Internet Psychologist
Graham Jones People gravitate towards people like themselves. We all love people like us; anyone who is a bit different we tend to shy away from. It’s the same online – we tend to “hang out” in groups and clubs in places like Facebook and Ecademy where the people we meet are …
The People – a major tabloid Sunday newspaper – is to feature me this coming weekend as part of a spread on “keeping up with the Joneses”. It’s about inflation and I was interviewed as an example of a successful Jones….!
Experts in “usability” gathered in London today to discuss several issues surrounding this topic. The meeting had been called by TechSmith, the producers of Morae the leading usability testing software. It became apparent during the discussions that usability testing is often seen as something that is performed at the end …
Lance Armstrong, Tony Blair and Mark Zuckerberg all have at least one thing in common. They are amongst the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time Magazine. If you have been living in a time warp, Lance Armstrong is the world’s most successful professional cyclist who beat …
Online business owners need to target their offerings in a much more refined way. Evidence is mounting daily that Internet users expect web sites to be devoted to their specific needs. For instance, let’s say you offer software on task management. You could have a site devoted to managing tasks …
Writers who have physical trauma heal faster than people who do not write. Strange as it may seem, studies have shown that physical problems heal more quickly if you write down your feelings. No-one is quite sure why, but the evidence of a mind-body link is so great that even …
Your web site visitors can be manipulated. Indeed, successful web sites do this with great care. They lure you in, almost hypnotically, and get you to do whatever it is they want, such as buy something from them. Copywriting expert Joe Vitale is the pioneer of “hypnotic writing” in which …
Researchers at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California have just published their report on the consequences and benefits of children going online. However, embedded within the report are some interesting facts that every online business needs to think about. Firstly, the annual study shows …
You will make more money if you get inside each customer’s head; really get inside and start to think exactly like they think. We all know that marketing is about providing what people want, but new research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that we need to do much …
Google quietly changed it’s terms and conditions for advertising yesterday. Up until now, advertisers using Google AdWords have been banned from using the brand names of their competitors in their adverts; now they can. This has spawned all sorts of suggestions as to how businesses might capitalise on the change. …
Trainers are available on all sorts of Internet subjects. Want to learn how to do “SEO” (search engine optimisation)? well, there’s a course on it. Like to discover how to “monetise” your web site? There’s a course on that too. Perhaps you’d really like to learn about corporate blogging. Well, …
Your friends like you; honest, trust me, they do. If they didn’t like you, then you wouldn’t like them and, hey, you wouldn’t be friends. Web sites are the same; if they demonstrate they like you – by providing exactly what you are after – then you like them. It’s …
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, claims today that the technology is merely in its infancy. It’s almost 17 years since the first ever web site was published (6th August 1991), so you’d expect the web to be a spotty teenager. The first British newspapers can …
Some people are avid social networkers and build up huge numbers of “connections” and “friends” online. Take a look at Thomas Power, the Chairman of Ecademy, for instance. He has over 15,000 contacts in Ecademy and almost as many in LinkedIn. Does he really know all those people? If you …
BBC Radio FiveLive carried an interesting item on the news this morning from Sony BMG that they are making their entire back catalogue available as a “free to listen” service. Wow – that’s great, you might think. But this is another example of how big business still has not understood …