
The purpose of this research was to form baseline psychographic comparisons between non-English and English sites from the same group as well as moderate to less moderate to hardline information and news sources. What spurred it? Hearing then Secretary of State Powell at the UN describe what had been found during the invasion of Iraq. There were things he stated as quotes from people in the region. I do not speak any Middle Eastern languages and I have studied the psycho-cognitive and -emotional biases of the peoples in that area. His quotes could not have been conceptualized by people from that area, meaning there was no way his quotes were quotes, nor even translations of quotes. His "quotes" were perfect for a western audience (as indeed it turned out they were intended to be) hence my curiousity led to this study (thanks to Stonewall for conducting it).
Anyway, the end goal was to look for conceptual collisions between such groups as Hamas, Hezbollah and the west (ie, "If everybody wants peace, why is there so much fighting?"). I can't share the findings directly and will share some of the more "cultural marketing" things we learned.
As I have no Middle Eastern language skills I wondered if this language group has more emotional clarity than european languages.
One site that used facial images incredibly well to direct visitor attention was Mehr News while Alalam.ir used all images, text placement and colors to convey authority.
One site that might be considered amusing or even laughable by western standards, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memoes, made generally excellent use of the few images it displayed and contained postings (it's a blog) that would do a good job of focusing readers to thoughts, concepts and ideas that the author(s) desired.
One site that demonstrated cultural awareness even in how it loaded its webpage on the browser was Sayyid Ali Khamenei while International Quran News Agency, a site that serves several language and cultural markets, showed moderate to good visual sensitivity to the different culture groups it served.
I think the big take-away from this study is that peoples served by these sites can take a real, genuine and active interest in the content provided because the layout of the individual screen elements encourages an emotional response. This isn't the case -- at least not in kind or degree -- with their USA counterparts such as CNN, WSJ, WhiteHouse.Gov and so on, where cultural training dictates a largely unemotional response to news.
Well, probably more correctly there's this belief that western audiences won't accept direct emotional appeals. That may or may not be true. The Middle Eastern sites also don't make direct emotional appeals, they simply know how to appeal to their audience's emotions far better than their western counterparts.
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