My thanks to the reader that caught the repeat postings Are Visitors Interested in Your Content? (NextStage Evolution's Evolution Technology, Web Analytics, Behavioral Analytics and Marketing Analytics Reports for the BizMediaScience Blog, 7 day Cycle, Part 7) and Do You Know How to Persuade, Influence and Convince Your Visitors? (NextStage Evolution's Evolution Technology, Web Analytics, Behavioral Analytics and Marketing Analytics Reports for the BizMediaScience Blog, 7 day Cycle, Part 8). Mea Culpa.
I had all the math, etc., worked out for a post on persuasion, influencing and convincing visitors, how and why it's measured, and it simply never got into the blog. I'm posting it here with my apologies. You can read the other entries in this NextStage Analytics arc as well.
Serendipity, ever abundant in my life, presents itself again. This post comes the day after Jeff Chester, Founder and Exec Director, Center for Digital Democracy, on Democratizing Behavioral Targeting and his concerns about influencing visitors without their knowledge.Interesting, isn't it?
Have you ever had a conversation with anybody about anything and not been attempting to influence them or be influenced by them? I mean, literally any conversation, any exchange of information, is a pas de deux and because homo sapien sapiens is essentially a herd animal we spend a lot of our time either looking for leaders or wanting others to see us as leaders. How do we determine that someone is a leader? By how well they influence us without our knowing they've done so. How do we demonstrate leadership? By our ability to influence others without their recognizing it as such.
And that brings us to the peat and motatoes of this post, persuading, influencing and convincing visitors that what you offer, what you do, your products and services are better than anybody elses'.
During the seven day cycle covered by the NextStage Analytics arc the following Rich Personae, their population density on the BizMediaScience blog and their population density in visitors to all sites in our inventory as a whole was true:
| Rich Personae | Population Density on BizMediaScience (%) | Population Density on All Sites (%) |
| V21 | 18 | 6 |
| V22 | 18 | 6 |
| A13 | 14 | 4 |
| V3 | 11 | 16 |
| V19 | 11 | 10 |
| V5 | 7 | 4 |
| A2 | 3.5 | 3 |
| A3 | 3.5 | 2 |
| A21 | 3.5 | 5 |
| K18 | 3.5 | 1 |
| K22 | 3.5 | 0 |
| V18 | 3.5 | 4 |
What we learn from this is that better than 50% of the BizMediaScience visitor population (V21, V22 and A13). These three Rich Personae share several traits and the major one is that they're all focused on the present. People with these three personalities tend to focus on the "now" far more than they think about the past or future in their daily routines.
Hmm...that was during a period when I tended to post about current events more than much else.
Hmm...this is worth exploring in a bit more detail, me thinks...
While I'm thinking, we can conjecture that the way to reach the greatest audience is to write posts that focus attention on what's happening that day. The challenge with that is that the nature of what I post about isn't "daily" type stuff. Yes, some current events lend themselves to my format and it doesn't happen often. Usually I prefer to take a longer view of things.
Hmm...this really has me thinking...
Anyway, one thing I've learned is that all those As and Ks and Vs are interesting to clients and only after they've turned the information we give them into money.
Not sure if I ever mentioned this before. I've talked with several notables in the web analytics community to learn what analytics methods they use on their own sites. The universal answer was "None."
What?
It seems that web analytics professionals don't use their own tools to study their own sites. Frankly, this confuses me and I'd enjoy learning their reasons for not doing so.
Another digression, that.
The Rich Personae shown above (also known as "Personality Types") provide some very quick and useful clues about how to interact with site visitors to increase their satisfaction, keep them coming back, etc.
For example, if I provided more images that dealt with "now" I could influence and persuade over a third of this blog's audience. That's all it would take to have them agree with whatever I was suggesting (that's a slight simplification with emphasis on "slight"). Convincing the majority of visitors of something could be easily achieved by including a chart or graph with an audio component drawing attention to features of the image and explaining its derivation.
This goes back to something NextStage has been telling clients for years; when you know how someone thinks and you know what they're thinking about you can encourage them to think about that thing the way you want them to think about that thing.
Circling this conversation back to the beginning, is that propaganda or advertising? And where's the line? Can it even be drawn?
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Conferences:
- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
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