Probably the biggest advantage of speaking at conferences is that it helps you establish stronger relationships with the other speakers. A side benefit this time was that Roger Dooley handed me his new book Brainfluence: 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neuromarketing.

Some of the highlights:

• Time “wants” vs. “shoulds.” When most of us think of the future we see ourselves as people who exercise, eat right, and act responsibly. However today most of us want chocolate and to watch TV. So if you’re selling vitamins or gym memberships, promotions should focus on great long term deals which sell to the person we want to be. Big discounts when buying a six month supply of vitamins, or a 12 month gym membership. When you’re selling impulse items focus on how quickly you can get the item to the user. This is why supermarkets start you out at fruits and vegetables and sell you candy bars, soft drinks, and gossip magazines at the counter.
• Free beats almost free. Amazon’s free shipping deal led to a large jump in sales. Except in France. Turns out the French site had altered the program to offer ‘One Franc’ shipping (about 20 cents). When they dropped it to free they saw the same benefit as the other countries. [I think there’s a larger point. There’s a huge difference between being something and being almost something. Many of us consider ourselves rationalists and moderate. But the human brain often seems to react to three compartments: ALL, SOME, and NONE. And even a penny puts you in the SOME category]. Dooley gives one exception where you should go with almost free: when you’re trying to dissuade the people who don’t need the service (and who are of little value to you) from participating in the deal.
• Serving hot beverages makes you seem warm. Cold beverages don’t. [Speaking for the minority that don’t drink coffee, offering me hot chocolate would definitely warm me up].
• Tell people they can trust you. Just adding “you can trust us to do the job for you” to the bottom of an ad caused people to rate the firm higher in every category: fair price (7%), caring (11%), fair treatment (20%), quality (30%) and competency (33%).
• Don’t price in round numbers. When we hear a price of $500 we wonder if it should really be $400. $499 is a better price not because it starts with a 4, but because we instinctively perceive it as a more exact value of the object. [I’ve been pricing in round numbers. I’m going to stop doing that.]
• On a website, the first 50-milliseconds are crucial. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was right about some things. We reach extremely quick first impressions and then filter all subsequent information through a confirmation bias. [BTW, Google recently announced that they’ll be releasing algorithm updates that take into account what a user sees in the first 50 milliseconds.]
• Credibility before claims. First convince people that you’re credible, then make your claims.
• Women (and pictures of women) affect men. Who knew? But Dooley gets specific:
  • Short term thinking: Viewing an image of an attractive woman makes a man more short-term oriented. In a controlled experiment a bank found that putting a picture of a pretty woman on their mailing significantly increased the number of men who took out loans. “The education levels and income of the customers did not affect the performance of the psychological features.” In other words, successful and educated men are just as dumb as the rest of us.
  • Sexy images hurt brand recognition: Sexy images generally reduce men’s ability to remember the brand. It seems their minds are elsewhere (or unavailable) [Though I think some companies like GoDaddy found ways to counter this.]
  • Romantic priming: Romantically primed men show off by buying visible things. Romantically primed women show off through visible altruism.
  • Peacock Effect: When around women, men instinctively feel a need to demonstrate power and competence.
  • It’s in the eyes: Men rated pictures of women as more attractive if their pupils were dilated. Dooley refers to this as a sign of arousal, but Daniel Kahneman refers to this more generally as a sign of engagement.

Use it only for good

What to do with this information? Well, you can just view it as a Defense Against the Dark Arts course, and try to be more aware of how people may be using your instincts against you. I appreciate that Dooley instructs readers to use this power only for good, though of course he can’t actually enforce that. It can be a thin line between manipulating someone and satisfying their psychological needs. But ignorance of neurological principles is probably not better for us than knowledge of what makes us and others tick.

The book is presented as 100 2-3 page lessons like “Simple marketing for complex products” (give buyers a simple reason to buy your complex product). He takes some of the best ideas from authors and researchers (I think 5 lessons are from Dan Ariely) and puts them into engaging and informative action items. It was a fun read that gave me some good takeaways.

“… the number of times that other search results are selected after a particular search result is selected (referred to as post-pogosticking) is also tracked. This pogosticking information may be used to improve search result ranking …”

Yahoo! Patent Application, filed November 6, 2008
hat tip SEO by the Sea, Blind Five Year Old

“Post-click SEO is going to become a larger part of the equation, blurring the line between SEO and traditional design and UI.”

Search PogoSticking & SEO, Blind Five Year Old, Nov 14, 2008

G-Bounce = Bad

When a user, let’s call her Susan, clicks on your site’s listing in Google you may think that your job as an SEO is done. But assuming you want more clicks from Googlers, you’re just getting started.

You may think of Susan as your user, but as far as Google is concerned, Susan is their user. They’re counting on you to treat her right, and they’re anxiously awaiting her return.

The next time Google sees Susan they may:

• Ask her directly about her experience with you by providing a +1 button and sometimes a “Block this site” link.
• Look at:
• How much time she was gone.
• How she came back (Back button?)
• Whether she then clicked on other links from the same search query.

• Link freely to relevant content on other sites. If you can’t satisfy your user, make sure he clicks onward, and not back to Google.
• Don’t get ranked for pages / search keywords where you’ll disappoint your user. For example, if you don’t actually have McDonalds coupons, you may not want to rank first for that term.
• Look for bad keywords. Mark went through a site’s analytics and found they were getting traffic from people who Googled “XYZ reviews.” It was a perfectly good page, but it had the text “No reviews” on it, which was causing it to rank on a term for which it couldn’t deliver.
• Go to a new browser, do a search that brings up a typical page on your site, and see what kinds of things might send you flying back to Google. A pop-up asking for your e-mail address? A flash intro? Overwhelming ads? Can’t quickly find the content area? Ugly site? Panda has made these practices far more expensive.

No, this isn’t a spin on “Take my wife, please.”

Rena Reich

Today’s Answer of the Day informed me that it’s Ada Lovelace Day, the day to honor Ada Lovelace by pledging to post a tribute to a woman in technology today.

Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked with computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Men had already figured out how such machines could be used for math. Ada’s insights were in ideas of how such machines could be programmed for other applications such as composing music and creating graphics.

So I’d like to recognize Rena Reich today. She taught herself programming, wrote functions to integrate dictionaries and encylopedias into Answers.com,  and eventually founded her own wiki company, starting with The Pet Wiki. Doing some programming herself and working with others she put together a great site, and she shares her experiences and learnings on her blog.

Ada Lovelace didn’t invent the Analytic Engine, she figured out clever ways to apply it to enhance the human experience. That’s been Rena’s goal. I wish her continued success, and I wish all of you, especially the women developing and applying technology, a happy Ada Lovelace day.

I’m making my SMX speaking debut on Sunday at SphinnCon. And next month I get to present at SMX Toronto.

Speaking at SMX Toronto

Just learned that a perk of speaking and blogging about it is I get to share a 15% discount code to SMX Toronto, so just use (REICH15 [update: for SMX Toronto 2011 use discount code GREICH11] when registering.

Vanessa Fox, who was named Best Moderator in Best of PubCon, will be moderating my SphinnCon session. A few hours ago she finished wrapping up SMX West in San Jose by speaking at a similar session on  Social Media, Search, and Reputation Management. Our session is Online Reputation Management and I’ll be joined by Sam Michelson, Shira Abel, and Dan Gerstenfeld.

At SMX Toronto, I’ll be speaking at the Real Time Search, User Generated Content and Social Networks session. Jeff Quipp will moderate, and I’ll be with Barbara Coll and Rob Garner.

My presentation will be about Using Q&A sites to Grow Your Business & Reputation. I’m looking forward to it! Quite nervous, though. I think my biggest challenge will be keeping my speaking speed under 200 words per minute. Though I wonder. Would that be a good gimmick? Doing a minute of the presentation at my full speed? Would be fun, like those old FedEx commercials. Only downside is nobody would understand a word I’m saying. Though sometimes that’s a good thing. :-)

Post Script: The SphinnCon presentation went pretty well. Quite nervous at first, and apparently I was too loud. But one of the other speakers told me how happy she was that she didn’t have to follow my presentation, so I thought that was a pretty cool compliment. Now I can learn a few lessons and give a better presentation in Toronto. The video of My SphinnCon presentation on YouTube, thanks to Lea Aharonovitch.

It's not about you

I got the following e-mail (names have been replaced):

Subject: Meeting with Joe – Discuss our award for Best SuperWidget

I wanted to share the news that AcmeWidget is the 2009 QTZ Award Winner for Best SuperWidget.  I’d like to schedule a call with you to review some of the successes we’ve had in 2009 and how these lessons might be applied to your business.

Let me suggest a rewrite:

Subject: Meeting to discuss how our award winning SuperWidget can help you

QTZ just named AcmeWidget the Best SuperWidget of 2009 because of how companies used it to grow their social networks. I’d like to schedule a call to discuss how AcmeWidget can help you grow your business.

The first rule of relationship building is to focus on your potential partner.

We actually met this company last year. They came to a meeting with a bizdev guy itching to do a deal and their founder who was itching to brag. Several of us sat in the room stunned as the founder hijacked the meeting to repeatedly tell us how awesome his company was. The meeting might have ended with us getting close to a deal. Instead it ended with us swearing that we would never get anywhere near this company again, partially because we didn’t trust them to be considerate of our interests, and partially because we never wanted to be stuck in a meeting with him again.

If you need to talk about yourself, get a therapist, or a dog, or a blog that you don’t care about. Don’t sabotage your business because you can’t control your ego.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/ / CC BY 2.0

Oracle Rapid Rise

Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only growing by a responsible and impressive 50% annually, his competitor would take the market.

For the longest time, I smugly thought: We’re profitable, our sales are rising, we make terrific products, and our customers love us. So what do we have to worry about?

Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore …  in Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Ingres.

“What set Oracle apart from Ingres,” Moore writes, “was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres ‘accepted’ 50 percent growth.” Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.”

Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?

Not every market rewards the fastest company to critical mass. And sometimes the company that reaches critical mass first (Geocities, MySpace) can’t hold it. And I think Spolsky is panicking a bit and reaching some uncharacteristically (for him) mediocre conclusions.

In the post Spolsky was talking about his excellent FogBugz software, which we use and enjoy (as much as one can enjoy bug tracking software). But I wonder how this point applies to his niche Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. Will there be a winner in the Q&A space? Will the Oracle (and I’d say Wikipedia) model hold there? That is, do you achieve critical mass with high quantity and keep working feverishly to get the quality to catch up? Or do you grow slowly with high quality working in tight knit communities? Will the Q&A space always live according to Spolsky’s “Google is our site’s homepage” rule, and if so, does that make it easier for many players to co-exist?

Spolsky’s post is provocative. If it’s true, the winning move in the Q&A space is to continue growing as fast as we can, while killing ourselves to keep increasing the quality.

What do you think?