How to read minds and influence people
Knowing what your customers are thinking is the first step towards making them happy. But how do you know what’s in their heads (without being Derren Brown)?
I’m some way closer to being able to read my website users’ minds than I was this time last week – thanks to two unrelated events which turned out (maybe supernaturally?) to be related after all.
The first was Gerry McGovern’s masterclass on web management. An inspiring, often amusing rallying call to public sector web managers to manage their sites properly: by identifying the top tasks users come to the site to do, and testing and re-testing those tasks continually to improve user satisfaction.
That’s a crude summary of a packed day’s course which has left a big impression on me. (If you get the chance, go). Among the many points which hit home were these:
- your website visitor is horribly impatient, even irascible, and 100% focused on a single task: find X or do Y
- in this mood, your website visitor is not going to think laterally – if they’re looking for ‘procurement’ and you’ve written ’suppliers’ they won’t even see the option is there
- using the right words in the right places is critical, so people can find the content in the first place (by searching and navigating) and understand it when they get there
- failing to get this right is almost worse than having not tried – an incomplete customer task is very bad PR*
- web managers (unlike other shopkeepers) are physically distant from their customers and more closely aligned with head office concerns and language – an imbalance which needs to be redressed proactively
(*Incidentally, writing this just reminded me of a visit to WHSmiths last Saturday – a non-virtual example of this customer service sin: chaotic, frustrating, and probably not long for this world).
At the second event, a meeting at Google, I heard about some incredibly useful tools for finding the right words which will help me put some of McGovern’s ideas into action. Most of these were new to me and might be to you too:
- The Wonder Wheel – explore a clickable mind map of the most popular related search terms from the results page of any Google search by clicking ‘Show options’ then ‘wonder wheel’. Great for a quick hunch-check or visual demonstration to your big cheese of how strongly one thing connects to another in the audience’s minds.
- Google Keyword Tool - type in a search term and see a long list of related searches and their relative popularity right now, or enter a URL to get rich keyword recommendations based on your site’s (or some other site’s) content. This does what the wonder wheel does plus a bit extra, in more depth and detail.
- Google Insights for Search - compare the relative popularity of search terms over time, correlate peaks and troughs to news events, and see suggestions for related popular search terms. Oh, and make funky embeddable real-time graphs like the one below.
- Google Ad Planner – enter any URL to see the demographics of that site’s user base, the things they most frequently search for on Google, and the other sites they visit based on all the data Google gathers from various sources. Wow. (And a bit Bwah-ha-ha).
- Insights for audiences and YouTube insights – eye-popping insights on video consumption and searches by different demographics, and (for logged in YouTube users only) amazingly useful graphs showing the levels of audience interest in any given video rising and falling as it plays, based on user behaviour while watching (pausing, rewinding, giving up and doing something less boring instead).
These tools are all free, enormously powerful and allow you to do seriously useful things beyond just buying up keywords for SEM. Like, just for starters:
- check why a particular page might not be performing as well as expected
- prove a point to a content author about the impact of organisation-centric language
- build a campaign (or write a better brief to a PR agency)
- identify sites your target audience is most likely to be using and place your ads there/send the digital engagement boys round (but less aggressively than that sounds, obviously).
Now shouldn’t you be crossing my palm with silver or something? I accept chocolate coins.
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Comments
Use the same terminology and words in copy that your customers use – so true. Your point about ‘if you have written procurement and your customers are looking for something labeled ’suppliers’ they are going to get impatient and hazy and the customer delight in experience begins to vanish in the process. This is what they call ‘proper microcopy’. More on Microcopy from Bokardo – social web design project is here –
http://bokardo.com/archives/writing-microcopy/
I assume it is related reading for readers of this article. Nice points about usability in the McGovern seminar!
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
Nice, useful stuff. McGovern does have his knockers, but he does get straight to the point. Its always good to have a healthy dose of pragmatism from him.