Tapping into the minds of your audience: The psychology of social media | Econsultancy

May 27, 2013

The tendency is to think "what shall we give our audience?" when it is just as important to ask "why should they care?"
I am fascinated by the whole psychology of social media: What motivates people to take certain actions, such as overshare the minutiae of their life, or angrily "out" brands on social networks rather than complain directly to them in private, or retweet unproven allegations (and therefore get sued), and so forth?
As well as these inevitable threats there lie opportunities for marketers if they can understand what motivates people to retweet, share, plus one, like and comment on content.

Very cool article - really gets at the crux of social media - why would users want to click/share/tweet - you need to develop a strong emotional connection to really engage and retain users.

Integrated Marketing Week

May 27, 2013

This event looks cool....if only I could afford to go! @IM_WeeK

5 things stopping your website from growing | Psychology for Marketers

May 27, 2013

Link to article

This is a great article to review and to decide whether your website is effective at capturing visitors from the landing page.

I think that the most important point in this article is #3 - You're asking for too many things. Some websites are overly complex and basically look as if they've pasted the entire sitemap over the homepage. Websites like mailchimp.com does a great job at keeping things simple and being smart & adaptive at offering you links to click only when they are relevant.

If you follow a few of these rules you will be sure to lessen your bounce rate.

RDFRS: Linguistic relativity, an addressable issue in an atheism awareness raiser?

May 26, 2013

In response to this.

Although I believe that linguistic relativity is something we have to watch out for in our everyday lives - I do believe that the hard form of the theory has been largely proved false.

Having said that, it is interesting to think about whether phrases like "oh my god" and "thank god" influence our perceptions on religion. There is no doubt the everyday phrases can influence our perceptions in general, however. In common everyday English we associate upward motion with higher states of awareness (for example) - perhaps this insures our perception that a heaven-like place exists above (when in fact outer space is really all around us, even below our feet)