TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

psychology

How to justify Marketing, User Experience and Psychology in 30 minutes

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Rather than justifying the role of marketing, and particularly psychology in business success myself, here’s a great video of Rory Sutherland at a Google Zeitgeist event last year.

 

In an era of data analysis and ‘social media scientists’, it helps to remind me why an absolute reliance on data and numbers makes me feel rather uneasy. There’s a belief that somewhere in the numbers is the one ultimate answer that will guarantee business success.

It also underlines the mistake that many companies make in seeing marketing and the customer experience as a low value add-on to the intrinsic value of the product or service they are selling – and how they can compound that mistake by always sacrificing those areas first when looking to cut costs.

It’s why I’d rather think of myself as an aspiring digital marketing psychologist than a scientist.

Is TweetPsych the oddest or scariest new Twitter application…

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Social scientist (or possibly mad professor) Dan Zarella has now invented what could be a particularly contreversial Twitter application: TweetPsych.

Taken from the main site:

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.

There’s a bit more detail on his blog, going into what RID and LIWC actually are.

The interesting bit is that compared to most other forms of writing and communication, Twitter is probably the closest to being able to express yourself with little or no thought – it’s simple, quick, and you can hide yourself behind a fake persona or a protected account.

The worrying thing is that it opens up your Twitter account to analysis by  friends, families and employees with little or no knowledge of linguistics and profiling.

In fact, the first comments on Dan’s post are discussing using NLP to influence people to puchase via advertising, the difficulty of interpreting the results, and the fact that it could easily be misused.

And without casting any aspersions on Dan’s skills, the possibility of an error appearing in an automated system isn’t unheard of…

Without being able to intepret my results effectively, feel free to explain them to me! Is it good that ‘Positive Emotions’ comes in at No.5, or bad that No.14 appears to be ‘Sad’.

Why we fall for ‘Don’t Click This’

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A recent spam attack on Twitter was entirely based around spreading a link with the words ‘Don’t click this’ – which of course, plenty of people did.

It led quite a lot of people to ask why anyone would click on a link which says ‘Don’t Click This’.

And that reminded me of a programme by Derren Brown on this very subject, with his usual mix of psychology, illusion and trickery.

Annoying Channel 4 in it’s infinite wisdom has disabled embedding of the very clip I wanted to share.

So ‘Don’t Click’ this link to view a video Channel 4 would rather people didn’t see, spread, share and use to promote the television series they paid to commission. Sadly the whole show isn’t available, including the later demonstrations with adults, and more explanation of how exactly he puts the ideas into the subject’s head in the most suggestive way.

I’m sure there are more clinical examples in the psychology field – which reminds me why Rich Millington recommended some psychology reading and blogs in his Online Community Building Manifesto.

So make sure you don’t subscribe to my RSS feed, don’t recommend this post via Stumbleupon, Digg, or Delicious, and don’t retweet it!

Thoughts on the Online Community Building Manifesto

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Despite a very kind email from the author, Rich Millington, I’ve been a bit remiss in not posting about his Online Community Building Manifesto (link to the PDF). (As a bonus, he’s also on Twitter).

It’s a call to change the way we think about online communities, and one that’s shared by a few people, myself included, but Rich has expressed it with a nice clarity.

We know about technology and we love the internet, but we (in general) don’t know half as much about the people forming communities and about ways to get a better understanding of what they’re doing and what their needs are.

He also raises good points about balancing what we learn about technology with other disciplines including psychology and sociology (with some helpful links to some interesting sources) – I won’t say any more in an effort to encourage you to go read it and leave him some comments.

He’s not alone in his thinking, but the benefit of the manifesto will come if it helps to join some of the minds in this space.  I’d include people like Dave Cushman, Mark Earls, Neil Perkin, and others who regularly appear in my RSS feeds but whose names have deserted me for the moment…which I shall rectify with a bit of an overhaul of my link lists shortly. It’s something that has been implemented in Seth Godin’s private Triiibes group (somewhere I need to spend more time if I can).

And there’s a real tangible personal benefit to social media/community/tribes people – technology is constantly shifting, and being an expert in Facebook or Twitter will start as an asset, become normal and then be old-fashioned and replaced by something new – but the lessons learnt about people will transfer to every network and device. They’ll evolve, but the changes with each evolution will work across platforms and devices and won’t rely on php, flash or javascript!

That’s why I posted on ‘Why Belief Matters‘ back in November, and used football and motorsport as examples. It’s the ‘why’ and the ‘what for’ of any community, and it comes from the people, not from the technology!

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