You’re writing your blogs wrong
Social scientists love a bit of research. We read some books, watch some people, run a few experiments, write a nice paper about it and it never sees the light of day. What’s the point you ask? Who knows. But, inspired by a few recent chats with people, I figured I’d share an overview of how to write a blog, inspired by social science.
Get negative.
Think clickbait (yuck, but you know what I mean). According to research published in Nature and Human Behavior, negative language in online content is more shareable and more likely to facilitate engagement. Negatively framed statistics are perceived as truer than positive ones, which is helpful when thinking about the virality of fake news and the mechanisms behind its success. This doesn’t mean you have to lie in your title, it could be something like “the planet is burning, we’re all going to die” which is objectively true…OR Climate Change Is Killing Buildings in Slow Motion, which is an article on the impact of climate change on buildings with a very sexy title.
Frame your way to success
Framing is when you present the same information in a different way to influence attitudes, emotions or behaviour – for example, people are happier about new economic initiatives that refer to 90 per cent employment as opposed to the same initiatives that are described as producing 10 per cent unemployment. Framing is everywhere, and a meta-analysis of the impact of Framing in the political context found that it can influence people. Still, its impact is weak under more consequential circumstances. The Frameworks Institute has a whole host of tools and research on this.
Two articles from the Express Newspaper about how Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle both eat Avocado’s Kate’s is frames positively, whilst Meghan’s is not.
But, back to the blog, if you frame your data in a way that’s catered to your audience, you’ll be more likely to encourage them to engage in the desired behaviour e.g. donate to your organisation. Reflect digital has a report on using behavioural science (not as good as anthropology, but it’s got a great marketing machine) on quick tips you can use for your donation campaigns.
Make your call to action easy
Picture this. You read an article about an amazing new play that’s coming to your city and it’s inspiring, the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon. You click on the link, find your bank card from one of the ten places it might be, sit down to book and what is that!? I had this experience recently, can you tell? I wanted a solo trip to the theatre, got my Monzo out…ready to buy my ticket but it wouldn’t let me because I couldn’t leave a single space between the next person and me. My choices? Persuade someone to watch Animal Farm with me or do the thing all millennials dread, pick up the phone and call the box office. What did I do? Neither, because I couldn’t be bothered. The point of this story? Think EAST.
EAST is a behavioural change framework developed by BIT (the details of this vs other frameworks etc. another conversation) but basically, when trying to change behaviour your desired task should be Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely for the end user, also known as a good user experience. My experience buying theatre tickets failed at the first hurdle. Many people across the country will be writing Booker Prize-worthy content, without thinking about where the users will end up e.g. a bad website, or a suboptimal donation page. Save yourself the hassle and the awkward conversations with your senior leadership team, and think about me on the other end of my laptop, Monzo in hand, trying to see my second favourite Orwellian story.
Some other stuff
Treat your blogs and content like a study. For example, I’ll post this and use tracking links to test which channels bring the most traffic to my website. I’ll see how long people spend reading the blog, how often the links are clicked and how much traffic my website gets. If it does worse than other blogs, I’ll pivot. Perhaps I’ll publish the same article with two different headlines or re-share it with a different title in a few months. Everything you do is data, and when you know enough, you can use that to design a better blog, campaign, product or service.
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