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Make your business socially, behaviorally, emotionally intelligent

Chip Conley

When analyzing consumer buying behavior, folks down at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival found themselves at the crossroad of psychology and business, with Chip Conley acting as the crossing guard.
Chip Conley is the CEO and Chief Emotions Officer at Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a company he founded two dozen years ago. Chip’s years of experience and best-selling books helped him to create his talk, “Emotional Equations to Connect With Your Customers,” which aimed to help business leaders understand how to be more emotionally intelligent in the workplace.

Unpack your emotional baggage

  • Despair = suffering minus meaning. Suffering is a constant, meaning is a variable. Meaning lessens suffering.
  • Fear is used systematically to control, suppress and get people to do “something.”
  • When going through bad times, a company is a sweatbox.
  • Study: Women who had teen depression vs those who did not – the former were much better able to handle being a widow later.
  • Stress early in life builds long-term courage and resilience, builds emotional muscles.
  • Anxiety resolution: Chart what do I know/don’t know, what can I influence/can’t.
  • Disappointment = Expectations minus reality.
  • Disappointment is usually the result of poorly managed expectations.

Happiness and business practice

  • Happiness = wanting what you have/having what you want
  • Happiness = practice gratitude/pursue gratification.
  • Happiness = wanting what you have divided by having what you want.
  • Solace and comfort comes from consumption, replacing religion?
  • Bhutan – forget GNP – try gross national happiness.
  • Hedonic treadmill, whatever we get is what we want, we want more, which yields unhappiness.

Our basic needs to survive, succeed, and transform

  • Meet expectations, meet desires, meet unrecognized needs, but unrecognized needs will become expectations.
  • Transformational companies focus on the unrecognized needs of their customers.
  • Between stimulus and response is a space to choose our response.
  • We all aspire to self-actualization, but how do you make it for a company? Many great companies used it.

Buying behavior

  • Buying behavior is driven by unconscious thoughts. 95% of thought, emotion & learning happen w/o consciousness.
  • Identity affirmations play a huge role in consumer behavior. What does the product say about me, self-actualization.
  • People identify with things they aspire to be. Shopping is buying identity.
  • The more options we have, the more opportunity for regret.
  • What does a self-actualized customer looks like?

4 ways to succeed

  • Help meet goals
  • Allow expression
  • Feel part of bigger cause
  • Offer real value that they hadn’t imagined
 Want to learn more about Emotional Equations? Check out Chip Conley’s Prezi presentation for free.

Boost Rankings by Optimizing Your Website Speed | SEMNE

A fast website makes users feel empowered; a slow website is simply agonizing. In a time-poor society, users and consumers want  to use fast, responsive sites. As website owners team up with developers to prioritize strategy, speed is consistently the most important factor. At a recent Search Engine Marketing New England event, Jonathan Hochman made the case for website speed optimization and how you can boost it for your site.

What every website owner should know about speed

  • If your site is penalized 100% of the time you will be notified in Google Webmaster tools.
  • Amazon reports that .1 of a second in load speed causes 1% loss in sales.
  • Browsers only run between 2 and 5 simultaneous requests (for images and data etc.)

Be selective when choosing hosting

  • It’s OK to complain if your site isn’t loading fast enough! The worst possible hosting is your own IT department.
  • Users recommend BostonComputing and TigerTech because they are good for WordPress and offer quality support.
  • Mediatemple and RackSpace also good hosting choices, but they are a bit more expensive.
  • Double your WordPress speed with W3 Total cache plugin. This tool allows you to turn on page caching and minification, which can double the page speed
  • Don’t self-host video, embed from Wistia for better quality and analytics. It’s not free, but can learn more and is compatible.

What affects website speed?

  • The number of lines of code (although this matters less than other factors)
  • Ad scripts being served from Google Adsense servers
  • Page size
  • Flash video player from YouTube
  • Images from Blogger Photos and other sites

 What is a CSS Sprite?

  • An image sprite is a collection of images put into a single image. A web page with many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests. Using image sprites will reduce the number of server requests and save bandwidth
  • Those looking to hire a developer should hire those who know CSS Sprites. Experts say developers should absolutely know sprites – should be standard nowadays.

Quick fixes help and code tactics count

High-impact, easy-to-use tools

  • Use content delivery network Cloudflare (free) to speed up your website’s load time! Users says comment spam and site scraping will be reduced.
  • Linux servers are faster than Windows. There may be a correlation to self-hosting and Windows
  • Measure website speed with Pingdom tools (you want 1.5 seconds or less). Users say it has great data speed when tested correctly.
  • Yoast works especially well with WordPress. This tools helps users optimize speed with the help of a plugin developer.

Special thanks to insight from SEMNE friends @seangw and @fairminder!