with you about web
psychology, which is a term that I coined in 2011 to describe the empirical
studies of online behavior.


It draws from various different fields. It's a point of convergence for any
type of research that looks at online behavior, so things like human-computer
interaction, cross-cultural psychology, which is a very, very interesting area,
social psychology, how we relate to other people both in groups and on a smaller
level, advances in neuroscience, how we can use neuroscientific studies to tell
us about how we respond online at a brain-activity level, and as a subset of
that, neuroaesthetics, so to visual stimuli. We also got cognitive psychology
and things like attention online, that tends to be quite limited, and how to
make the most of that attention, and also behavioral economics, which looks at
why we behave in seemingly irrational ways online.


All of these different disciplines and many more give us different glimpses
into how online behaviors are shaped and can be affected.


In the research for all of this, it was actually for a book that I wrote
called "Webs of Influence," which is looking at the psychology of online
persuasion. In all the research that I did, I found that there were three key
things that you had to be able to do or to think about and to act upon in order
to be successful online.


So there are three secrets to online success. The first is to know who you
are targeting. The second is to communicate persuasively, and the third and
final one is to sell with integrity. So I've broken these down a little bit so
that we can have a little look at some of the elements that make up these three
pillars.


So let's start with number oneâknow who you are targeting. It's really,
really important that you research your audience, especially if it's an audience
that you think that you're familiar with, because doing research will uncover
things that will always surprise you. So I like to start with the most basic of
things or the most complex of things, which is the human brain.


What systems are we engaging online? I like to think of it in a metaphorical
sense. So you have the logical, which is where we like to think we make
decisions, the emotional, which is where we actually seem to make decisions, and
then the primal, which is freeze, fight, and flight, sex, food, motion, it's the
thing that keeps us alive. So we start with a human brain, and if you have an
understanding of how we work, then you can start looking at the psychology of
decision making. How do we make decisions, both on and offline? How does that
influence what we end up doing versus what we say we might do.


You also then have to look at who's online and why they're there. It's not
enough to have an idea about just the people that you think you might like to
target. But broaden your scope. Who else is on there that you think would be
interested in what you have to say?


Once you've figured out who's online and why they're there, figure out who
you specifically are targeting, and you have to narrow this down to make sure
that you have a clear enough idea of the persona or personas that you're trying
to engage.


Once you've narrowed it down to that point, you have to look at two really
key things. Number one, the cultural context of that audience. So are they from
a culture that is very high in collectivism or in power distance, the degree to
which we accept and expect unequal power distribution? If you're interested in
that, there's some fantastic research by a guy called Geert Hofstede, who is a
professor of psychology who spent 40 years looking at cultural dimensions. You
can find him online. So looking at the cultural context of your audience and
then their individual psychology.


So things like individual psychology can mean their gender, personality
traits. If you're going to look into personality, check out the big five, the
five factor model. It's a lot more accurate than the other models typically.
Also things like age, you can also look at the types of clusters of traits that
they exhibit in terms of the preferences for online platforms, behaviors. You
can really go to quite a strong degree of granularity on that one.


So that gives you a quick overview of some of the elements in section one of
knowing who you are targeting.


The second pillar, to communicate persuasively, it really rests on the idea
that we tend to prefer to engage with and trust people who are able to make us
feel like we have a connection. That's a no-brainer. Research has shown that
there is a subset of motor neurons in the brain, called mirror neurons, that
activate when you see someone else doing a particular action.


So if I suddenly had my arm chopped off, hopefully if you're empathetic, your
mirror neurons would kick in, and you would hopefully feel a sense of wince or
pain in sympathy with me. The reason I'm telling you this is because to
communicate persuasively, you have to trigger other people so you can literally
get on the same wavelength. If you can do that, you'll be able to convert much
more effectively.


So there are different ways in which you can approach this. Most of you might
be familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so things like safety, physical
safety, food, shelter, love, all the way up to self actualization. There are
ways in which you can help people to achieve these things online. You can do it
through all these different elementsâyour website, your images, your
videos, your color, and your social work.


Websites, very interesting, you've got a huge amount of stuff that influences
how people react to you on the website. Things like the fact that we will
subconsciously scan a new website for cues as to whether or not we can trust
that site when we first visit. These can be things such as padlocks, showing
that your information will be secure. It can be things like authority figures
endorsing your website.


It could also be stuff that moves into the realm of colors. In color
psychology, there are two main colors that seem to have fairly universal effects
on the human psyche and emotional state, and that's red and blue.


Red tends to be very high arousing, raises up our heart rate, and it makes us
a bit more stimulated. Blue tends to have a similar but opposite effect. So the
opposite effect is that it calms us down. We feel like we can trust the person
whose site it is, which is probably also why the Fortune 500 and financial
sectors use blue typically as their main brand colors, because it calms us down.


Another weird fact about blue is that it kind of warps our perception of
time. So if cultural audience is based somewhere that has very low Internet
speeds, make your color blue, and they will perceive the speed of the website as
loading more quickly.


Videos, things like body language are very, very important. Having a more
open, natural, slightly more expansive body language can be quite useful. Again,
you've got to check that against culture. The images should always reflect the
audience that you're trying to reach. So I'm going to use a London example. If
you're looking at reflecting Shoreditch hipsters in East London, then you would
want to use people in your images and your videos that reflect those traits. So
the kind of jackets that they use and the metro look and the rest of it.


I'm not going to go into social right now because its way too complex and it
would take forever. But you get a sense of some of the things that are involved
in effective and persuasive communication.


The third and final pillar is about using psychological techniques to sell
with integrity, and the reason I've put integrity in there is because it is
absolutely key. But if you're nudging people towards taking certain behaviors,
you do it in a way that is authentic and that their best interests as well as
your best interests at heart. Good business is where you get the intersection
between what's good for you and what's good for your audience.


With that in mind, I'm sure some of you will be familiar with Cialdini's six
principles of persuasion. You can also use these online. There is a fantastic
group of people in the Netherlands who are doing this. They've created a thing
called persuasion API that actually tracks which of these principles are more
effective on certain people. That's quite fun to check out.


The other thing that's key in terms of using these psychological principles,
but in a way that is going to be not manipulative, so doing it honestly, is to
build up your reputational capital, so getting people to trust you. That can
mean everything from getting social proof, so that's kind of a herd mentality,
game of numbers. If I have 5,000 followers on Twitter and you are a new Twitter
user and you come on and you see my profile, you'll think, oh that's 5,000. It's
indicating that probably she's all right because that many people have liked her
already. Things like that, so ratings, social media followers, testimonials,
that helps obviously to build your reputational capital.


You can increase your sales also using certain techniques, such as things
like bundling, bundling items together, having flexible pricing, which you have
to do carefully. So there was a bit of a furorâI can't remember which site
it was and I don't want to get sued, so I'm not going to mention itâwhere
people were basically being pitched more expensive holidays when it was known
that they were on a Safari browser because it meant that they were a Mac user
and therefore probably more likely to part with cash.


So there are ways in which you can use sort of pricing strategies that are
better than others. That's an example of a bad way to do it. A better way to do
is the way the airlines do it, for instance. So when you're sitting on a plane,
the person next to you may have paid twice as much for their seat, but that's
probably because they booked three months after you did. So because you got
there early, you paid less, and that's a strategy to get the prices of the seats
paid but sort of tiered.


So there are various things you can do to increase your sales. Also ratings
are very important. You're 20% more likely to buy an item that's been rated
versus non-rated. It leads in nicely into the next point, which is around
pricing and value.


We have a general pricing heuristic, which says that the more expensive
something is, if we don't know anything else about it, the more likely we are to
attribute high value to it. So if it's more expensive, it's better value. That's
when we have a limited amount of knowledge on an item. So that's something for
you to consider. If you want your thing or your service or your product to be
perceived as more valuable, you can up the pricing within reason.


B. J. Fogg, one of America's very fabulous researchers and psychologists,
came out with this fantastic model called the behavior chain, which shows you
how you can use psychological steps or a process to get people to the end point
where they buy and further on. I would highly recommend that you check that out.
That's a really useful framework to implement some of these strategies.


The final one I want to mention is around risk, trust, and privacy. The
biggest barrier online to purchasing or to giving away information is the sense
of risk that we have around our trust being violated. How private is my
information? How secure is it? Easy things to do here are to not ask for too
much more information than you need and to make sure that you have a disclaimer
that says you will treat everyone's information with privacy and respect and
that you won't pass it onto any third parties.


I hope that is enough of a quick whiff around. Those are the basic three
pillars. But ultimately there is one golden rule that you have to follow, and it
takes this form. So, number one, research your audience. It doesn't matter who
they are, research who they are. That means that you can do things like on
SurveyMonkey or some questionnaires. Qual and quantitative stuff is brilliant.
Find out, do your research, and that will form the foundation for your online
endeavors.


Number two, once you've got your research, test your hypothesis. If you know
that your research shows you that these are 18 to 30 year old hipsters in
Shoreditch and they're likely to like these sorts of preferences and they have
this cluster of personality traits, create something and test that hypothesis
and see if it pans out.


Third and final step, analyze your results and evolve accordingly. Okay.
Well, that's pretty much it. So then you just repeat the cycle, and if there's
ever a gap in your knowledge, go back to the first point and do some fresh
research.


Ultimately, that's it. Web psychology, it rocks. Peace out.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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