Irrational Conversion from a User perspective at #Searchmeet

On Saturday (28th of November) I held a talk at Searchmeet in Stockholm arranged by Per, Simon and Johan. They had done an excellent job finding speakers that would compliment each other in a good way and make this the best conference I have been attending for a really long time. No one seemed to be there to sell or overcome each other in the “I know the best” category. Simply excellent execution from start to finish.

Speakers during the day was Gary Beal from Vanguard SEO who held a presentation on the 12 SEO trends of 2009. Bo Tidelius had a interactive session on how one would market Ahlgrens bilar. Just before that Johan from Dinwebb, one of the organizers talked a bit about what they do. Post that group activity I took the stage and gave a session on the Value Ladder. More on that later. Then Cristoph C. Cemper from cemper.com took over and dished out a link building beating worthy it’s name. All speakers nicely molded into each other and there was a clear sense that this day was not like other days aiming to be this day. It was extremely nice, and I’ll leave you with that.

Irrational Conversion

My talk wasn’t very much about irrational conversion principles at all. First of all, it is a very complex topic to cover in a 20 minute session, and secondly it is probably only two people in an SEO crowd that get a hard on by listening to me getting side tracked by all ideas I get when talking on the topic. Instead I decided to recommend an excellent book on the topic – The Psychology of Economic Decisions by Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carillo. For this purpose you’ll only need to read the first chapter in Volume I. But for those of you interested in the intersecting space between psychology and economic theory, I suggest you read the rest these two have written as well.

Keep in mind that this is a highly disputed area of science and even though the research that supports these theories is highly accepted, there are still a lot of exceptions where these rules do not apply. Well…. they are in fact no rules at all, but they give you some insight into how the human brain works and how we make decisions about our money alone or in groups. Many times we find ourselves deciding over our own money in the wierdest and most irrational kind of way. We pay more for the same just to get it now. We get insecure and vulnerable. We feel threatened and pacified. However, our worst enemy when working with being rational in our economic decision making is our perceived well being. Anyhow, read the book. You’ll like it.

Presentation on the Value Ladder

Instead of digging any deeper into the actual theory base of the topic of the day, I started talking about how one can split conversion into several steps and that the user enters your site with a specific frame of mind that you need to take into account if you want to convert him or her. This ladder was first introduced to me by this guy Henrik from Litium, but I have since then elaborated on it quite a lot and built it into a model for customer value and investment in time/money.

The video will be added (I’ll tweet when I add it) as soon as I get it. That way I do not have to transcript this whole session which would be a bit of a mess anyhow since I really don’t remember what I said. I might come out looking like a retard, but from what I could tell by the tweeted feedback, people seemed to get some entertainment at least :).

I enjoyed the railing discussions I had with the people at the conference. Please visit Searchmeet.se to find more info about who was there. I guess you know how to use google.com/translate right 🙂

Thank you all that was there today for a fantastic day! Connect to me on LinkedIn if you’d like a place to stay in touch easily.

//Jesper – who hasn’t had this many outbound links ever.. 🙂