Internet Psychologist
When I was small, there was a TV programme called “That Was The Week That Was“. It was the first satirical programme on TV and set the ball rolling for later series such as “Not the Nine O’Clock News” and “Have I Got News for You”. These programmes poke fun …
On Christmas Day, shortly after the presents are unwrapped and the chef for the day goes into the kitchen to start boiling the sprouts, the Internet will burst into life. For the past few Christmases, online activity in the UK has peaked between 10am and 6pm. That’s the eight-hour gap …
The other day I received an email asking me for a “link swap”. The person who sent the email lavished me with praise about my website before saying they’d love to have a link on such a site. If I gave them a link, they promised me they’d return the …
The other day during a consultancy session with a food industry client one of the directors asked a fairly common question that I get asked a lot. When is the best time to post things on social media? The glib answer is, “when your contacts are using the networks”. However, …
How much time do you spend each day staring at a blank screen wondering what to type? Much more than you think is the answer. Years ago, “Writer’s Block” used to be the preserve of fiction authors who suddenly found their typing dried up. Unable to carry on writing they …
This week I was at a conference where I was spending the day “in surgery”. The idea was that I would have a series of 15-minute appointments throughout the day. People booked an appointment with me to talk about their web presence and to help me “diagnose” their issues and …
The other day I was running a masterclass for a client who had asked me to help their younger staff understand the boundary between the professional and personal use of social media. The people attending were all recent graduates and were about 23 years old, on average. They had all …
This week presented me with a problem I was not expecting. A month ago I wrote an article for a client while I was in a hotel, away at an event. I stored it on Google Drive and sent my client the link to the file. A day or so …
Probably the most popular question I get asked is “how do I get more traffic to my website?” It is, of course, the wrong question. The real question that people are asking is “how do I get more of the right kind of traffic of people that are going to …
On the way into Reading from my house, there has been an Aldi supermarket trading happily for several years. It has been on its own on the edge of a housing estate and apparently doing well. Several months ago, however, the wasteland next to it started to be developed. A …
The chances are you attend business meetings most weeks, if not most days. You also know the problem, don’t you? Most of those meetings that you visit are time-wasters. You probably sit there frustrated that someone is droning on about something inconsequential. You might even get bored and check your …
Twice this week I have been asked the same question: what should I pay for a website? Twice this week I have given the same answer: that’s the wrong question…! The reason it is the wrong question is that it is treating the website as though it were a “one-off” …
The other day I was lecturing at the University of Buckingham on the potential for new technology to disrupt business. The students are studying for a degree in entrepreneurship, and they are all running “live” companies as part of their studies. They were keen to discover how they could predict …
This week Twitter decided to roll out an experiment in which certain people (I’m not one of them) were provided with the opportunity to write Tweets that are twice as long as normal. The company has increased the maximum length of a Tweet from 140 characters to 280. To understand …
Here in the UK, the coming week is “Recycling Week” where a national campaign will invite us all to recycle more. In spite of increased opportunities to recycle, with more roadside collections than ever before, it turns out that Brits are recycling less. And there is a clear psychological reason …