EMOTION: The Key to Unlocking Your Audience

Marketing is a human interaction even online. Or at least it should be and the better we understand the science behind those interactions, the better we become as marketers and the better we become at engaging our audiences on- and off-line.

In a recent piece on Fast Company dot com, excerpted from the book “The Power of Communication – Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty and, Lead Effectively”, Helio Fred Garcia* makes a point that is extremely important for any marketer involved in web communications and marketing.

His lead proposition is that “the default to emotion is part of the human condition.” In his book he presents an argument that has some powerful implications for those of us in the mundane world of business and need to affectively connect with our audiences.

The science behind his discussion is very sound, and to better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience – whether online or off – to do, we need to have a basic understanding of the physiology involved.

Helio explains that “The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other.”

He goes on to say that “the primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. Within the limbic system, there is a structure called the amygdala.” This is the part of the brain we need to fully understand.

Definition for the non-psychology/med majors out there . . .

According to the Gray's Anatomy textbook the amygdala are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.

From a physiological and psychological standpoint, when given any type of stimulus, the amygdala turns our emotions on. We can’t help it. It takes place instantaneously, without having to think about it.

As an example, we find ourselves responding to a threat even before we’re consciously aware of it. Think of jumping back when we see a sudden movement in front of us, or being startled by the sound of a loud bang – commonly called the “startle response”.

Now as marketers, we can use the knowledge that the human brain responds instantaneously to positive stimulus without thinking about it. A couple of good examples come to mind. For instance, we tend to smile back when someone smiles at us. Or how we are immediately distracted when something we consider beautiful enters our line of sight.

This part of the brain is the crucial to understanding an audience’s emotional response, and how to connect with an audience. It plays an important role in salience, what grabs and keeps our attention. In other words, attention is an emotion-driven phenomenon. If we want to get and hold an audience’s attention, we need to trigger the amygdala to our advantage. Only when we have an audience’s attention can we then move them to rational argument.

To illustrate this point, Helio gives a narrative about how he starts his class sessions when he explains that he has “. . . become somewhat notorious in the programs I teach at NYU for the ways in which I start each class. I teach all-day sessions on Saturdays, and as the 9 a.m. start time approaches, most students are still milling about, getting settled and chatting with each other. At precisely 9 a.m. I touch a button on my remote mouse and play a sudden blast of very loud music. Most of the time it’s the chorus of “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas, but to keep the element of surprise I sometimes vary the selection. After a 10-second burst of very loud music, I have every student’s undivided attention. I then lock in the connection: I smile, welcome them, thank them for investing a full Saturday in developing their careers. Only then do I begin the class. I have hijacked their amygdalas. We need audiences to feel first, and then to think.”

Five Strategies for Audience Engagement

He then suggests five specific strategies to engage with your audience. When communicating with your audiences you need to take the amygdala into account in determining how the content is structured and how the audience is engaged. In person, this is far easier to establish. Online is more presumptive and requires more forethought and persona planning, but it can be done.

1.       Establish connection before saying anything substantive - And remember that the connection is physical. This means pictures and graphics online or using the technique of asking for the audience’s attention, if only with a powerful and warm greeting, followed by silence and eye contact in person or by clear and well defined ‘next step’ directions online. The key is to make sure the audience isn’t doing something else or distracted by a purely extraneous element on the web page so that they pay attention.  

2.       Say the most important thing first - Once you have their attention. The most important thing should be a powerful framing statement, that single statement or value proposition that will control the meaning of everything that follows. An important thing to remember – again with the psychology of the human mind in mind - that frames or framing statements must precede facts. It’s a matter of how we process, retain and engage as humans. 

3.       Close with a restatement – Reiteration is power in communications: As you close your discussion, simply restate your powerful framing statement that opened your presentation. 

4.       Make it easy to remember. Keep in mind how hard it is for people to read or listen, hear, and remember all at the same time. One proven method is to repeat key points. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “But I’ve already said this. I don’t need to say it again.” Or, “I don’t want to say it again and seem repetitive.” We need to constantly repeat the key themes, within any on- or off-line presentation and in general as a matter of organizational strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re bored with saying it or feel that it’s repetitive. The audience needs to hear it, again and again.

As a general principle, people need to hear things three times if they are to even pay attention to it. And because any given audience member at any time may be distracted or inattentive, they are unlikely to hear, see or attend to everything that is presented to them. So you need to repeat key points far more than three times to be sure that everyone has heard, seen or perceived them at least three times.  

5.       Follow the rule of threes. This is incredibly important and one point that I consistently see violated in online and web communications. Have three main points. But no more than three main points, no more than three topics and no more than three examples per topic. Remember to group the thoughts in threes, words in threes, and actions in threes.  

Helio concluded by noting that “The default to emotion is part of the human condition.” The amygdala governs the fight-or-flight impulse, the triggering of powerful emotions and the release of chemicals that put humans in a heightened state of arousal and awareness. Humans are not just thinking machines. We’re feeling machines who also think. Most importantly we need to realize that we feel first and then we think. As a result, marketers need to meet emotion with emotion before they can move audiences with reason.

* Helio Fred Garcia is the Executive Director at Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership and author of the book “The Power of Communication – Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty and, Lead Effectively”

How Does Google Work

This morning as I sat down to my computer, it occurred to me that searching on the web has become such an integral part of life today that even the name of the leading search engine has become a verb for finding information – Google. The web has been a great innovation and has served – whether by design or by accident – as one of the fastest and most reliable means of distributing knowledge and information.

 

It is fast and fairly efficient. Well, for the most part anyway.

But have you ever wondered what takes place after you enter your search words into your favorite search bar and hit enter? It is something that we all take for granted today. You type in your query and in a couple of seconds, an over whelming list of possibilities is displayed – on the magnitude of millions – “there are 33,800,000 results for your search”.

 
But how does it all work? What happens? What are the steps that take place? And where does it all happen? Google Works

Here, then, is a guide to what happens during a typical Google search — now, of course, with automatic spell-check.

Query Box: It all starts with somebody typing in a request for information about the safest dog food, what time the D.M.V. closes, or what the prime rate is in China.

Domain-Name Servers: The software for Google’s domain-name servers runs on computers in leased or company-owned data centers all over the world, including one sitting in a small town in Eastern Washington. Their sole purpose is to shepherd searches into one of Google’s clusters as efficiently as possible, taking into account which clusters are nearest to the searcher and which are least busy at that instant.

The Cluster: The request ­continues into one of at least 200 clusters, which sit in Google-owned data centers worldwide.

Google Web Server: This program splits a query among hundreds or thousands of machines so that they can all work on it at the same time. It’s the difference between doing your grocery shopping all by yourself and having 100 people simultaneously find one item and toss it into your cart.

Index Server: Everything Google knows is stored in a massive database. But rather than waiting for one computer to sift through those gigabytes of data, Google has hundreds of computers scan its “card catalog” at the same time to find every relevant entry. Popular searches are cached—held in memory—for a few hours rather than run all over again. That means you, Britney.

Document Server: After the index server compiles its results, the document server pulls all the relevant documents—the links and snippets of text from its massive database. How does Google search the Web so quickly? It doesn’t. It keeps three copies of all the information from the internet that it has indexed in its own document servers, and all those data have already been prepped and sorted.

Spelling Server: Google doesn’t read words; it looks for ­patterns of characters, whether English, German or Sanskrit. If it sees your requested pattern a thousand times but finds a million hits for a similar pattern that’s off by one character, it connects the dots and politely suggests what you probably meant, even while it provides you the results, if any, for your fat-fingered query for “hwedge funds.”

Ad Server: Each query is simultaneously run through an ad database, and matches are fed to the Web server so that they’re placed on the results page. The ad team is in a race with the search team. Google vows to deliver all searches as quickly as possible; if ad results take longer to pull up than search results, they won’t make it onto the page—and Google won’t make money on that search.

Page Builder: The Google Web server collects the results of the thousands of operations it runs for a query, organizes all the data, and draws Google’s cunningly simple results page on your browser window, all in less time than it took to read this sentence.

Results ­Displayed: Often in 0.25 ­seconds or less.

So, the next time you hit your search box, remember that while we may take it all for granted, it is a rather awe inspiring process that takes place at a mind numbing speed. Not something to take for granted.

CreateYour Own Facebook Timeline Cover

If you were wondering how to build out a real cool looking facebook timeline cover, well our friends at HyperArts have let the cat out of the bag.  Here is their new tutorial with template and examples that I thought was well worth sharing.

http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/how-to-create-a-cool-facebook-timeline-cover-photo-and-profile-picture-combo/

Social Ads are 55% More Memorable [Study]

by Pam Dyer on March 13, 2012  

Social Ads are 55% More Memorable [new study]

One of the main pitches social networks make to brands is that placing ads on these platforms gives marketers the ability to leverage the power of users’ networks to share content, creating brand awareness and improving sales. There have been a number of studies on this topic, including one from Nielsen in 2011 which found that 76% of U.S. consumers trust recommendations from personal acquaintances more than other forms of advertising. Facebook rolled out some new premium advertising products at the end of February that emphasize harnessing these friend connections to make advertising innately more social and help brands accomplish this goal — Facebook advertisers will now be able to distribute ads to fans of companies in news feeds, the right-hand column, and in a log-out message; these ads will also be in the news feed of its mobile app.



On the heels of this introduction, Nielsen has released the results of a new study showing that social ads are recalled 55% more than those that don’t allow people to share ad content with friends. “Social ads are those served to users who have friends that are fans of or have interacted with the advertised brand and prominently call the relationship out,” Nielsen says, “while non-social ads are served to the remainder of the Facebook population”. It should be noted that Nielsen is a Facebook partner, and has created the online system that enables Facebook advertisers to improve their campaign measurement effectiveness and online reach.

To measure how well social ads gain audience traction, Nielsen analyzed 79 Facebook campaigns over six months to see what, if any, advantages social ads offer vs. traditional ads. Prior Nielson research showed that online ads in general tend to be noticed and remembered overall, so the new data shouldn’t come as a surprise:



The current campaign analysis further demonstrates that social ads offer an advantage. Based on this data, marketers should consider leveraging ads with social content as a means to better utilize the power of the consumer networks that engage with their brands. It also serves as a reality check for marketers’ efforts to create more social connection points with their consumers, demonstrating that a well-executed social campaign better positions their brands to reach a larger group of prospective customers.

Here is a great piece by Deb Ford on Linked Local Network.

Many small business owners are faced with similar issues when tackling the subject of internet marketing. What actual value and ROI can I expect for my business? Do I use it alone or as a complement to my existing marketing plan? It’s likely that the company has a static website managed by the two person marketing department or your college nephew. Then recently you met with business friends and someone mentioned using Facebook and Twitter, along with some other sites to drive business. The good news is you are not alone. Statistics indicate that small businesses still are wrestling with understanding the benefit to the social media equation. Yet, social media can be a huge boost to your customer base with minimal expense and can be incorporated into an existing traditional media campaign.

To develop your presence, you have to think about your customers. The same thought should be given to creating a social media campaign as to your traditional marketing campaign. . . .

Read entire post . . .
http://linkedlocalnetwork.com/archives/802

A Simple Beginning
A Currated Content Blog Site
As a starting point I would like to define what this space will represent. This will be a safe space for an open and free-flowing conversation - mine and yours - about all things marketing.

There will be a particular focus on the 'modern' challenges facing the discipline of marketing, the new balance between the art and science of marketing that technology and innovation have thrust upon the entire marketing mix.