Poor Amy Winehouse eh? Fancy being an international star and being booed off stage. How rude. Or you might think it is rude to ask people to pay you and then turn up to entertain them, apparently drunk. Either way, what is clear is that the audience at the Belgrade concert is unlikely to forget the evening. The night that Amy came a cropper on stage in Serbia is likely to be the stuff of dinner party conversations for years to come. “I was there and I booed her,” people will proudly be saying. However, what is interesting is that if the concert had gone ahead “normally”, without any apparent problems or difficulties, the chances of people remembering very much about it are much slimmer.
It seems that when negative emotions are triggered we are able to remember things more clearly than when we feel positive about them. Indeed many of our “flashbulb” memories are for things which are negative – the 9/11 attack, the day John Lennon was killed, the morning Princess Diana died. Big events, big memories, big negatives.
New research suggests that when we have a negative emotion it actually helps us remember things more clearly than when we are in a purely positive mood. Allowing your website visitors to think good things about you, then to give them some kind of negative as they are about to leave your page, could actually work in your favour. They may well remember more of the positives, it seems. Leave people with good content and there’s an almost “that’s nice” reaction and the memory fades. Give your readers some nice content then shock them at the end and you could well increase the retention of what you are writing about. Being nasty, it seems, works – at least in terms of memory.
There are several ways you could do this, of course – some more annoying and troublesome than others. You could, for instance, merely make some kind of negative comment at the end of your positive piece. Or you could be even nastier with pop-up boxes that appear on exiting a web page and which will not disappear until your visitors have clicked on the appropriate link. You could also have a negative sound which arises upon the closure of a web page. For instance, if you have a website which is all about business growth and when someone closes your page on that topic they get the sound of a baby screaming.
Of course, you may not wish to go this far…! But you may wish to consider triggering negative emotions towards the end of your content; that way, according to this new study, people will be likely to recall the positive content at the beginning of your article. To make them remember your good stuff, you need to be a bit nasty at the end it seems. After all, we all remember that Simon Cowell supports his artists, is immensely loyal to the good ones and is a significant contributor to charities. But I doubt if we’d remember much of that if he wasn’t Mr Nasty from time-to-time. So, if you want your website to be remembered for all the good stuff it does, perhaps you also need to be prepared to be nasty as well.
Gettit? You good-for-nothing, lazy, selfish wotsit…! Oh, have I gone too far? Never mind; you’ll remember it now….!
Related articles
- WATCH: Amy Winehouse Booed After ‘Disaster’ Performance (huffingtonpost.com)
- New Marketing Data Shows More Content Means More Leads (hubspot.com)
- How to Stop Visitors From Leaving Your Website in Three Seconds (grahamjones.co.uk)
