Digital Business Psychologist
Graham Jones Happy people mix with happy people. Wow – hold the front page…! That’s one of the conclusions to a major study from the University of California and Harvard Medical School, published in today’s British Medical Journal. The researchers looked at people in a particular (offline) social network around Framingham, Massachusetts. …
Goldman Sachs has announced today that it is “thinking about” running an Internet bank. Hang on a minute – I thought they were a bank. Indeed, their web site says, for instance, “Goldman Sachs offers comprehensive wealth management services, including private banking products and services, to our high net worth …
You have probably never heard of Pownce, yet its name is plastered all over the Internet this morning – including in highly respected publications like the Financial Times. Pownce is a social networking site which has bitten the dust. It has been bought by a blogging company called Six Apart …
People are getting confused over the benefits of email marketing according to a new report on “customer engagement“. The study shows that 45% of businesses say they have not done email marketing to any great degree because of budgetary concerns. Now, with the recession beginning to bite and budgets being …
Researchers at the Chartered Institute of Management (CIM) are reported to have discovered that most companies are failing to embrace the Internet. Indeed, around one in every eight companies admit to imposing “curfews” on Internet usage, preventing employees from accessing the web at particular hours of the day. Are they …
Researchers at Hewlett Packard have worked out why some people do well online and others don’t. The study looked at contributions made to YouTube. Why do some people post loads of videos on YouTube and others give up? It’s an interesting question and relates to many other areas. For instance, …
Employees at Woolworths wake up this morning not knowing if they are going to have a job much longer. Not the kind of news that 25,000 people want just a month before Christmas, but sadly their company has gone into administration. Woolies owes its creditors some £385m – a debt …
Online shopping has fallen by 4% over the previous year, according to the latest comScore analysis. Of course, this is only to be expected – consumer confidence is at its lowest ever, the economic news is depressing and people are losing their jobs day in, day out. However, it’s easy …
If you think your business can survive the recession – think long and hard. The world’s biggest bank had to be baled out by the US Government yesterday, the historical Lehman Brothers has disappeared and leading car makers are on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, even Google is in trouble. …
Users of your web site are less likely to return if your site breaks or doesn’t work properly. People get frustrated by slow loading, by the addition of technologies that work only in certain circumstances or where your web site is simply too technologically “clever”. The latest “gadget survey” by …
Internet marketers are busy trying to sell more and more online as the recession starts to take hold. They are beefing up their web sites, they are trying to gain more traffic and they are advertising like crazy in a bid to bolster their sales. But these are all the …
Readers of web sites do it quickly; they take a quick glance, get the gist of what is being said and then move on. Few people spend hours poring over every last detail of your web site or blog. To be sure those people understand, you need to aim your …
Shoppers make irrational choices; that’s a conclusion you can draw from new consumer research from psychologists at the University of Chicago School of Business. The study looked at the influence of numbers on buying choices. It found that people chose things in a non rational way. For instance, when shown …
People aged over 40 are often amazed by what is happening online. Sometimes they find it difficult to consider things the way those born in the 1970s do. For instance, people under 30 tend to distrust corporates and they also seek the best solutions for what they want to achieve, …
Look at the statistics for web usage and you soon discover that the most popular web sites in the world are those which are focused on specific brands. Search terms also tell a tale or two about the importance of brand. For instance, the latest figures on search popularity show …