Internet Psychology from Graham Jones

Welcome to another weekly digest of material from my website grahamjones.co.uk. Enjoy.

Stephen Hester cannot help it you should blame his Mum and Dad
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affected, for instance, the extent of interest in them in online dating sites. The names of individuals were also related to measurements of self-esteem and smoking people with negative names smoked more and also had lower levels of self-esteem. Thats probably linked to perceived lack of like-ability; because of their name some people get fewer social connections and feel less popular, which makes them think negatively about themselves. So, if you lack followers on Twitter, or friends on Facebook it might be simply that your name is wrong. Human beings might like to profess we are not prejudiced against particular names, but this study and others before it show that we are biased against certain names and that we favour others. You might do better online if you use your nick-name, or your middle name. Alternatively we could all call ourselves the most popular and most highly rate name found in this new research Alexander. If we were talking about Alexander Hester today, the coverage would be a lot less negative. Still, at least his parents didnt call him Kevin. The research shows that is the most disliked name of all. Apologies to Kevins reading this!
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Stephen Hester, the embattled boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, cannot help being the current most-disliked man in Britain. It is not his fault that his employers decided to pay him 1.2m a year. Neither is he to blame that they decided to give him a bonus worth almost as much. But would he be as disliked as he is today if he had a different name? What if he were Tarquin Hester or Dave Hester or Jonathan Hester? The fact of the matter is, his name affects what we think of him.

Outrage as Royal Bank of Scotland chief Stephen Hester gets 963,000 bonus (thesun.co.uk) National News: Miliband accuses PM over RBS bonus (coventrytelegraph.net)

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So, if he is somewhat reviled today you can blame his Mum and Dad for choosing Stephen instead of a name that the rest of us might prefer sorry if your name is Stephen! Your name has a significant impact upon what other people think about you. For example, it has been shown to have an effect on your academic performance because your teachers, presumably subconsciously, react better to some names than others. People with certain names do better at school than others. Choosing your childs name can have a major effect on their life. New research confirms the name effect. The study, conducted in Germany and the USA, found that the names of individuals

Your Internet Marketing Could Be Boosted With A Cardboard Box

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be improved because you will literally be thinking outside of your box.

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Thinking outside the box DOES boost creativity: Cramped work spaces produce few lightbulb moments for employees (dailymail.co.uk) Leave the Room to Boost Creativity [Brain Hack] (lifehacker.com) To think outside the box, think outside the box (eurekalert.org)

Twitter can manipulate your behaviour

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Internet marketers are nothing if not creative. There hardly seems to be a day that goes by without some new idea from an Internet Marketing brainbox. And each time you think there cant be any new ideas to market your business online, along comes another creative thinker who has developed an amazing way to promote your products and services. In business meetings you will often hear people say we need to think outside the box on this one. It is a shorthand way of suggesting that the people in the meeting need to be more creative and come up with new and seemingly whacky ideas. And you can bet that many traditionally-based marketing departments are amazed at how much outside the box thinking there is in the young upstarts of the Internet Marketing world. Recently, however, psychologists were interested to find out if by actually being outside a box made people think more creatively. The researchers conducted a study which was purportedly looking at different working environments. Some people were sat in a large cardboard box, whereas others were outside the box! The researchers were not actually looking at work productivity or the way people responded to different environments. Instead the psychologists wanted to find out if being in a box hampered creative thinking and if being outside the box actually helped. And amazingly it did! When people were inside the box, they were much less creative than when they were, literally, outside the box. So, in order to boost your creative thinking for your internet marketing you could always buy yourself a big cardboard box, do your work in that for a while and then physically step outside the box to improve your creativity. On the other hand, you might want to take a different path to success! What the research really shows is that a change in environment boosts your creative thinking. So, if you are struggling with coming up with new ideas for your website, or how to market your online products, you need to get away from your desk. Take a walk, go for a coffee, simply walk to someone elses office for a chat all of these are tactics which help improve creative thinking. In essence, when you are in your office you are in your own little box environment step outside of that box and your creative juices will start to flow again. It all goes to show that there is often some truth in the jargon-laden sayings we hear in the workplace..! Get out of your office for a while and your Internet Marketing will

Twitter is not necessarily doing what you think it does. Rather than being the place where you send out short messages to your friends and colleagues it may be the place where your behaviour is manipulated by software. Researchers in Boston, USA, have discovered that Twitter bots can change our behaviour. The bots are automated pieces of software that trawl through the Twittersphere, find some target Tweets and then automatically Retweet them. To the original Tweeter it looks like a human being has found what they said interesting. Far from it; the Tweet may never have been actually read by a real person. The Twitter bots also sometimes include a mention in the Retweet. That means, for instance, if I were to Retweet something you said on Twitter, but also included my sons Twitter name in the Retweet I would have given him a Twitter mention; inserting anyones Twitter name or handle into a Tweet is a mention. The automated bots will do this at random, adding people who have used similar words to your original Tweet. The implication is that one of your followers knows that someone else would also be interested in what you have to say and so is effecting an introduction. Indeed, this is what happens all the time with real people but automated software can do it too. The problem for Twitter users is this. Unless you know the person who is Re-Tweeting you, the Retweet could come from automated software not a real individual. But the inclusion of mentions merely adds to the illusion that someone else thinks your content is worth spreading and sharing to other like minded people. The result is that these automated Twitter bots can fool us. They can make us think people value our material, when in actual fact no-one has engaged with our Tweets at all. However, what the researchers found next is fascinating. It seems that the automated bots are so good at giving an impression of human behaviour we behave as we would do in the real world. The bots appear to be helping create new followers and connections between the various
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people mentioned in the automated Retweets. In essence, the bots are creating introductions, helping us network. But the problem is in the real world we only introduce people to each other who we think will get on, who will share common interests or who we think can help each other. Twitter bots cannot make such value judgements and are therefore inferior to natural human behaviour. Even so, we appear to be take in by them. Perhaps it is time to review your Twitter Followers and to make sure you are only being followed by real people. That way you will minimise your chances of being manipulated by software into following other people who you have little real connection with.
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laptop and write a FIVE STAR REVIEW on Trip Advisor. The hotel had made me feel welcome, as though they were running the hotel just for me. So many hotels simply seem to ignore their visitors. And, sadly, so do many online businesses. The chances are you have emailed some website or other, never to get a reply. Or you have asked a question in a companys support forum or ticket system, only to have to wait weeks to get an answer, if at all. Many companies simply build a website and leave it there; its rather like building a retail store, dressing the windows so people can see what you have to offer and then letting people in the doors only for them to find there are no staff. Human beings do not like being ignored. And this is confirmed by a new piece of research from psychologists at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. They found that people feel good even if they get a sense that strangers warm to them. Being ignored by people walking past meant that the participants in the study felt negative. It shows that simple connections are all you need to make people feel more connected with you. Online that means the language you use hopefully you feel I am writing this directly to you, you can almost hear me speak it to you. Also, it means answering comments as quickly as possible, dealing with emails immediately and doing everything you can to make people feel you are not ignoring them. Much business online is missed because websites simply ignore their visitors. If you want to discover how it feels to NOT be ignored, to be welcomed and treated as a friend, check yourself in to Rudding Park!
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Should You Add Please Retweet to Your Twitter Updates? [Debate] (hubspot.com) Obamas State of the Union Address Sees 760,000 Tweets [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com) FAQs about using Twitter for business (marketing.yell.com) Can Twitter Bots Encourage Human Communication? (blogs.wsj.com)

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9 Must-Haves for the Perfect Landing Page (hubspot.com) The Ultimate Guide to Designing the Perfect Business Blog (hubspot.com) Top 10 Reasons Your Website Is Losing Sales (mashable.com)

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Do not ignore your website visitors

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Hello, how are you? Hope you are well and that you have had a good day so far. Now, tell me, isnt it nice to be asked, to be recognised, to be noticed? I am writing this from the Rudding Park Hotel, near Harrogate, where I am speaking tomorrow morning. I arrived to be met by a cheery smile, to be asked how has your day been today Mr Jones? and to be escorted to my room with a bright conversation about the area. Once in my room I rang room service: Good evening Mr Jones, how are you this evening? was EXACTLY how the phone was answered..! Wow, what a hotel! I was so impressed, the FIRST THING I did was to open up my
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Online success could be boosted by crossword puzzles

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Business owners tend to fall into one of two camps those who are willing to have a go at anything and try new services and ideas, or those who want to maintain the status quo and who are very conservative in their approach to life. Indeed, the notion that people are either open to change, or they are not is a central characteristic of personality psychology. In personality tests your degree of openness is assessed and forms part of your personality profile. The degree to which each of us is open is, according to personality theory, a rather fixed part of our very being we are either open, or not. However, recent research suggests that our degree of openness can indeed be altered. It is not a firmly established personality trait after all, but something which can fluctuate. And that is good news for the online success of anyone running an Internet business. The online world is changing at such a rapid pace that you need to be able to adapt and move quickly in order to succeed. However, business owners who are rather conservative, who preserve the status quo and who do not want to try the new fangled ideas until they become established could be doing themselves a disservice. In the past it was indeed wise for business leaders to wait, to let other test the waters and find the problems, before then taking on any new ideas. But nowadays, the new ideas are old ideas within months if an online business does not take up such new things quickly, they easily miss out. The old, slower, way of doing business is no longer an option online which means that those business owners not open to change could find life tough on the Internet. But the research shows that all is not lost. Rather than thinking that this fast-moving online world is not for me, the business owner who is traditionally not open can alter that aspect of their personality quite easily. The psychological studies show that crossword puzzles and Sudoku tests can increase the level of openness in an individual. This means that if you want to increase your online success all you need to do is take up crossword puzzles. Youll become more open to new ideas and information and as a result you will be more willing to try out new elements which could improve your web business, for instance.
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The psychology of (cogsciblog.wordpress.com) How crossword puzzles (newscientist.com)

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