Internet Psychology from Graham Jones

Welcome to another weekly digest of material from my website grahamjones.co.uk. Enjoy. that much of the impact of social networking could lie outside the social networks themselves, invisible to you and certainly unmeasurable. But just because it cannot be measured does not mean it is unimportant. It means that you should be using social networks, even if you think they are having no influence because people outside those networks ARE getting the message.
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Social media have wider influence

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/1Kr3euiLKL4/socialmedia-wider-influence.html

Why Youre Struggling to Measure the Value of Social Media (hubspot.com) Should brands care about Klout? (bizjournals.com) Ive seen the future of social influence measurement, and it isnt Klout (thenextweb.com)

There are some people in the world who like to think they are above all the chit-chat and office gossip going on. You will have people in your workplace who you know distance themselves from all the discussions and who like to give the impression they are thoughtful and more cerebral than the rest of you. Indeed, these people often think they ARE more focused on concepts, ideas and information and much less swayed by the opinions of those around them. Whoops! They are wrong..! An ingenious piece of research from the University of California shows clearly that people who abstract, who are seemingly disconnected from social norms, are actually influenced by the social groups around them. Not only that, but the people who thought they were above all the social chit-chat, were actually MORE likely to go with the group norm. In other words, the very people seemingly rejecting group pressures and distancing themselves socially are the ones most likely to follow the pack.

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How to spot a web fake

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Lets face facts: there is plenty of complete and utter nonsense published on the web. There are websites which purport to tell you one thing, but are actually trying to delude you and gain access to information about you which can be sold on. Or there are phishing sites which make you think they are genuine, but they are fake. Knowing what is genuine online is sometimes tough. So just how do you decide whether or not a website is the genuine article, or whether it is a dud? One thing we know about human gut instinct is that it is invariably correct. So, if you think a web page is not quite right, then the chances are it isnt. But sometimes you think that a site may look dubious, but you put that down to poor design, or inexperience on the part of the company. Or you think there are cultural differences in approach for instance in the UK users often forgive American websites which are often more forward and brash than the sensitive British soul prefers.

This has important implications for businesses online. Many companies focus on either getting a massive social following on the likes of Twitter or Facebook, or ignoring such social networks because not many of our customers use them. However, this research implies that social groups have their influence way beyond the group themselves. So, if you are not using social groups in your business, you are missing out on the wide influence they may have. It would seem

Facebook boosts businesses in unusual way

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/grahamjones/~3/LvuLypTpqYY/ facebook-boosts-businesses-unusual-way.html

However, interesting new research suggests that the people with some of the best gut instincts may actually be the worse at spotting web fakes. The study found that people with high emotional intelligence were less effective at distinguishing between real and fake presentations. Admittedly, the study did not look at websites, but at video recordings, however it does expose one factor. And that is that people with high emotional intelligence get so close to the content they are experiencing they find it harder to be analytical about it. In other words, as people became more attached to the video, they became less able to make decisions about it. This has important implications online. If you get sucked in to the narrative of a web page, theres a chance you could become too emotionally attached and therefore less able to make effective judgements about the content. You can see this all the time on those get rich quick websites, which draw you in to their story about being on hard times and now owning a yacht and only having to work one hour a day. The people with high emotional intelligence are more likely to buy in to these emotional hooks and as a result are less able to see that it might be some kind of scam. So, what can you do to help you avoid being duped by websites? The first thing is to be aware of your own level of emotional intelligence. If you find yourself being able to see things really easily from the perspective of others, then you are emotionally intelligent. If you do have high emotional intelligence, then you should take extra care online have a breather before you press that buy button! Whatever your level of emotional intelligence, though, gut instinct is a useful method of checking our a website. So too are things like seeing if the site displays a real, physical address indicating they exist. Equally, hover over a link and look in the bottom left hand corner of your window where does the link actually point to? If the site is honest it will be a link you expect. Similarly, do they have links to their Twitter or Facebook pages? If so, check them out and see what people are saying about them. In other words, take your time dont rush to make those clicks; a few moments longer while you think will have no real impact on your day.
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Business leaders are fond of banning Facebook and other social networks. Indeed, I met a security expert the other day who told me that some firms even ban people from using their personal mobiles from accessing Facebook during office hours either by confiscating all mobiles at the start of the working day, or by installing blocking radio waves, which prevent the mobiles from receiving a signal. What jolly workplaces they must be. Some business leaders appear to think that social networking is a distraction. Thats in spite of several studies which show that office productivity FALLS once you ban the likes of Facebook. Furthermore, companies that institute Facebook bans also find they lose the benefit of staff giving their company free marketing support.

But why are businesses happy to let their company lose out on the marketing potential of their staff talking about them on Facebook? The issue, it seems, is that they cannot trust their staff to say positive things about the firm. Oh dear. If you cannot trust your own staff to say good things about your company that says a great deal about your employment practices and your relationship with your workers. This is not a Facebook problem; instead, Facebook bans reveal more about inadequate senior management in businesses than anything else. Now, a new research study emphasises this issue. Psychologists have discovered that Facebook usage during studying has no impact on the students who use Facebook, compared with those who do not. The fear was that Facebook would contribute to lower grades because of the distraction. However, this is not the case. What is interesting in this research, however, is the fact that students who were good multi-taskers and who had good relationships with their parents tended to to better if they also used Facebook. For businesses this has important implications. It suggests that the selection of staff is important and that if a company has issues with social networks like Facebook it could mean they really need to look at staff selection, rather than banning Facebook. Ultimately, what this new research suggests is that if you select people who are good at multitasking (why wouldnt you want them anyway?) and who are well-rounded with solid family relationships (who wouldnt want that either?) then you are much more likely to be choosing people who will actually do better for your business if they use Facebook. In other words, many business leaders need to look at themselves and how they select their staff, rather than simply banning social networks. Indeed, choose the right people and your business will benefit significantly in more ways than you think from using social networks.
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People with high emotional intelligence are more easily duped by fakers (bps-research-digest.blogspot.de) Employers Value Emotional (minnesotaworks.wordpress.com) Intelligence

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for 79p. The pound store had by its design lulled me into the cheapness frame of mind. Similarly online, the design of Amazon helps you think bargain the design encourages you to buy and the sometimes cluttered nature is part of that. In other words, we get a meaning from the design which is more subconscious. It can be a mistake, therefore, to think that clean design is the only way to get your meaning across. This is highlighted in recent research in Taiwan which looked at whether or not the meaning of words came through when they were crowded out by clutter on the page. It transpired that the meaning was indeed identified by the readers even if they couldnt actually spot the word. It is more evidence that clarity or clean design is not the only way to get your meaning across. You can easily demonstrate the meaning of a web page without people actually seeing it. Clutter might even help.
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Cluttered web pages may not be bad after all

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3 Marketing Lessons From Amazons Web Strategy (hubspot.com)

Do you get annoyed by web pages that are cluttered and lack clarity? You land on the page and you are faced with all sorts of boxes, images, adverts and general untidiness. When you ask people what they think of such web pages they generally do claim to be frustrated and put off. Indeed, many people say they would simply leave such sites and go to another one which looks more professional. Part of the reason, apparently, is that visitors cannot work out what the page is about the meaning gets hidden amongst all the clutter. Or does it? Take a look at Amazon. Some people say they do not like it because they view it as cluttered, untidy and not a web design award winner. Yet in the last quarter alone this website brought in almost $14bn. Not bad for a site some people say is full of clutter. The meaning of the site must get through in spite of the very busy pages it presents to us.

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Your attitude is the key to successful search engine ranking

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Search engine specialists will often blind you with science of getting to the top of the rankings. After all, you want to be number one for your important keywords, or at the very least on the front page of Google. So, these specialists can help you as long as you pay them a nice monthly fee and they can adjust all manner of settings on your website. They will talk to you about Title Tags about Meta Descriptions and about on-page and off-page elements. Search engine specialists will suggest the use of anchor text in backlinks and will also provide you with data about the need to reposition your keywords in your titles so that they are nearer the front. And all of thats before they start talking to you about word counts, character counts and alt tags. The one thing you can be sure of with many SEO experts is the amount of jargon they will use and the seemingly complex array of techniques that are required to get to the top of the search engines. They make you think you need to understand computer coding, that it takes years of experience and that it is a combination of science and art that you simply do not have the time to learn. Oh dear. These kind of SEO experts need to read the details of a massive study on the kind of web pages that get top ranking on Google. The researchers looked at 10,000 different keywords across 300,000 websites and then they conducted statistical tests. And guess what they found?

Often, website owners confuse meaning with clean design. That is not necessarily the same. Take the plethora of pile it high, sell it cheap retail stores. The items are not displayed well, they are often still in cardboard packing boxes rather than on shelves and there is a general aura of cheapness. That makes us feel as though we are getting a good deal. The design of the stores makes us think bargain. Yet some of the prices are higher than for similar items in better designed shops. For instance, I bought a single item in a pound store yesterday, paying 1 for it of course. Five minutes later I was in a major retailer with bright lights, beautifully designed displays and so on to discover the same 1 item available

Ultimately, though, what this research confirms more than anything else is that it is about attitude. If your attitude is that all you need to do to succeed online is to get search engine rankings, you wont succeed. If your attitude is that you need to focus on a complete web presence, then you will gain search engine success. The answer? Stop thinking about SEO and think instead about your complete web presence. The SEO will then sort itself out without you needing to do anything or pay for any snake oil.
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Related posts 1. Google releases two new ranking algorithm updates 2. Search Engine Trends Well, they discovered that Title Tags are not related to search engine ranking, neither is the position of the keywords you use in any of the text elements on your page. Indeed, all the traditional SEO expert techniques appear to work AGAINST websites. It looks like the favourite techniques of many SEO gurus are actually nonsense. They are selling you snake oil. So what did the research find was most valuable? It seems that the top websites that get the highest rankings are the ones with most Facebook activity such as shares and likes. In other words, at first sight, it seems from this research your Google ranking depends almost entirely on your Facebook activity. But dont believe everything research tells you. What this study is really showing is that there is a correlation between the extent of the Facebook activity and the search engine position a web page gets. And correlation does not mean cause. So what is going on? If you look at the research it shows you that there is a negative correlation between the title of a page and search engine ranking not what SEO experts would expect. Equally, there is no information on Google+. Surely Google are not going to give greater prominence to a competing social network in their ranking system? Think for a moment. What do people DO when they focus on SEO using things like title tags or meta descriptions? They tend, in my experience, to think that is the secret to search engine success. Indeed some of the more snake oil selling type of SEO companies may well tell them this is indeed the secret. The result? The hapless firms dont do anything else which could help them achieve search engine success. But what if you believe that search engine success is about everything you do online? What if you think the sum total of your activity online affects your search engine ranking? The chances are you will do plenty of Facebook activity, that you will Tweet a lot and that you will contribute to other websites, bring you highly useful backlinks. The research actually demonstrates that when you focus your attention on your entire web footprint you get search engine success. When you focus solely on getting top search engine rankings you worry about those geeky SEO science bits and pieces and that fails to achieve what you want. Of course, the really good search engine specialists will already tell you that search engine success is much more than simple SEO science.
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