Behavior News & Articles

A link is a signpost, a promise. If a customer clicks on your link they are spending their time. Don't make them waste it.

Forrester (news, site) recently asked how much of what you know about your business ecosystem comes from controlled, structured sources like surveys, product registration forms, customer interviews and market reports? If the answer is "just about everything," then you're leaving a huge amount of data on the table and then tossing it in the trash.

This data is in the form of unstructured content in social media, email, call center notes, help desk tickets, news articles, patent applications, contracts and more. The problem is that even if you want to take all of this data seriously, it's impractical to hire enough people to sort through and classify it.
 

In his opening keynote this morning at the J. Boye 2009 conference, BJ Fogg presented his views on why Facebook and Twitter are the rock stars of social media, and how they got there.

Weaving in psychology and behavior models into the conversation about technology and new media, Fogg introduced the notion of persuasion being all around us and tried to help the audience understand better how exactly it works.

Love it or hate it, Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology of all time. Here's how they hook us.

I'm here in sunny Denmark attending the 2009 J Boye conference where the presenters dig into many subjects, but one of my personal standouts is psychologist BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is jazzed-up about how technology is used to influence our behavior. This has been his particular obsession since 1993 and by the looks of it -- in our age of social media platforms -- he's hit his stride.

Forget trying to modify attitudes, he says, this is too difficult to measure and may not lead to behavior change. Focus on modifying behavior -- it's measurable and closer to your real goals. This is how Fogg kicked-off the morning. Here's how he says you can do it.

The exact words you choose on the Web can have a huge impact on behavior. Finding the right combination of words takes testing and a focus on the action.

Jimmy is looking for a law school. For the last 10 years, he's been an electronics engineer at a very innovative company. He's realized he enjoys working with his company lawyer to file new patents and thinks he could be a good patent lawyer himself, especially with his high-tech engineering background.

Jimmy was excited about exploring schools. With us peering over his shoulder, he started searching Google for a local school, finding one that he recognized as having a great reputation.

Reaching the landing page of the school's site, he told us he had three questions he needed answered: Does the school go into enough depth on intellectual property law, especially patents, to make Jimmy happy? Would Jimmy find the school affordable? What does it take to complete a law degree through evening courses?

Unfortunately, the site didn't help him with his questions.  While there seems to be a "concentration" on intellectual property law, he couldn't tell how much depth it went into or the expertise of the instructors. He knew there must be a section that talks about tuition and financial aid, but he couldn't find it. Moreover, he couldn't find any detail on the evening program, especially how big the class load was and whether it’s practical to do while working.

Jimmy was the perfect prospective candidate for the school, yet he ended up considering looking elsewhere because the site had failed to address his tasks.

A good link has no time for small talk or niceties. It acts like a signpost, like a promise. With a good link, what you see is what you get.

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.

Success on the Web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.

The key to web success is to stop thinking about organizational information and start thinking of customer tasks.

You want to grow your business, and raising its profile in the community seems like the perfect strategy to get more visitors to your website. But, be warned, if you launch a public relations campaign prematurely you could be doing more harm to your business than good.

Before you start pitching media outlets and bloggers, there are a few things you need to consider.

Web teams often think progress can't be made because "it's always been this way." By challenging tradition you can find that it's not as immovable as it seems.

IKEA changes its font to Verdana. This is not likely to result in a massive drop in sales.

The most effective web marketing is having a website that is useful, simple and fast.

The truth is, most online readers don’t care much about grammar, spelling and punctuation as long as they get the information they need. With that said, good grammar does build trust in your organization. So does proper spelling -- so proofread your text and ask a professional copywriter to look it over if at all possible.

Here are some of the many tips I give our clients during my popular “Writing for the web” workshop.