The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This post deals with visitor interaction with vacation sites. The vacation sites in our system tend to be high end type vacations (luxury hotels offering safari style expeditions in Kenya, for example) and that's going to play into my end analysis of what we learned with this tool. This report covers a seven day cycle, 27 Sept - 4 Oct 07. Visitors, Truth, False Information and Personal Information, Part 1 provided a report for a general B2B sampling of sites NextStage monitors for clients. Part 2 dealt with B2C sites and Part 3 with blogs. Part 4 dealt with a glom of sites and provided a general overview of visitor honesty on several sites in our system. Part 5 dealt with online insurance providers and Part 6 with online medical and pharma sites.

One of the first things I noticed about these results is that they're kind of a polarity mirror of what we saw in Online Medical and Pharma, Truth, False Information and Personal Information, Part 6. Basically more people are exaggerating or outright falsifying information on these sites.

It's worth noting at this point that these charts and the equations behind them aren't simply "Truth v Fiction" because the parts of the brain-mind system that register truth and fiction are also the parts that determine if we feel comfortable or uncomfortable in a given situation. I went with a "comfortable v uncomfortable" analysis of online medical and pharma sites because that interpretation made more sense in conjunction with other data we had gathered on those sites. Here, in high-end vacation sites, a "truth v fabrication" analysis makes more sense.

What we told the clients (the numbers varied across the sites so I'm being general here) is that lots of visitors might not be able to take part in their vacations and probably know this viewing the sites. However, these sites, their intense graphics, fluid narratives, videos of people taking part in arctic expeditions, hiking over glaciers, trekking in the Andes, whitewatering in who knows where, allow many visitors to dream and while I won't debate whether or not dreams are truth or fiction, I will offer that dreams are wonderful ways to escape and seeing yourself in a given situation is necessary when deciding if an extreme vacation is for you.

In other words, people fabricating, imagining, dreaming, is probably a good thing on these kinds of sites. Fortunately and as mentioned before, it's possible (with other NextStage tools) to zero-in a bit more and know if visitors are purely fabricating or merely allowing their imaginations to run wild.

And now to recapitulate the explanation of how to read these charts:

Deceitful behavior is both a boundary and defense mechanism. Think of a cat poofing its tale, a dog bristling it's back, things like that. These mechanisms engage to make the animal appear larger than it is. It is, in a sense, being deceitful, making itself appear larger than it is, to protect itself or its territory. Thus, when there are no forms to fill out, et cetera, and ET is picking up fabricational behavior it is an indication site visitors are uncomfortable with the website they're navigating. Similarly, truthful behavior is an indication visitors are comfortable with the website they're navigating.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• The NextStage Reports arc
• The Visitors, Truth, False Information and Personal Information arc

• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.