Google uses the phrase 'Zero Moment of Truth' (or ZMOT) to refer to the online decision-making moment.
I use the phrase 'moments of truth' to refer to the small almost instantaneous and sometimes unconscious decisions that a person makes that contribute to the big overall decision.
The overall decision (or ZMOT) is of course whether they will buy from you, talk to you, sign up for something you offer or contact you in some form.
These small moments of truth are influenced by the experience that person has on your website. If they are positive it builds to a positive outcome. If they are negative, it means that the visitor is less and less likely to do what you want.
On a website these moments of truth are influenced by:
I'm not suggesting that businesses agonise over every word or pixel. We are (sometimes painfully) aware of how hard it is to get it right. We don't always understand what those moments of truth are for different visitors. Sometimes you have to test out things and be ready to make a change if it doesn't work.
And of course everyone makes mistakes. We are after all, only human.
I'd like it if businesses understood that they should care about these moments of truth.
That a good website will make the difference between someone doing business with them – and choosing a competitor instead.
I'd like people not to make decisions about their website based on what's easier for them or who can do a year's hosting in Uzbekistan for $3.50 a year and a free set of steak knives. It should be about what will be easier for their customers.
I'd like people to appreciate that good web designers and developers are worth the money because they know how to create positive moments of truth – and they're worth the investment.
I'd like people to realise that the cheap website slung together with little care by the inexperienced and uncaring will hurt their business.
]]>This survey asked New Zealanders about their use of and attitudes toward the Internet as an indicator of New Zealanders as a whole.
Result highlights:
But you need to know these techniques because to be honest there is a lot of rubbish content published by people who know how to get their site high up in the search results.
One of our favourite sites, The Social Media Guide, posted their list of 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. We thought there were a couple missing, so have added ours here.
First I'll summarise Social Media Guides list. Check out the entire post if you want to read them in more detail:
Type in "100 pounds in NZ dollars" and you will get a list of currency converters. Since more than one country uses the same currency name (eg dollars) you might need to specify the country as well. Thanks to Simon Mackie of Gigaom for this one.
When you get your initial set of results there is a list of search tools on the left hand side with a drop down called 'More search Tools' that has some handy extras.
One of the tools we use most often is to filter by time - usually Past Year.
This means you don't get results from three or four years ago that are no longer relevant or are out of date
If you only want to find images or news, you can select your desired option. Particularly useful is the Places option.
If you are looking for something with a presence in the real world like a retail business, restaurant or the like then filter by Places and you'll get those businesses that have a Places listing with a place holder on a map to show you where it is.
The small magnifying glass next to the title will show you a preview of a site.
This is handy when there are a lot of results that look similar but you don't want to go through to each site.
You get a small snapshot of the site from which you can see if it has the kind of information or quality you're after.
If you add a * (known as a wild card) into your search term Google treats it as 'any unknown term'. For example, you may want recipes that have apples mixed with some other ingredient, but you don't know what.
Put apple and * recipes into Google search and you'll get results for apple and cranberry, apple and carrot, apple and rhubarb etc etc.
Got any more you'd like to share? - Let us know!