Most of us believe that face-to-face encounters are more persuasive.  They are the better approach, but not in all situations.  There is also the issue of what to do when you aren’t able to meet in person.  Is email a good choice?  How do people react to persuasion attempts over email?

Research by Guadagno & Cialdini in 2002 shows us that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies.  Women, however, may respond better in face-to-face encounters because they are more ‘relationship-minded’.

This sounds a bit like gender stereotyping and in fact Guadagno and Cialdini explain their results in terms of cultural stereotypes and expectations about social roles.  We view men as more task-oriented and women as more relationship-oriented.  That doesn’t mean that women aren’t task-oriented or men aren’t  relationship-oriented, it just means that as a general rule you find more men skewed one way and more women skewed the other.

What the study is saying is that where there is a task-oriented versus relationship-oriented focus and likelihood of competitiveness, email may be a better venue simply because it provides a way to sidestep competitiveness and enable the receiver to be more open and objective about what is being presented (i.e. more open to persuasion).

Conversely, the more cooperative the situation and the more relationship-minded the receiver, the more likely face-to-face communication is the better choice.

On your website, people tend to actually read very little of your content. Instead, they skim, jumping from point to point in an “F” pattern.

Visitors to your site tend to look at the first headline and typically read all of it (if it’s not too long). Then, they drop down to the next big, bolded line and read some of it. Finally, they skim down the left side of the page looking for something else to grab their eye’s attention.

There are only a few of these studies, and they all come to the same conclusions:

· visitors read very few words
· those words are located in an “F” pattern

The wisdom and advice for you is this:

If you want to capture your visitor’s attention, you have to reformat and edit your web content to take advantage of how people read websites. You have to take advantage of the psychology, or you will be victimized by it.

– Michael Lovas

Most authors never get a review this good. For us, it’s even better because the reviewer is also a well-known author!

Well-researched. Highly readable. Very practical – Much has been written about credibility–but not more comprehensibly than Lovas and Holloway in this book.

They have built upon the work of researchers such as Kouzes and Posner in their link between leadership and credibility and added one KEY factor to the equation: likeability. The authors’ central message: Many credible people never find a ready audience for their work, and many likeable people never become credible. But marry the two characteristics–credibility and likeability–and you have a winning combination.

Further, the authors take the ingredients of likeability and credibility and make them tangible–and marketable. In short, their book tells sales professionals, managers, and consultants how their language, appearance, personality, hallway reactions, and marketing materials all reflect these two characteristics. — Dianna Booher, Author of Voice of Authority