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Twitter continues to explore and appraise long-term revenue models. For the time being, Twitter’s primary focus is to build and nurture a thriving and indispensable community. Equally critical is the company’s ability to steer engineering and marketing efforts towards developers to empower them to extend, evolve, and enhance the overall Twitter experience for the vast landscape of discerning users as well as those new members who have yet to realize its potential.
In July 2009, we were introduced to Twitter’s new monetization strategy. The company veered its attention and resources towards businesses, initially releasing a series of documents and use cases to help companies, large and small, embrace the capacity and techniques for connecting with customers, prospects, and peers directly in Twitter. Then in August, Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone revealed that the company’s initial revenue would funnel from businesses seeking a more meaningful return tied to performance metrics. Its developers would soon follow, creating dashboards and sCRM (or SRM) systems to scale engagement and monitor key performance indicators.
Now, we are starting to see the plan and the development come into focus. On December 14th, Twitter announced that it was testing features designed for businesses, starting with a service designed to humanize brands and organize team-driven conversations. The company also rededicated its commitment towards building features as well as new APIs and frameworks specifically for business engagement and metrics.
“Contributors” is indeed a step in the right direction. For example, my good friends running the @GMBlogs account can now save precious characters by removing their IDs directly from the tweets – focusing on valuable content instead. The same is true for any number of brands in virtually any industry. Contributors connects people to the people behind brands, facilitating human connections and setting the foundation for invaluable relations and relationships.
According to the Twitter post announcing the project:
The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.
The functionality of contributors will be fully supported by the API and is designed to enhance Twitter business apps, such as CoTweet and HootSuite. It is expected to roll out on a limited basis in BETA to targeted partners and business users to “kick the tires” and provide feedback to improve the service and expedite a formal release. This feature is one of several in development according to the company.
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Influence can be defined as the power exerted over the minds and behavior of others. A power that can affect, persuade and cause changes to someone or something. In order to influence people, you first need to discover what is already influencing them. What makes them tick? What do they care about? We need some leverage to work with when we’re trying to change how people think and behave.
But there’s a problem. You won’t be able to meet and get to know everyone. You won’t have the luxury of learning their life history and what they hate or love. In the online world, people are ghosts. They drift into your website, showing up only as a number in your traffic statistics. Who are these people that come in to your website? Who is viewing your content and checking out your products?
If you don’t know the answer to all these questions, how are you going to influence them? The solution is to find and analyze general patterns of human behavior or thought. These patterns are indicators of how most people operate: by learning them you would have acquired the tools to exert influence over them. You don’t need to know everyone personally to understand what drives them and what they love or hate.
I recently read Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click by Susan Weinschenk, a book about how our online behavior is influenced by both conscious and unconscious thought patterns. I found it fairly interesting because it provided some scientific explanations to tactics that many marketers have been using for the longest time.
At only 130 pages long, the book is a very easy read because its tailored for the average person and not specialists. The downside of this is that it only offers a very general overview of brain science and how it relates to websites.
Contrary to its name, it also talks more about psychology than general web design/usability. If you’ve read Robert Cialdini’s work or other books on persuasion tactics you would easily recognize many of the concepts mentioned in the book.
While I would preferred a lot more depth on some topics covered, it did offer a handful of helpful tips you can implement immediately to improve your website. I thought I’ll do a quick summary of these tips while adding in my own unique analysis and comments.
But before we begin looking at what you should do on your website, you must first understand how your brain works.
Trium Brain Model – We Have Three Brains, Not One
The trium brain model is a theory developed by Paul MacLean in the 1960s to explain how the human brain has evolved. This simplified understanding of the brain became an influential paradigm amongst psychologists and some neuroscientists. As the name suggests, we don’t have one brain but three. These are all layered on top of each other and were developed during different stages of evolution. They are as follows:
- The old brain. Also known as ‘R-complex’ or reptilian brain. The old brain is primarily concerned with your survival. It scans the environments for threats and benefits. It controls instinctual survival behavior and is also in charge of autonomic functions such as heart beats, digestion, movement and breathing.
- The mid brain. Also known as the Limbic System or mammalian brain. The primary seat of emotions, memories and attention. This is where your emotions are produced and where positive or negative feelings arise. The mid brain includes the amygdala, which is involved in connecting events with emotion and the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory recall and converting information into memories.
- The new brain. Also known as the neocortex. This is the logical part of the brain that involves rational thoughts, thinking skills as well as language and speech processing.
According to this theory, we are only fully conscious of our new brain, the neocortex. But our mid brain (limbic system) and old brain (reptilian brain) are largely unconscious. Our unconscious is incredibly efficient, smart and useful. Neuro-scientists have estimated that our five senses receive 11 million pieces of information every second with our conscious brain only processing around 40 pieces. The rest is being assessed by the unconscious automatically.
The unconscious brain helps you to determine what you should pay attention to with your conscious brain. Your decision-making behavior is greatly influenced by the unconscious brain. According to Weinschenk, the best website is designed to talk to all three brains, both the conscious and unconscious.
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