If you are a marketer understanding how to create a sensation and influence perception are powerful tools to have in your tool kit. If you are an SEO you may not have allowed yourself to think about these psychological concepts as you are probably knee deep in policing your web site, fixing massive information architecture issues, wishing your link graph was better, and hoping that the folks in editorial would just create something that would go viral.

Perception – the way we interpret the information we take in and thus what is used to build our mental model of that which we are interacting with. Perception is unique to each individual and thus our perception of reality is our own reality.

It is however perception that triggers how we respond to a situation. In short, did you do anything to impact the user’s perception of your site in a positive way? So much so that they want to tweet about your site? Was the user left feeling as though they need to share your site via a link from their blog?

Linear Circuit– a circuit or device having an output that is proportional to the input. Thus a non-linear circuit is one in which a change in input does not produce a proportional change in outcome.

Examples of non-linear outcomes in human emotion:

1.) Which outcome will make you the happiest?

[A] Winning a $40,000 give-a-way one time

[B] Winning $10,000 give-a-way four times

[C] Either - $40k is $40k

2.) True/False – You are 100 times more grief stricken when you read about 100 people dying in a commercial plane crash than you are reading about 1 person dying in their personal plane?

In the first example studies show that individuals who win more times are happier even if the sum of the prizes are equivalent or less. This sort of makes sense and one could argue that this in part because the experience of winning is prolonged over a longer period of time, thus there is more time spent in a winning state.

However, this does not hold true when looking at an inverse situation of human loss. Studies show that people experience nowhere near 100 times the level of grief when we learn of a commercial airliner crashing vs. a small one-person commuter.  Thus having spent more time in the state of winning or grief may correlate to your level of happiness but there is no direct causation.

As a result you can see that our perception of the world is non-linear. So how do you take advantage of this as a link builder? Twitter contests are very popular right now as a method for acquiring links back to your site and creating brand awareness. Contests that involve Twitter generally require that the person entering the contest send out one or multiple tweets to their followers that includes a link to the contest and a specific hash tag. In most cases, more tweets result in more chances to win. Simple enough right?

Applying lesson from $40,000 give-a-way & 100-person plane crash:

• Large prizes eat up more of your budget and don’t necessarily result in a better perception of your give-a-way.
• Make an incentive for people to share with their social network and reward actions taken by their followers. (IE – if a entry is RTed both the party who RTs and the original tweet author are both entered to win again)
• Have more chances to win over a longer period of time.  As a link builder you want consistent link growth over a long period of time.
• Don’t limit participation; the 80-20 is in play here. 80% of your entries will come from the same 20% of people, when you find motivated people give them plenty of room to work. Consider letting participants win more than once. In reality people who are serious sweepstakes players know how to get around one-winner per household rules anyways.
• Not winning after entering 100 times is NOT 100 times worse than losing as a result of only 1 entry. So don’t be concerned that you are setting people up to be heart broken if they put a lot of work in and come away with nothing. Hopefully you have created a contest that is fun, easy play, has insensitive for sharing, and has many chances to win.