2010 – Page 2 – The Brain Alchemist

To keep your personal brand relevant, encourage engagement, not agreement

Much discussion around personal brands focuses on the story and messages we want to communicate to our audience. Such intentional strategy is important and necessary, but it is equally important to accept that it’s not your intentions that form your personal brand, it’s the perceptions you create in the minds of others. These perceptions are formed in part by what you say and how you act, but also by how people experience you and how you make them feel. Do you feel like your brand supporters are part of your tribe? Do you take time to get to know and understand them better?

A recent study on how the brain processes social interactions indicates that the brain responds stronger to close friends than to strangers who share our interests, views and beliefs. Study participants who were asked to make judgments about themselves and their friends experienced increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with the perception of value and the regulation of social behavior, regardlessof whether the friends shared similar views as the participants. Judgments about unfamiliar others with common interests did not result in the same brain activation pattern. In other words, social closeness trumps similarity when it comes to evaluating people and assessing personal relevancy of social interactions.

Your personal brand is relevant as long as others perceive you as socially and personally relevant. The implication from the study is that if you want to strengthen your personal brand, perhaps, you are better off if you focus on nurturing the closeness of your human connections than on the perfection of your message. It sounds contrary to the traditional wisdom but may be more in tune with how the brain evaluates social relevance.

What do you think?

By Anastasia Pryanikova| 2010-11-07T16:52:17+00:00 November 7th, 2010|Communication, Perception|1 Comment

Customer sentiment: How to deal with angry customers

“To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.”
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Every business wants to know the minds of their customers. But when your customers speak their minds, do you know how to listen? There are several layers of listening to your client feedback. You can focus on just what’s being said or you can pay attention to the sentiment of what’s being said – the emotions, the undisclosed assumptions, the unvoiced desires. The latter is more difficult to do, but careful tuning into customer sentiment can be the key to improving customer service.

A recent study on customer conflict, for example, revealed two fundamental behavior patterns of angry customers. Some anger is transactional, or task-based, in nature. For instance, you go to a grocery store, buy a bag of potatoes, bring it home, and open it only to discover that several potatoes are rotten. You may get angry, but it’s unlikely that you treat this incident as a personal affront. If you go back, complain and get a new bag of good potatoes, you will probably be quite satisfied with the resolution of your complaint. The study confirmed that transactional anger can be diminished by compensating the customer for the poor service.

There is, however, another anger pattern among customers. That’s when they take the situation personally. The study revealed that these angry customers often thought that they had been misled by the company’s marketing messages and felt betrayed. Such consumers interviewed in the study used highly emotive language to describe the service provider, including ‘hatred’ and ‘vengeance’. In such situations, it’s not enough for the customer service to compensate the customer for the bad experience. In fact, offering to exchange the defective product or refund the money may lead to more angry outbursts. Instead, customers want an acceptance of responsibility and a personal apology. Perhaps, they want their customer representatives feel their frustration, connect to the source of their pain, and empathize with them.

This makes sense from the brain’s perspective because the second pattern likely triggers the brain’s preference for fairness. Fair treatment is a reward to the brain that activates dopamine cells while unfair treatment is perceived as a threat and processed in the anterior insula, the part of the brain also associated with the feeling of contempt [PDF] The perception of unfairness can lead to emotional and sometimes even violent outbursts.

According to Golnaz Tabibnia, an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Melon University, fairness may be even more important to us than money as the ultimatum game experiments demonstrate. In the ultimatum game experiments, two people need to split a pot of money. One person makes an offer, and the other person needs to decide whether to accept or reject it. If the offer is rejected, nobody gets any money. It turns out that people are willing to sacrifice their personal gain if they think that the offer unfairly benefits the other person. When the offer is fair, the reward system in the brain becomes more active than when it’s unfair. Other studies show that people report higher levels of trust and cooperation when they experience fair exchanges. Interestingly, the sense of fairness increases the levels of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, making people more open and willing to connect with others.

In summary, businesses that want to nurture customer loyalty should pay attention to the perceptions of fairness when listening to customer sentiment and analyzing conversation patterns. Strong emotive language may indicate that customers take the conflict personally as a breach of trust and seek justice and empathy, rather than refunds and compensation.

By Anastasia Pryanikova| 2010-10-14T20:26:24+00:00 October 14th, 2010|Communication, Conflict Management, Perception|0 Comments

Top Reasons for Facebook Unfriending

What happens when Facebook friendships end? This question prompted Christopher Sibona, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Information Systems program at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, to do a study on the Facebook unfriending practices. ScienceDaily reports:

After surveying more than 1,500 Facebook users on Twitter, Sibona found the number-one reason for unfriending is frequent, unimportant posts.

“The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,” he said.

The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics.

“They say not to talk about religion or politics at office parties and the same thing is true online,” he said.

Inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments, were the third reason for being unfriended.

The study showed 57 percent of those surveyed unfriended for online reasons, while 26.9 percent did so for offline behavior.

Sibona also cited a 2010 survey showing that 54.6 percent of recruiters used the site to find or investigate job candidates, suggesting that the same reasons may turn the recruiters away.

By Anastasia Pryanikova| 2010-10-06T15:00:49+00:00 October 6th, 2010|Communication|0 Comments

On cyberbullying and online disinhibition

The Internet is a bunch of interconnected computer networks, senseless and indifferent to the types of messages they transmit. It is capable of spreading love as quickly as it spreads hate. It doesn’t blame and it doesn’t absolve. It provides, however, fruitful ground for social experimentation, often fueled by our hard-wired desire for status, social approval and authority. The recent tragic death of 18-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi shows the dark side of such social experimentation.

We might as well have a sign pop up on our screens every time we load a browser, “Leave your inhibitions at the click of a mouse.” Psyhologists have a name for it – the “online disinhibition effect.” In its negative expression, it may go as follows:

“I feel important when many eyes follow, read, and watch. If I can get your attention, it must mean, I am worthy of your attention, so you will acknowledge me. I prefer to be invisible, though, because that way, if things go wrong, I won’t lose my face…because you won’t see my face. Every act needs an audience, and I know you are there somewhere. I can’t see your reactions, but I can conjure them up in my mind. That makes me bold and even reckless, and I like it. Nobody would describe me as bold or reckless in my real life. What’s real, anyways? I’ll role-play a little. I’ll be a villain. Villains are powerful, and I want power. I want to dominate and control. I hope you like my show, and if you don’t, chances are I will never know because you won’t have the time or feel the need to tell me. You may say, “That’s just awful,” or “I am confused,” or “Somebody must have already reported this stuff,” and click away. I can handle that. Now, I just need a victim because “How can I be a villain without a victim?” All of cyberspace is a stage, after all. Why should I feel responsible for what happens online? Watch my avatar in action.”

Fortunately, the “disinhibition effect” is no defense to malice, hate, or stupidity online. We, human beings, are given a wonderful gift of awareness and consciousness that we might as well use to rewrite the discourse above and make social networking a safer and more empowering experience for all of us. The safety of our social networks is everybody’s responsibility. Perhaps, a better approach would be…

“I feel my connection to the larger world out there when many eyes follow, read and watch. I will work hard to share my best with you because your attention is a precious gift that I honor and will never take lightly. Although you cannot see me right now, you will know my name and I will carry responsibility for everything and anything that I choose to share with you. I promise to treat you with integrity and respect that you deserve. I speak to all as I would speak to every single one of you face-to-face. It is my choice to use the Internet to nurture relationships and collaboration. I will take time to state my intentions clearly, to communicate in a sensitive and respectful way and to avoid unnecessary conflict and hurt feelings. I will speak my mind and encourage you to do the same. I will listen and acknowledge your opinions even if I may disagree with you. I will be fair. I will intervene when I see an injustice. Perhaps, together we can make this social network a welcoming place.”

How can we make our social networks safer and better for everybody?

P.S. For a positive example of what social networks can do to counteract bullying, visit the It Gets Better project on YouTube, created to show the LGBT teen victims of bullying that “it gets better” through personal stories.

By Anastasia Pryanikova| 2010-10-04T14:34:30+00:00 October 4th, 2010|Change, Communication|0 Comments

How NOT to talk about money

This happened years ago when I was still practicing law, but the episode is etched in my memory, perhaps, because it stirred many emotions and emotions make memories stronger. A middle-aged couple walked into my office to talk about a loan they were considering. There was nothing unusual about them or the beginning of our conversation. We made introductions, exchanged a few niceties, then, it was time to explain the terms and conditions of the loan. The man had some questions, which I began to answer, when he suddenly stopped me and pointing towards his wife, said, “Could you please talk to her? I have cancer. She has never had to deal with finances. She needs to know…”

Writing about this conversation still makes me sad because, unfortunately, I know, there are many couples out there who don’t talk about money in a way that empowers them to plan for the future. The way we talk about money often involves too much blame, stress and confusion. These are difficult conversations that need to happen but don’t. The tragedy of this silence often becomes evident when it’s too late.

To change how we talk about money is to work against the wiring of our brains. Our brains can easily filter out the subject matter we don’t enjoy. We don’t invest a lot of mental energy into things that we don’t want to think about. The short-term rewards are much more exciting to the brain than long-term projections. Tangible things are more likely to grab our attention than abstractions. A new 3D TV or a pair of shoes can captivate the brain in a way that no 401K ever could.

Second, the brains prefer status quo, the familiar patterns of behavior. We may have inherited these patterns from our families or developed our own ways of dealing with money, which the brain turned into habits overtime. The point is we all have money stories already in our subconscious mind that drive our behavior and choices although we may not always realize it.

Finally, difficult discussions are stressful and often unpleasant, and the brain is wired to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. Our status and the sense of fairness are often challenged in money conversations. The brain has evolved to be sensitive to status and fairness as indicators of our position in society. No wonder, we avoid difficult conversations altogether.

As a young lawyer, I learned a lesson from that episode. Whenever I talked to my clients, I reminded myself to make an eye contact and talk with all the parties, not just the most active ones with most questions. I began thinking of myself not only as an adviser but also an educator. As trusted advisers, we get the opportunity to probe, influence, engage, and maybe, initiate a conversation that would not have happened otherwise. We can’t waste such opportunity.

For my own good, I also made it a habit to ask myself the question, “What conversations am I avoiding?” Facing the truth is the first step to making a change. And to make the money concept more concrete and exciting to my brain, I keep a picture of Louboutins on my desktop as a symbol of rewards to come…shallow, I know, but whatever works…we are dealing with the mammalian brain here.

What else can we do to rewire our brains for more effective money conversations? How do you handle money talk?

By Anastasia Pryanikova| 2010-09-29T18:59:38+00:00 September 29th, 2010|Brain, Change, Communication|0 Comments