I arrived at PodCamp Toronto after the lunch break today; “PodCamp” is a bit of a misnomer since this unconference now covers all sorts of social media.
My first session of the day with Brian Cugelman on the psychology of websites was a bit of a disappointment: too much of a lecture and not enough of a discussion, although there was a huge crowd in the room so a real discussion would have been difficult. He did have one good slide that compared persuasive websites with persuasive people:
- They’re reputable
- They’re likable with personality
- They demonstrate expertise
- They appear trustworthy
- You understand them easily
- What they say is engaging and relevant
- They respect your time
He went through some motivational psychology research findings and discussed how this translates to websites, specifically looking at the parts of websites that correspond to the motivational triggers and analyzing some sites for how they display those triggers. Unfortunately, most of this research doesn’t seem to extend to social media sites, so although it works fairly well for standard websites, it breaks down when applied to things such as Facebook pages that are not specifically about making a sale or triggering an action. It will be interesting to see how this research extends in the future to understand the value of “mindshare” as separate from a direct link to sales or actions.