Charismatic behaviours can be learned and perfected by anyone. From high-stake situations such as a business negotiation to a thesis defence, presentations are generally not natural and can be deeply nerve-wrecking. Here are some tricks that are easy to adapt yet can make your ideas get heard and respected.

How do these tricks work?

Without realising it, our bodies send out thousands of signals every minute. These signals are part of the millions of bodily functions controlled not by our conscious mind but our subconscious mind. If we have the right mindset, all our non-verbal language becomes charismatic by itself. Knowing your internal world starts with one key insight upon which all charisma is built: your mind can’t tell fact from fiction. As Cabane writes: “This is the one dimension of your internal world that can help you get into the right charismatic mental state at will, and almost instantly.”

The placebo effect can be remarkably powerful. Just one example of hundreds would be a study by Ellen Langer, a Harvard University professor of psychology. She gathered elderly patients in a nursing home and simply surrounded them with decor, music, clothing and food from their twenties. In the following weeks, physical exams showed tighter skin, better eyesight, increased muscle strength and higher bone density. Because your mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, by creating a charismatic internal state your body language will authentically display charisma and confidence.

Because your mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, by creating a charismatic internal state your body language will authentically display charisma and confidence.

The Tricks

• Practice.
  This helps you build muscle memory and confidence. Practice alone and with a small audience. Let them point out any confusing aspects.
• Before starting the presentation, pause for three beats, making eye contact.
  Nothing rivets the audience’s attention like this kind of silence.
• Your presentation should always have one main, simple, crystal-clear message, supported by three to five key points.
• Support each point with an entertaining story, interesting statistic, concrete example, or vivid metaphor.
  In fact, audiences often remember first the story, and only second the point the story was making. Also, get graphic. The brain thinks in pictures.
• Make your presentation short and entertaining. Watch the value of each sentence.
  It’s all about them. Use the word you as often as possible. Try and match your verbs to your audience: lead or initiate for businessmen, build for engineers, craft for artists.
• Slow down.
  When adrenaline is rushing through your veins, your brain speeds up. This is why everything around you seem to be happening in slow motion. With your brain going hyperdrive, you tend to speak faster, but your audience is operating at normal speed.
• Arrive early and walk the stage to visualise and own it.
  When you later enter the stage again, it already feels familiar.
• Use a wide, well-balanced stance and take up as much space as possible on stage.
  This shows confidence. Limit superfluous gestures that distract the audience’s attention.
• Speak as if you’re sharing a secret with the audience, telling them something special and confidential.
  People love secrets.
• Use smiles and fluctuation to warm your voice.
  The author even suggests imagining your listeners having angel wings.
• Keep eye contact for one to two seconds per person.
  This is possible even with audiences of hundreds. If you are having trouble with it at first, then find people who are listening — smiling or nodding — and make eye contact with them.
• Pause frequently and deliberately to show confidence and add drama as well as give yourself a chance to breathe.
  After delivering a key point or telling an impactful story, pause to let your audience take it in. Same after using humour. If you’re having trouble pausing, try color-coding your notes with, for example, blue for longer pauses, green for shorter ones, yellow for smiles.
• If you mess up, imagine someone giving you a hug.
  This releases oxytocin the same way a real hug would.
• Don’t run off the stage after finishing. Pause for three beats and thank the audience.
  As the composer Gabriel Fauré put it: “The pause at the end, right after the last note, is so critical that without it, the entire performance is ruined.”
• No Q&A in the end, if possible.
  People remember primarily beginnings and endings. It’s hard to have a Q&A as energetic and compelling as the main speech.

What (Colour) to Wear? *

Wear something that you can breathe in.

• Red conveys energy, passion. Wear red to wake up an audience.
• Black shows you’re serious and that you won’t take no for an answer.
• White exudes honesty and innocence, which is why defendants choose it often in courtroom.
• Blue emits trust. The darker the shade, the deeper the trust.
• Gray is neutral, the quintessential colour of business.
• Orange and yellow are not recommended because they are the first to attract the human eye, they are also the first to tire it.

The most important thing about performances is getting in the zone before going on stage. For this, take the most of the placebo effect. You could, for instance, visualise familiar and beautiful surroundings and talking to someone who inspires or encourages you (Gandhi, Oprah, Steve Jobs, your beloved grandmother). Listening to music is also an effective way of getting into the mood. Don’t forget to relax your body and breathe deeply. Good luck!

*More about color psychology in my upcoming article.

How to Give a Charismatic Presentation was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• How Extroversion Became a Cultural Ideal?
• Extroversion in Today’s World
• When Collaboration Kills Creativity at Work and School
• Genetics and Free Will

Kafka, Stephen Wozniak, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. K. Rowling, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Al Gore, Jon Berghoff, van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page…

This is an article about these people and not only. As a matter-of-fact, this article is about the 33–50% of the people in the world who might not enjoy small talk or being observed, have a rich inner-life, notice details, prefer staying at home with a nice book at weekends, enjoy eating alone or are used to constantly hearing “Why are you so quiet today?”. These people are called introverts and they are tremendously undervalued in a world that cannot stop talking.

Before we start looking inside people’s mind (yes, literally, their brains), we should agree on something. Shyness is not the same as introversion. Shyness is a fear of social disapproval or humiliation, introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Why these two are mistaken for being same, is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists debate to what degree). The mental state of a shy extrovert sitting quietly in a business meeting may be very different from that of a calm introvert — the shy person is afraid to speak up, while the introvert is simply overstimulated — but to the outside world, the two appear to be same.

How Extroversion Became a Cultural Ideal?

To understand the shift, we could look at Dale Carnegie’s story. Once an insecure farmboy, son of a bankrupt pig farmer, inspired to become a great speaker, makes his impossible dream come true and transforms himself into a speaking champion. In the time when corporate America is booming, he founds the Dale Carnegie Institute, educates other businessmen and writes many best-sellers, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” among them. Carnegie’s story reflects a cultural evolution that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever how we act at job interviews, how we court our mates and raise our children.

Before the rise of industrial America, the ideal was serious, disciplined and honourable. What counted was not so much the impression one made to the public but how one behaved in public. But now the nation quickly developed from an agricultural society of little houses on the prairie to a “the business of America is business” powerhouse. Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. Everyone had to be a performer.

Extroversion in Today’s World

During the cultural shift in the 20th century, we were urged to develop our personality to outshine the crowd in an anonymous and competitive society. Now we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. A good way to understand whether equating leadership with hyper extroversion is reasonable is to look at the attitudes and values of the institution that identifies and trains some of the most prominent business and political leaders of our time — Harvard Business School (HBS).

Education

A Chinese student at HBS said: ”In the US, conversation is about how effective you are at turning your experiences into stories, contrary to how it works in China.” This also reflects their values at class. The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. If you don’t have all the facts should you wait and act until you’ve collected as much information as possible? You risk with leading your people into a disaster. But if you show uncertainty, then funders won’t invest, you lose the trust of your people, and your organisation can collapse.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organisational behaviour professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits — that are, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information — make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident — the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

Business

People tend to follow those who initiate (any) actions. A highly-successful venture capitalist said that today it is important to distinguish great performers from great leaders when pitched by young entrepreneurs. Contrary to HBS model of vocal leadership, most top CEOs are actually not charismatic. The ranks including Charles Schwab, Bill Gates, Brenda Barnes, James Copeland, CEO of Sara Lee, Darwin Smith etc. “Most leading in a corporation is done in small meetings and it’s done at a distance, through written and video communication”, said HBS professor Quinn Mills. We are at a point where the outside shine is more valued than the inside world that is actually valuable in leading an entreprise.

Religion

Same values tend to be honoured in religion. An evangelical pastor Adam McHugh from one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in the US Saddleback Church, explains the situation: “It’s not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the divine; it must be displayed publicly. As an introverted believer, you start questioning if god values you & if your experience with god is strong.”

Politics

“When I went to Congress in the middle of the 1970s, I helped organise the first hearings on global warming,” said Vice President Al Gore in the Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth. He was puzzled that no-one listened. Gore is an introvert, but Congress is full of extroverts — exuberant, fearless, persuasive — who are unlikely to feel alarmed by a photograph of a tiny crack in a distant glacier. He finally got his voice out when he teamed up with whiz-bang Hollywood types and created the mentioned movie.

If you’re a sensitive sort, then you might be in the habit of pretending to be more of a politician and less cautious or single-mindedly focused than you actually are. I’m asking you to rethink this view. Without people like you, we will, quite literally, drown.

When Collaboration Kills Creativity at Work and School

“Innovation — the heart of the knowledge economy — is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organisational consultant Warren Bennis. We elevate teamwork above all else. But scores of studies have shown that best work comes from solitude.

Over 70 percent of today’s employees work in an open plan office. Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. A study of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity.* Open offices, brainstorming, teamwork and other aspects in productivity is discussed more widely in my other dedicated article.

Speaking on the fly

It happens every now and then at work or school that you have to attend a sudden meeting or give a presentation on the go — express your knowledge suddenly and on the spot. If you’re an introvert, you might feel uncomfortable in such situations. So happened with Ester, a tax lawyer in a large law firm, who didn’t quite perform at such presentations. Her colleagues, in contrast — all of whom happened to be extroverts — were spontaneous talkers who decided what they’d say on their way to the meeting and were somehow able to convey their thoughts intelligibly and engagingly by the time they arrived. At first, she thought that her colleagues are simply more knowledgeable in tax law, but over time she gained experience, became more senior and still couldn’t do it.

The reason behind the difference lies in introverts’ and extroverts’ preference for stimulation: introverts’ optimal levels of arousal are simply lower. Overarousal interferes with short-term memory and attention — key components of the ability to speak on the fly. And since public speaking is an inherently stimulating activity — even for those who suffer no stage fright — can find their attention impaired just when they need it most.

Suggestions

In his memoir, iWoz, Steve Wozniak writes:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

We should actively seek out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which leadership and other tasks are divided according to people’s natural strength and temperaments. The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show. We should also create settings in which people are free to circulate, a great example of such offices would be Pixar Animation Studios and Microsoft where casual encounters are encouraged yet people can enjoy a private office when they want.

Genetics and Free Will

”Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” -Robert Rubin, In an Uncertain World

The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signalling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond. The more reactive a child’s amygdala, the higher his heart rate is likely to be, the more widely dilated his eyes, the tighter his vocal cords, the more cortisol (a stress hormone) in his saliva, the more jangled he’s likely to feel when he confronts something new and stimulating. These are the foundings of Kagan’s study launched in 1989. He documented those kids growing up and found that the high-reactive babies turned out to become reserved quiet teenagers. Therefore, whether you become a sensitive person as an adult, is destined since birth.

Introversion and extroversion, like other major personality traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness, are about 40 to 50 percent heritable. We are born with prepackaged temperaments that powerfully shape our adult personalities.

The Orchid Hypothesis by David Dobbs tells us that the reactivity of high-reactive kids’ nervous systems makes them quickly overwhelmed by childhood adversity, but also able to benefit from a nurturing environment more than other children do. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show.

Can an Introvert Become an “Extrovert”?

A recent fMRI study shows that when people use self-talk to reassess upsetting situations, activity in their prefrontal cortex increases in an amount correlated with a decrease in activity in their amygdala (the part of the brain that controls emotions, such as fear). But it doesn’t switch it off altogether: unwarranted fear might come back in stressful situations. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only up to a point.

We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only up to a point.

This means that one born as an introvert, can teach himself to become, for instance, a great public speaker, but at the end of the day, cannot change as much as to become fully extroverted.

Finding Boundless Energy

If you’re an introvert, you can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call “optimal levels of arousal” and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before: know when to leave the party, learn to say no to long meetings, not apply to the sales assistant job and so on.

Find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status, contrary to extroverts. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths.

You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless.

Introverts and Extroverts in a World That Doesn’t Stop Talking was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The way we organise the majority of our work today is strongly limiting the potential of our brains: office plans, working hours, meetings and presentations, workstations, and brainstorming. But businesses and schools want people to flourish in terms of productivity, creativity, and originality. Why not start providing perfect working atmospheres by looking into the mountain of research done on the subject.

Workplaces

Although understanding how our mind works is still one of the most challenging and important tasks in science today, we can draw clear conclusions from numerous researches on work efficiency. We could, for instance, look into the work of an Estonian neuroscientist Dr Jaan Aru who has dedicated his career on understanding neuronal basis of consciousness. In his blog post on brain efficiency, he writes: “Work environments today transform our brains from a sportscar into a scooter.”

“Work environments today transform our brains from a sportscar into a scooter.”

Multitasking

The main reason why our brains become limited is information overload.

There are two monitors on your work desk. You check your phone again while chatting to your colleague simultaneously, but the email tab stays open just in case and oh a developer just asked something in Slack, you should answer right away.

The standard today is to multitask and always be available and online. Lots of information and lots of work to be done results in longer weekdays. The problem is that brain isn’t a great multitasker and what looks like checking your phone and chatting at the same time is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks which requires extra resources (sort of like javascript). This ultimately reduces productivity and increases mistakes up to 50 percent.

”Oh, an hour has passed and I still haven’t begun with my task!”

How to avoid this?

1. Concentrate on one task at a time. Turn off everything that might disturb (browser, Facebook, email, phone, Skype, and annoying colleague).
2. If you lose your concentration, take a break; stand up from your desk immediately. Dr Jaan Aru says in his book that creative ideas often strike us when we are relaxed, too.
3. It is recommended to switch between different types of work every 25 minutes. Ever heard of Pomodoro technique?
4. Write a task list every morning and always set milestones to bigger goals. Your brain will magically follow your wishes.
5. Do all the important tasks first. When your brain is not tired yet.
6. When you feel overwhelmed — meaning your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that does the conscious thinking, is tired from multitasking — sleep for 10–15 minutes.

Open-Plan Offices

I can hear you thinking: “Sure I can do that, but I can’t turn off my annoying colleague, because I work in an open-plan office!”. Over 70 percent of today’s employees work in an open plan office, definitely a trend among fancy enterprises and startups. But many don’t know that open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. There’s so much recent data out there that shows how they’re associated with high staff turnover, make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure.

Open-plan office workers are more likely to suffer from high blood-pressure and elevated stress levels and get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping their phone calls and spying their screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates, releases cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others. A study of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. That’s a lot of ugly proof.

Coding War Games

Coding War Games was an extensive research study that involved 600 developers from 92 companies. Each developer designed, coded and tested a program working in their own office. The results were astonishing:

• The best outperformed the worst by 10:1 and the median by 2.5:1.
• Attributes like years of experience, salary, time spent on programming etc had little correlation.
• Programmers of the same company more or less performed at the same level even if they never spoke to each other.

The reason is that top performers worked for companies that gave them most personal space: 62% of the best performers all said they had an acceptably private workspace. 76% of the worst said people interrupted them needlessly.

Lessons Learned

Backbone Entertainment, a video game design company in California initially used open office plan but saw that their programmers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. So they decided to change to cubicles. “We worried that in a creative environment people would hate that”, said Mike Mika, their former creative director. But instead people prefered they had the chance to hide away and concentrate.

Something similar happened in Reebok International when, in 2000, the company consolidated 1,250 employees in their new headquarters and assumed people would want to stay in an open office space with plenty of access to each other. Luckily, they consulted with their shoe designers first, who told that what they needed was peace and quiet.

The best solution would be creating “flexible” open plans, where the environment encourages casual meetings, yet provide private space for concentrations, such as in Pixar Animation Studios or at Microsoft.

Jason Fried, cofounder of the web application company 37signals asked hundreds of people (mostly designers, programmers, and writers) for ten years where they liked to work when something needed to get done. He found out that they went anywhere but their offices. That’s why in 37signals’ employees are not required to show up at work anymore, even for meetings. Especially not for meetings, which he calls “toxic”.

Meetings

Lone geniuses are out of fashion. Brainstorming is in.

The concept of brainstorming was invented by Alex Osborn during the 50s. His theory had great impact, and company leaders took up brainstorming with enthusiasm and brainstorming has stayed in high honour until this day. But there’s one problem with the idea: group brainstorming doesn’t actually work.

One of the first studies of 106 participants was conducted in 1963. Two groups had to produce ideas: one group in solitude, the other brainstroming together. The results were unambiguous. The group where everyone worked on their own, produced more ideas than the other. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality.

Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases. As the organisational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it: ”Business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

”Business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The only exception to this is online brainstorming, where everything is vice versa. Online, the results are the best, and the larger the group the better it performs. Same has been found with researchers. When collaborating electronically, the more influential work they tend to produce.

What often happens during meetings, is that some people stay passive. There are many reasons to it. A much discussed issue is that men talk louder than women, some people may be shy (evaluation apprehension), have a quieter voice, or might just be lazy (social loafing). Some of the reasons are discussed in my other article about introverts.

But why does brainstorming remain as popular as ever? Group brainstorming makes people feel attached. A worthy goal, so long as we understand that social glue, as opposed to creativity, is the principal benefit.

Leaders

The modern organisation, particularly in the Western world, is biased towards the extroverted profile. The bold, assertive profile is notably apparent within the Investment Banking world, which was at the heart of the Wall Street crisis in 2008. Susan Cain, the author of ‘Quiet’ believes that the crisis might have been easily caused by the dominance of extroverted deciders. She explains the biological differences: extroverts are more sensitive to dopamine, the ‘reward chemical’ released by the brain. This means that extroverts process information quickly, and act quickly. They are more likely to get ‘carried away’ with their momentum. In contrast, introverts process information more slowly, but are far less likely to be influenced by dopamine. In short, while they make decisions more slowly, they tend to be more accurate in their decision-making. The message is not that extroverts should no longer play a role in leadership, but rather that our leadership structures should be more representative of both of these personality types.

Schools

Schools understandably reflect the values of the business world. As a result, the school environments today can be highly unnatural. Everything from the noisy school bus, inharmonious canteen to group discussions and group work. There’s little time to create or think. The structure of the day almost guarantees that you end up with no energy, rather than feel stimulated.

Conclusion/ TL;DR

1. Don’t try to multitask, your brain isn’t capable. Instead, divide your day into 25-minute tasks.
2. Open-plan offices reduce productivity and make people unhappy. Give your employees enough private space for concentration.
3. If it’s creativity you’re after, ask your team to solve problems before sharing them.
4. If you want the wisdom of the crowd, gather it on writing electronically or on paper.
5. Brainstorming doesn’t increase creativity, nor produce more ideas.
6. Meetings are social glue and motivate people.
7. Remember that not everyone’s voice is always heard in business situations. More about this in my article about introverts.

Easy, right. Thanks for reading and have a lovely day.

Reconsidering Work Settings According to Science was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

13 April 2017 @ SpringHub, Tallinn
Words of wisdom told by Daniel James Coll from Tybridge Media

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. — Rudyard Kipling

Copy is writing to evoke action. It’s the most creative writing that you can do (that people are willing to pay for).

You have to know who you are aiming for

And you need to write to these people as you know them, you have to know what they love and what they do.
Who are they?
How do they feel?
What they do on a Sunday?
What do they dream of? Maybe you can give them a bit of this through the product.
Who do they love?

The consumer isn’t a moron. She’s your wife. — David Ogilvy (the godfather of copywriting)

You have to know what is the result to get

What’s the outcome you want? In business, it’s usually customers buying your product. You have got to evoke an emotion to get that result happen. If you want to sell your product, you have to care about copy.

Basic rules here

Don’t neglect your words. Don’t hope that someone else is better and leave copywriting to them for sometime later. Having no text is more damaging than having bad text.

In case English is not your first language, don’t worry. You can have someone check grammar afterwards, because the goal is to make the reader feel a certain way. Sometimes companies write in their native language and give the texts to professional translators later. I wouldn’t recommend that. Instead, you should write in rubbish English and ask someone to correct it, because translators aren’t copywriters and they may miss the point.

There are three dimensions in writing: simplicity, length, tone. A longer copy is more effective than shorter, it’s proven. People will read good copy from beginning to end.

How to get them to read it?

• Offer a secret or reveal a mystery; exclusivity. (“Here’s how you can increase your sales by 200%”)
• Empathize a problem, offering a solution.
• Focus on the benefits, not the features.
• Make them dare to dream.
• Position yourself or product as the key to all their problems, dreams, imagined needs, desired; however unlikely!
• Tip them over the edge to buy or subscribe with an unbeatable offer. (“Buy now and get 10% off.”)

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be creative, orginal thinker unless you can sell what you create. — David Ogilvy

Book Recommendations

• “Ogilvy on Advertising” — David Ogilvy (bible)
• “51 Helpful Marketing Ideas” — Drayton Bird
• “Persuasive Copywriting” — Andy Maslen

Copywriting (The Complete Overview) was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What I learned at a recent seminar from two lovely tech women from sem.lt.

Seminar on 11 April 2017 @Lift99 by Performance Marketing Agency.

- Indre Sizovaite, Inbound Link Building & Digital PR Team Lead
- Rasa Urbonaite, Head of SEO

Simply put, if you pay, you’re findable on Google. But paid sites get ~10% of clicks, 90% goes to organic search results. And that 90% brings in higher quality users, which means higher conversion rates.

Case Study — MailerLite

A great demonstrative example would be our work with the email marketing software MailerLite. Their market intended to be global and the goal was to get 30% better visibility on Google. Problems:

1. They had a small budget, yet mostly used Paid Search, meaning that the conversions were costly.
3. Low brand recognition, and high competition (MailChimp, Constant Contact).

The strategy we came up with to solve these problems:

Reveal Unicorn Keywords, Research User Intent

Remember that the stages in googlers mind are the same to general consumer decision journey: awareness, consideration, intent, decision. You need to assist the user in every step of the journey.

We talked to customer support to understand user’s intent and found out that users mostly want to find alternatives to existing brands, and are interested in email galleries/ examples, which is the consideration stage.

New Optimised Landing Pages

One simple solution was to add a comparison chart to our new landing page to respond to user’s intent.

Conduct Off-Site Optimisation

We used content marketing and amplification, actively participating in discussions and including useful links to Mailerlite if appropriate (forums, articles). We got 3000 visitors from 120 links. We saw the progress on Google Trends. Organic traffic and signups grew. We reached a 426% increase in organic search, 655% increase in sign ups from 2014 to 2016.

What Can You Do to Make SEO Work?

Understand How the Search Engine Works

Here’s Google’s own explanation.

Google has a list of trustworthy websites, where it starts crawling. Google discovers your new blog/ web through these sites. Google crawlers look at your content/ metadata/ web IA/ linking structure, load speed, code etc. This is parsing. After this comes indexing, which means that Google basically puts a “label” on your web, or puts it in a “box”, so to say. Note many different aspects of pages, such as when they were published, whether they contain pictures and videos, and much more is considered. Google’s third most important ranking factor is RankBrain, an AI with its Hummingbird algorithm. RankBrain might bring you down if you don’t satisfy your users.

There are up to 200 ranking factors and up to 500 algorithm updates a year. This means the algorithms change around 2 TIMES A DAY!

Know Some Technical SEO

a) Don’t use sub-domains, use directories
blog.sem.lt/site-mig vs sem.lt/blog/site-mig, because otherwise, Google thinks it’s a separate domain. Not even for your e-shop.

b) Smart keyword research
Identify user personas, identify the keywords they use using:
Google Search Console,
Google Suggest,
Answer The Public,
Semrush,
discussions in forums,
Google’s Keyword Tools (if you have an Adwords campaign),
Your competitors’ FAQ’s.

c) Map those keywords to your landing pages
Keywords that satisfy the same user intent only need one URL.

d) Google wants what your user wants
Content is secondary, has to match your user’s intent. Use answerthepublic.com for content ideas.

e) Metadata is still important
Titles and meta descriptions, the latter helps your click-through-rates (CTRs) but not ranking. Note that meta keywords don’t matter at all in anything, only reveals your keywords to competitors!

Get Links to Your Best Content Pieces

Link building consists of…
a) Choosing outreach strategy and tactics

b) Searching for topically relevant sites
Put them in a spreadsheet to analyse the list later.

c) Evaluating websites
Think about robots — backlinks, geography. Make sure you are adding your link to a healthy website. If you add your link to an unhealthy web, Google notices. Add backlinks to authoritative websites like Product Hunt, social media, and participate in discussions. Get and convert mentions of your brand name to links (query could be “brand -brand.com -twitter.com -facebook-com”)

d) Outreaching
Don’t add links everywhere, don’t exchange links, don’t be spammy.

e) Pleasing your users, always
Think about the user when adding topically related links, honest personal experiences, unbiased recommendations, helpful information, correct facts, engaging questions.

f) Be ready to invest a lot of time or money
And don’t forget to use moz.com title tool to check if your metadata is displayed in SERPs correctly. Use Similar Web Extension (expensive) to check out the traffic of your competitors. Check website’s technical issues using Google Search Console.

Latest SEO Trends

1. Voice Search
   40% of adults use once per day in the US. Google says 20% of all mobile searches are voice searches. 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. And then, if you’re not first, you’re not seen.
2. Position Zero
   9.5% of all search queries return answer boxes (source: seoclarity.net). It takes up a big part. If you want to get there, create good content with good formatting.
3. Mobile First Indexing
   Turn off Mobile Pop-Ups, think about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which are fast-loading pages for mobile resolutions.

Q&A

• How do one-pagers affect SEO?

If you want to rank good for many queries, you need to have many landing pages, not one.

I hope you got something new from this post! Enjoy the day and keep exploring Medium.

How to Beat Your Competitor Using SEO was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX Conference “UX TARTU”

Insight to the most notable UX Conference in Estonia in 2017 up to now. Held by Estonians, performed by Estonians in Estonian.

7 April 2017 | SPARK, Tartu

Lineup:
Taavi Kotka — Former CIO of Estonian government, Advisor for e-residency
Elmo Soomets — Designer and Team Lead aka Interaction Wizard at Mobilab
Andres Kostiv — UX Designer at Tieto Estonia Mikk Tasa — Design Lead in Velvet
Mikk Martin — Designer at Pro Ekspert
Heidi Taperson — UX Designer at Toggl
Tajo Oja— Design Lead at Fraktal

Untold Stories aka Fails as a Gov CIO by Taavi Kotka

Taavi Kotka entered the stage confidently as ever, wearing what could be called the “Silicon Valley uniform”, made the audience laugh in moments and started off with telling how today, the X-Road is still unique to Estonia. “Below Denmark, it’s still stone age”. His charismatic presentation was about the biggest mistakes learnt during the time they built it all up.

Mistake 1: Always search for a business case

At first, we, as entrepreneurs in the public sector, believed that a project always has the same path:
1. It starts with institutional goals: what, why, and the probability.
2. It has actual concrete results: KPIs & finances.
3. In the end, you learn from the mistakes made.
But in the public sector, they didn’t get it. In medicine, you can’t really measure results in such a way: does a human have a price?

Mistake 2: Measure, measure, measure.

We said that we should gather feedback. We should know how many users there are, whether they’re satisfied, what are the administrative costs per service, how much time customers waste on services etc. They said no. They didn’t want it. It’s notable to say that Tax Board fires people the most in Estonia, might even be around 100 people in a year. Well, this is a measure.

Measures help you understand what are your goals and build a road towards the result.

In 1994, you still had to wait hours to declare your taxes. We have gone a long way from this. All of the measures of Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications are public information on mkm.ee. It’s not a lot as you can see. Practically none of Estonian public services know what is happening inside their house.

Mistake 3: Monopoly equals no competition

2.6 is the number of times a user has a real contact with public services in a year. So, UX is actually a sketchy term in governmental institutions. You cannot expect users to learn the UI. Everything has to be automated. Examples:

1. When a child is born, you have to apply for child support. 100% everyone does it, but we cannot automatize it because the law forbids.
2. Declaring taxes is a multiple-page form online, although 95% of people changes nothing in these pages. Shouldn’t it be shorter then?
3. When you want to apply for paternity leave, you have to find it among the list of 80 services (it’s the 76th). Maybe we shouldn’t put all the services on one site, Eesti.ee? The Road Administration was a great example of how they got significantly more users after they separated their site. When I finally found the paternity leave form, it was too complicated to fill in, even for me, someone (almost) with a doctorate degree. (Also, did you know that you can put a casino restriction for yourself in Eesti.ee?)

Fighting such foolish rules, taught us something:

The best weapon against a monopoly is public shame.

In governmental institutions, nothing is more terrifying than a threat of getting discredited on Pealtnägija show.*

*Pealtnägija is a famous investigative TV program since 1999.

Mistake 4: We had a goal that a service has to be as fast as boiling an egg

You could now open a company in 15 minutes and as a result of this innovation, in 2013, VAT fraud increased by 30%. We lost 280 million euros. You could double teachers salaries with it! Starting from 2014, it’s necessary to declare VAT. We had to make this reform to cover up for the former mistake.

Mistake 5: Dialogue is broken between Government and Partners

We have broken systems, code is buggy, but we don’t really talk about it openly. Software engineering industry is not mature, so we have to create our own rules. We have to make them as a community.

IT development teams worry about server happiness, not user happiness.

My message to you today is to go and work for the country. It lets you think bigger and influence, there are more possibilities and money and it needs your work. The path is exciting. With e-residents, we have already increased the working age population by 3%. There are bigger and greater campaigns ahead.

Q&A

• How many UX people are there in the public sector?

Estonian gov outsources everything to private companies. They don’t have one specialist.

• What’s the motivation behind e-Estonia?

It’s the only way to survive.

How to burn documentation? by Elmo Soomets

The development cycle is like a telephone game. This is how information is passed on in our company:

Client -> PM -> UX -> UI -> Dev and QA -> Client -> User.*
*The parts in bold is where information is lost. It especially happens in UI -> Dev.

The problem here is information overload and too much documentation. This can be cut for example with UI mockups and guidelines. As a prototype is a good source of information to everyone, then wireframes might not be entirely necessary at all times.

Q&A

• How much do you have to convince someone that the design is good?

We respect client’s taste in design.
In the sales process, we always provide a visual solution.

Mobilab uses Zeplin for mockup versioning.

Design Thinking in UX by Andres Kostiv

The process essentially has four steps:

1. Research — interviews that shouldn’t last more than 45 minutes and job shadowing.

During interviews and job shadowing, don’t try to fill awkward silence.

1. Brainstorming together with the client and customer.
2. Prototyping. It’s basically insurance for programming.
3. Delivering. This includes changing their old workflows, too.

Tieto’s experience design Tiex.ee.

Q&A

• How did you participate in and what was Lexus’ virtual sales assistant?

We needed to sell the car before it was out. In two minutes, the user can play with their virtual catalogue and get an experience.

• How can you use postit brainstorming to define a problem?

It helps you test/ redefine the problem.

• How is prototype testing useful?

It helps you quickly and efficiently find problems and risks that you otherwise would find only in many dev iterations. It helps your team prioritise tasks.

• Are you satisfied with your job?

It gives me influential power to help people.

UX vs CX | Adapt or Die by Mikk Tasa

Today, we live in a world with refrigerators having Twitter, smartwatches on everyone’s hand and beacons spotting smartphones. This is called “Digital Darwinism”. Although we are surrounded by such enhancements, we still often encounter situations where entrepreneurs cannot offer a proper CX.

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we keep getting what we get.

Today we are experiencing digital transformation* which basically means more attention are given to the users. This is important as 86% of customers are willing to pay for 25% better UX. An unsatisfied customer tends to avoid your product for 2 years. Example: shops. I hate it when shops don’t have self-service. Amazon GO. In the USA, smart shops are becoming a standard.
Read Walker’s “Customers 2020”.

Journey driven design is something we should aim for. Banking apps are making great progress in it recently — asking for money/ sending money; one of my personal favourites is Waze.

Customer is not the king, customer is the dictator.

So what’s the difference between CX and UX?
CX — customer service, advertising, brands, sales, pricing, products, store. CX = brand + customer = relationship
UX — usability, interactions, visuals, architecture, content strategy, user research.

In Velvet, we create concepts like they make concept cars in automotive industry. We dream big.

*Digital transformation is the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact on society in a strategic and prioritised way, with present and future shifts in mind.

Q&A

• How to make a customer your slave?

Make a procurement and you’ll find out, haha.

Loyalty programs is a way; like in gyms. It all comes down to psychology. You have to understand behaviour patterns to make customers your slaves.

• Do we really design for human needs or market needs?

Every designer wants to change the world according to their views. I believe we design for human needs.

(A little philosophical remark here, doesn’t a market consist of humans?)

• How to avoid getting your head too much wrapped around the problem?

That keeps on being my problem and it’s a good thing. You do that, too.

A Sense of Space in UX by Mikk Martin

We don’t design web pages, we design experiences. Nowadays, people cannot concentrate for more than 12 seconds, we watch cat videos. We have never been in this kind of situation in history before.

Skeuomorphism — a real actual thing is created into a representation.
A sense of space in UX — Space is experienced through animations. Examples of great animations: iCloud, Tinder, Cors TV. This is all cool stuff but how can we make it? Here are some recommendations:

• Disney Animation “The Illusion of Life”
• UX in Motion

Tools

• Sketch
• Timeline based — After Effects, Tumult Hype
• Node based — Origami studio, Noodl
• Code based — Framer, GSAP, Rebound
• “Zoomable UI” — Joni Korpi
• “The 12 Principles of UX in Motion” — Issara Willenskomer

Q&A

• What’s your favorite tool?

GSAP

Why Do Designers Only Spend 50% of Time on Designing? by Heidi Taperson

I want to talk about time. According to my calculations, we all have only 41 hours of free time in a week. Also, we have tested and found out that a person cannot be productive for more than 6 hours in a day. I had an experiment in which I concluded that 50% of my time goes to prototyping, 25% on prototyping and 25% on user feedback. Prototyping is important because you can’t really tell developers what to do, you need to show them.

What have we discovered during the other 50%?
For example, one thing that we discovered during user testing was that people didn’t understand our vocabulary, they didn’t understand what “health kit” was. A good solution for this was visual representation, in this case, the Health App icon.

“How are others using Toggl?” article was a failure, users literally dropped. They couldn’t relate to the others’ stories. Our case study drove users away.

Q&A

• How to convince developers?

You gotta inspire your developers.

• We love Toggl. How did you come up with details such as Chrome plugin?

You must be talking about the Toggl Button. I think it derives from our awesome team. The Button was a developer’s own initiative.

Too Much UX by Tajo Oja

I want to bring attention to the fact that in 2017, we haven’t had a proper design conference in Estonia yet. This is the first one!

You can clearly see in Google Trends how the term UX was searched significantly more beginning from 2011. My day-to-day job is to ask critical questions. So my question now is: “Did Alexander UX discover UX in 2011?” Is UX a discovery?

We have so many job titles in creative development but who should be responsible for UX? Only the “UX designer”? But shouldn’t a backend developer care?

We cannot design a user, neither a situation, which are essentially UX. So what can we design? There is no such thing as UX design. It’s a label to price for 4000€. I’ve been in the industry enough to see all the trends come and go. There was a time when everyone suddenly needed to be responsive, a time when every website needed to “have” an SEO. And UX is another trend. All those fancy terms like “user onboarding”, “growth hacking” etc. have born from this trend.

UX laziness — it’s my own term, but feel free to use it. The Internet is full of UX myths, researches, rules you have to follow, such as why you cannot use a hamburger menu etc. And UX designers tend to always point a finger out to them, feed them to clients, not even thinking that maybe that’s not the case for this project.

You can’t A/B test yourselves your way to Shakespeare. — Brian Chesky

My mum asked if I’m afraid of losing my job to robots. Well, that’s why I studied public relations, haha.

Q&A

• What’s next? We can’t just end up with “one click” for everything, can we?

Look into the vehicle industry, for instance. Smartphones are all the same. In the end, people want routine and security and that’s fine. There are websites that work analogously to gasoline engines. We cannot go any further. Can we? Maybe there’s a completely another engine? I can’t ask: “What if there’s a newspaper without any articles”? But I could ask: “What if all the media didn’t work on banners”?

• How to be a better client?

I’ve been asked how to win a Kuldmuna* and I think that the answer is similar. It’s all a question of trust. People have to trust you in order to do great work. It doesn’t matter if the professional is a doctor, a lawyer or a designer. I experienced this kind of client-customer relationship with my interior decorator when designing our new office. I tended to put a word in it, but soon realised how I’m only making his work harder and should trust him. I don’t know anything about interior design, honestly.

*Kuldmuna (“Golden Egg”) is a prize awarded for the best advertisements of the year.

I hope there was something new you got from these insights. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

UX Conference “UX Tartu” 2017 was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everything I learnt from UX experts from Google, FatDUX, Sephino and Cyprus University of Technology at WUD 2016.

• ‘Making Public Transport Information Accessible in India’ — by Rajiv Arjan (Google)
• ‘Designing and Evaluating Behavior Change Technologies for and in the Real World’ — Evangelos Karapanos (Cyprus University of Technology Assistant Professor in Social Computing)
• ‘More Than Just Green, Design Research for Business Sustainability’ — Olga Banka, Marta Lutostanska (Senfino)
• ‘A Bigger View of UX’ — Eric Reiss (FatDUX)

Making Public Transport Information Accessible in India

by Rajiv Arjan (Google)

Picture this: Your team approaches you saying that they want to build an experimental app to help people in India get better access to public transport information. Several of them have never travelled to India before and they have 9 months to build an app with a potential user base of 2 million people. How did they do it?

User Research

1. Home visits
   All of the team — developers, product owners etc — has to be involved. It makes them feel involved. Shoot a video to later be able to get back to this feeling and environment. At homes they did user interviews and card sorting.
2. Interviews on street
   Finding answer to ‘How they get access to the information that they have across different devices?’ In the train station, for example, a sudden focus group appeared, which was really positive. Later, they categorized all foundings on post-its.
3. Immersion
   Using a pretty shitty phone, the team had to travel from A to B. While on the road, they had an interview with the bus driver. After the day, sat down and talked about what was learnt. They did it several times and so had always quite long days. Captured travels with GoPro to remember later. Everyone had cameras to take pictures of everything to present later and use as documentation and proof.

Conclusion & what to consider:
Users have bad phones with low storage and they’re sensitive about what content to add to the phone. 87% has 2G. English isn’t their first language. Not used to basic internet behaviour.

Implementation

A phone app without an interactive map. It only has three sections: “Directions”, “Saved”, “Timetables” and includes alerts about news, interruptions. It’s offline, has simple UI and small file size. Some marketing resulted 10,000 downloads in 2 weeks, which is something to be proud of. In order to connect to users later, they hired an agency. Now they’re working on providing offline maps in India in Google Maps.

Designing and Evaluating Behavioral Change Technologies for and in the Real World

by Evangelos Karapanos (Cyprus University of Technology Assistant Professor in Social Computing)

Diabetics skip their insulin intake 25% of time. Over 80% of world’s adults are insufficiently physically active. How to design for behavioural change?

User Research

Basically just evaluating technologies in the wild:

• interaction logs
• wearable cameras to capture users behaviour
• popup questionnaires during day

Implementation

To motivate users they decided to set user’s goals, show their historical data and send informational and persuasive messages. Divided user’s behavioural progress into stages and according to the stage decided on exact content.

Lessons Learned

• In goal setting, it’s important to let users define their own goals (results are better).
• Only 30% go back to look at their historical data.

94% of systems are designed for System 2 (rational mind). You must approach bearing mind System 1 (automatic/ intuitive mind):

1. Participants who saw their low activity rates in the last hour, had a 77% higher chance to start an activity in the next 10 min.
2. Participants decided on their behavioural success based on if they’re ahead or behind of others.

See more of their work:

Persuasive Tech Lab

More Than Just Green, Design Research for Business Sustainability

By Olga Banka, Marta Lutostanska (Senfino)

User Research

Involves a user, researcher and a designer.

1. To understand the user of a pizza portal, a creative workbook was created with instructions, stickers, drawings (like for kids). This kind of approach lets users express their thoughts, deeper emotions, really opens them up.

2. To understand the user (reader) of a magazine, Mind Maps was used to reach the emotional level of them. They wanted to capture the story of users, so they added a page for it in the magazine. To analyse, they used Affinity diagramming. What are these methods?

Mind Maps have a natural organizational structure that radiates from the center and uses lines, symbols, words, color and images according to simple, brain-friendly concepts.

An Affinity Diagram is an analytical tool used to organize many ideas into subgroups with common themes or common relationships. Source

3. A great tool they have also used with projects is Emotional image toolkit — Collage, often used together with interviews. They pick out antonyms (confident <-> shy) and then choose pics expressing these words. Participants have to pick the pictures associating to their ‘journey’ with the client/ board and then further elaborate. Important: While listening to the stories, bear in mind the pics they chose and what fears and/ or needs the pics are expressing and ask about them.

See more of their work:

Senfino, welcome to our Software House

A Bigger View of UX

By Eric Reiss (FatDUX)

We have more and more books about UX, but reading about something doesn’t make you an expert. You have to work in the field as well.

So who is an expert? An expert (is expensive but) answers directly without going home for 4 hours looking for answers.

Some authors to read:

UX Myths

• UX is only on a screen.
   — No it’s improving a series of interactions. Represents the conscious act of coordinating interactions we can control. It’s acknowleging interactions we cannot control.
  There are 3 types of interactions — active, passive, secondary.
• UX can be accomplished by a team of one.
   — No, we need to teach others.

He hears only that what he understands. — Goethe

• UX is just another name for customer experience.
   — No, customer is not the user. Let’s take cat food as an example. The customer is the owner, the user is the cat. Easy as that.
• Invented in the ‘80s.
• UX is a new discipline.
   — No, tools and disciplines have been around for years. To name a few examples: ‘Carte Figurative’ (150 years-old), 650-years-old personas, 15k years-old storyboard (cave painting), wireframes on cows. Now we have to organise these old understandings and put them in a new setting that provides business value.

Top tips

1. If a company asks ‘Can you wireframe?’, run away.
2. An easy decision model: 1. Can you control it? 2. Does it affect business?
3. Don’t trust client’s research. Talk to users yourself.
4. SCRUM is not the only and one method. Just do what you need to do in order to get the shit done:
   Figure out the business problem, understand the opportunities, channel your energy, kiss some ass, institutionalize the process so that everyone understands, take care of the business problems.

See more of their work:

Home | FatDUX

Thanks for reading, have a nice day and good luck!

World Usability Day 2016 TALLINN was originally published in Nordic Creative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.