This post is really about another (“I Hate My Website,” written by New York personal injury attorney Eric Turkewitz). But, first . . .
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It’s the better part of a year ago, and I’m in a courtroom. (Not to worry; I’m sitting in the gallery.)
The judge looks like a million bucks. If Alan Shore appeared in her courtroom, he’d have a new goal in life — seduce justice!
The defense attorney looks so impressive. With his silver hair, golden cufflinks, and expensive garb, he looks as if he’s very experienced and successful.
But the prosecuting attorney doesn’t look so sharp. He sports a cheap, crumpled suit; he needs a haircut, and a new pair of shoes.
The case is about whether the accountant for a small business embezzled money from her employer.
I’m in the gallery with several dozens of others; we’re the jury pool.
The judge introduces the players — the accountant and her counsel, and the prosecutor.
In short order, the jurors form some impressions of the players.
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Have you ever heard of Thin Slicing? That’s our tendency “to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”
It’s a key factor in how we form “hunches, snap judgments, emotional reactions, and first impressions – in short, instant responses to sensations.”
It affects jurors. And it affects a potential client’s decision to select you, rather than another attorney.
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When it comes to getting into Harvard, winning an election, or promoting your firm, first impressions are key. Make a bad first impression on those who decide whether you get what you want or not, and you’re looking at an uphill battle. Make a good first impression, and the battle could be effortless.
Studies show that we begin to form our impressions of others before they’ve had a chance to say one word. We rely on non-verbal cues (demeanor, dress, etc.) to inform us first. According to those who study such things, we size others up in an instant; they say it has to do with evolution.
From the Handbook of Interpersonal Communications:
Evolutionary and biological imperatives probably required humans to develop the mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that encourage us to construct relatively complete judgments about objects from limited amounts of information. Whereas internal characteristics become more important when individuals are transforming impressions into relational knowledge, initial judgments rely upon readily accessible cues that make such judgments akin to viewing others as objects. This imparts primacy to visual nonverbal cues in initial interactions.
The Handbook also reminds us what we all (or should) know — first impressions can be lasting:
First impressions based on nonverbal cues tend to be highly persistent, even in the face of subsequent contradictory cues (Burgoon & Le Poire, 1993; Kenny et al., 1992). People are biased toward seeking information that confirms first impressions, and this serves to solidify and perpetuate those impressions.
| “The researchers also believe that these quickly formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.
If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.”
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If you have a blog or Web site, potential clients (and, in some cases, jurists and jurors) aren’t so likely to form their first impressions of you based on your appearance or demeanor; they’re likely to form their first impressions from your blog or Web site. That’s what they see first.
And those first impressions don’t begin to form when they read what’s written at your site; they begin as soon as they see your site’s appearance. Before they read, they see, and then they develop some sense of what sort you are — smart, or stupid; sharp, or sloppy; trustworthy, or not.
In 1993, researchers put Thin Slicing to the test. They had college students watch 10-second, silent video clips of teachers giving lectures. Based on just those clips, the students were asked to rate the teachers on a wide range of characteristics: did the teachers seem attentive, supportive, optimistic, competent, confident, etc.
Those ratings were compared to end-of-course evaluations by students who had taken courses with those teachers, and there was a great correlation (0.76). And the correlation remained strong when the silent video clips were reduced to five seconds, and then two just seconds!
| Ratings of 2.5-second clips of network newscasters’ facial expressions during the 1984 presidential elections showed that one newscaster had significantly more positive facial expression when talking about one of the candidates. Voters who regularly watched this newscaster were significantly more likely to vote for the candidate he favored. |
Since then, further research has shown how powerful Thin Slicing is. In one experiment, subjects were asked to rate surgeons according to 20-second audio clips of the sounds of their voices. And guess what? A great correlation was found between how the subjects evaluated the surgeons’ voices and how often the surgeons had been sued for malpractice!
More recently, researchers have found that subjects formed their impressions of Web sites in just a tiny fraction of one second.
| The way in which people move, talk, and gesture — their facial expressions, posture, and speech — all contribute to the formation of impressions about them. Many of the judgments we make about others in our everyday lives are based on cues from these expressive behaviors. |
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Now, why does Eric Turkewitz hate his Web site? Because 1) in order to attract clients, he has to toot his own horn, even though he was taught not to, 2) in order to be noticed, he was to repeat key words over and over again, even though that ruins his prose, and 3) tooting his horn might not sit well with some jurors.
So the juxtaposition of these three elements — clients, search engine optimization and jurors — creates an unsolvable riddle for me. One possibility is to create a 2nd website, and have that swapped out with my real one when I am on trial so that jurors are not offended. But that doesn’t take care of the conflict between potential clients (where good writing is beneficial) and SEO (where poor writing is beneficial).
I’d like to end by saying that I’ve have solved this riddle. But I haven’t. Nor have I seen any other personal injury website solve it, even those written by “professionals.” Many of us do the same thing when it comes to our content, repeating the keywords for Google, listing past results and hoping that we can find a happy middle ground. Many of the sites appear to be oblivious to the potential for juror backlash.
If anyone does know the magic bullet — and it seems to me that this is a job for a copy editor not a marketer — I’d love to hear about it in the comments or on your own site. It must exist in some form.
Turk’s right — a copy editor can help an attorney write copy that satisfies search engines and prospective clients.
But a good designer — now that’s the bomb (as they say).
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For further information:
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
In this essay from the New Republic, Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reviews Blink.
First Impressions Count for the Web, BBC
Snap Judgments Work!, by Harbour Fraser Hodder
first impressions, edited by Nalini Amaday, Ph.D., and John Skowronski, Ph.D.
Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences, by Nalini Amaday and Robert Rosenthal
Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness, by Nalini Amaday and Robert Rosenthal
First Impressions Through Visual Web Design, by Luke Wroblewski
First Impressions Count in Website Design, by Andrew King of Website Optimization, LLC
Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!, by Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek, and J. Brown
Tips for Search Engine Optimization, Google
Sometimes, the author ‘cops an attitude’ and asks me who the heck I think I am.
