Captology Notebook

Stanford Persuasive Video Example: Thru-You

Enrique — 2009-03-21T14:07:42-08:00

How are you persuading people through video? Learn more by joining the new Stanford Class
“Persuasive Online Video: Methods and Metrics for Changing Behaviors” this Spring.

As the course develops, I'll share updates and any findings. To get things started, how about we discuss Thru-You.

Aside from the amazing aesthetic appeal of Thru You, I think Kutiman successfully elicited 2 core motivators by selecting "unknown" individuals from YouTube:
-Hope/Fear: if you're featured in a video, chances are you're going to watch it out of hope and/or fear for how you're presented publicly

-Social Acceptance/Rejection: dovetailed with hope/fear is the fact that we all want to share the best face with our peers online and make sure we're presented in a video appropriately

In terms of executing the Thru-You campaign here are a few highlights:
-Small Town Newspaper effect: reporters know if they feature local individuals in the news more people in the community will tune in. Similarly, Kutiman had a "guaranteed" audience of all the people he featured in his mix. Another classic note is the free marketing in this strategy. Many of the people Kutiman used in Thru-You automatically received email notifications because of the video response/comments.

-2nd order effect: if someone featured me in a quality video, I'm likely to tell someone else. Once again, Kutiman received "free" word of mouth advertising.

Another successful persuasive video similar to Thru-You is Pork and Beans.

Now put yourself in Kutiman's shoes a few months ago... What were your persuasive goals when you started to conceptualize Thru-You?

Feel free to suggest more examples and get in touch to learn more about the course.

--Enrique Allen

HaveASec? Collect Mobile Feedback with Stanford iPhone App

Enrique — 2009-01-30T11:00:00-08:00

The Stanford iPhone class released some great apps and finally got a little love from TechCrunch. One app I have been using frequently is HaveASec.

Developed by Nafis Jamal, Paul Wilson and Andrew He, HaveASec is perfect for collecting mobile surveys and polls even if your participants don't have an iPhone. Unfortunately, we are inundated with spam and it's often difficult to collect useful feedback with traditional tools like SurveyMonkey. One persuasive technique that's been effective for me is sending a short URL via text message. The personal nature of the phone and mobile optimized interface makes it easy to rapidly collect data with HaveASec.

As a researcher interested in contextual sensing, HaveASec is also useful for catching people in action. If you're an app developer you can embed a survey directly within your application and get the rich comments you can't possibly infer from just clickstream metrics. I can also see how health organizations or even restaurants can ask a few non-obtrusive questions to improve their service. I am much more likely to respond to a survey while I'm waiting in line than fill out some piece of paper weeks later. Try making a survey online or directly from your iPhone and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Go directly to HaveAsec in the iTunes App Store here or check out their web page where you can create a survey now.

--Enrique Allen

Obama Facebook Page Reaches Historic Activity Levels

Enrique — 2008-11-14T18:16:57-08:00

Barack Obama's Facebook Page has unprecedented activity for a leader and will continue to serve as a growing social media monument. Just think about it for a second... will your actions online persist alongside Obama for generations to come? When else in history have you seen millions of people from across the world contribute themselves to a digital movement? If you have comparable examples, please comment!

As of today, the actions of 3,134,949 real people on Obama's Facebook Page are echoed by:

-578,708 Wall Posts
-1,670 Notes (1000+ Comments)
-41 Videos (700+ Comments)
-21 Posted Items (100+ Comments)
-15 Photo Albums (500+ Photos)

Whether people stay active and continue building momentum is up to you. Stay tuned for more examples of Obama's Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP) strategies.

Other interesting Obama social media stats:
-19, 687,519 YouTube Channel Views
-1,500,00+ MyBarackObama Active Users (35,000+ local organizing groups, 200,000+ events)
-927,156 MySpace Friends (147,621 Comments)
-130,522 Twitter Followers (263 Updates)
-1,502 Flickr Photo Sets
*Potential double counting

--Enrique Allen

Donate Your Status Message for Votes and Psuedo-Community

Enrique — 2008-11-04T20:11:16-08:00

How would you respond to a handwritten or mass mailed letter asking you to vote in 2004? At least initially, you might assume the handwritten letter was more sincere and open it because it was not simply sent through computer spam. The handwritten message might persuade you to vote, however, it's impact would be limited unless you were inspired to handwrite letters to other people too. Fast forward to election 2008 and ask yourself how you responded to a Facebook Status Message Update (SMU) from friends asking you to vote?

Your response is influenced by the perception of interpersonal (direct, personal, and sincere) and mass (indirect, selfishly motivated and not likely sincere) communication on Facebook. You may view a SMU from a friend as sincere and feel inspired to show solidarity by also donating your status to the application Causes shown above. In doing so, you have enabled Causes to massively distribute your call to action to other friends on Facebook, thus creating a pseudo-community around the election rally. According to Beniger (1987), "there is a long history of efforts to personalize mass media communication by disguising the size of intended audiences, targeting messages and contriving intimacy. These superficial interpersonal relations cause us to confuse personal with mass messages. The capacity for this pseudo community is limited by technology’s ability to confuse us. " This begs the question, did Causes confuse you by showing that millions of people have donated their status, including a number of your friends? I don't think nearly 2 million people were confused by the actions of their friends. I interpreted the simple SMUs from my friends as sincere, reassuring my own beliefs and triggering me to be apart of something bigger than myself. I'm hopeful that we can replicate this type of Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP) for more causes in sustainable ways.

*Important to note that the cost of sharing a personal Status Message Update (SMU) is close to $0 versus sending a handwritten letter.
*Also interesting to note that about 10% of the total user base on Facebook participated in the Causes election rally

--Enrique Allen

Texting Your Way to Love

Enrique — 2008-09-25T20:22:56-08:00

WARNING PG-13: Possibly inappropriate for young viewers

Pay attention to the following steps and watch how to text your way to love:

1. The first text
2. Flirxting
3. Drunk Texting
4. The phone call
5. 80's party
6. The text message breakup

Enrique Allen

Lifestreaming diet challenge

Enrique — 2008-09-17T19:41:47-08:00

Loic Le Meur (Founder, Seesmic) showed an interesting example of a video conversation thread challenging people to improve their diet and lose weight at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event last night.

Do you think that video lifestreaming can improve your health? Let us know what you think in the comments. For more information on the importance of online video check out the recent conference we hosted at Stanford.

--Enrique

Did Web 2.0 really help people during Hurricane Gustav?

Enrique — 2008-09-07T11:29:02-08:00

Sometimes we all need a reality check after hours and hours in front of our screens developing and engaging in the Web 2.0 space. With natural disasters affecting millions of people across the world I thought I should look into the role of social media during Hurricane Gustav.

What is the net effect of our digital conversations and connections during Gustav? How can we show that people changed their behavior, hopefully to make better decisions, because of social media?

I address these questions here: http://www.techforpeace.org/? p=122

Look forward to your feedback on measuring our tangible impact!

--Enrique Allen

Obama & persuasion via mobile phones

BJ Fogg — 2008-08-25T10:46:51-08:00

Brian McConnell writes a good article about how well the Obama folks are using mobile phones for the campaign.

http://gigaom.com/2008/08/24/what-obamas-text-message-campaign-reveals/

--BJ Fogg

Tricking the customer with visual design

BJ Fogg — 2008-08-13T20:05:07-08:00

Network Solution uses a clever technique to trick the user into adding a $12 service to an order. See the image below that shows the steps in their check-out flow.

No doubt this has made the company lots of money --BJ Fogg

Social Network -- good summary & Stanford angle

BJ Fogg — 2008-08-04T09:30:45-08:00

The Stanford Magazine published a good summary of social networking. This article includes a Stanford angle, of course.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/julaug/features/networking.html

5 iPhone apps for health - but no real innovations

BJ Fogg — 2008-07-30T08:17:57-08:00

You'll find five iPhone apps for health at this web page:

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/07/5-great-health.html

Another list of health apps is here:

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/features_julieshealthclub/2008/07/iphone-on-call.html

Our lab reviewed health apps for handhelds in 2001. The story today seems the same: Most apps are either reference tools or they allow you to track your behavior (food diary, exercise log). Again, this is precisely what we found in 2001 when reviewing "state of the art" health apps for PocketPC and such. Back then and today, surprisingly few mobile apps use more interesting forms of motivation.

Where's the innovation?

--BJ Fogg

(Thanks to former lab member Rupa Patel for the initial pointer.)

How does Facebook motivate you to update your status?

Enrique — 2008-07-28T23:56:23-08:00

Facebook uses a number of persuasive strategies to make you update your status with a new message. If your status message becomes stale after a week or you manually clear it, a security alarm goes off telling Facebook engineers to act quickly and convince you to update (surveillance).

Thinking of a new SMU can be difficult, so Facebook automatically places the question, “What are you doing right now?” prominently for you to see. Having a specific question to answer makes it easier to comply (tunneling). People have high ability when it comes to changing their status- it's a simple call to action. Facebook wants you to type anything in the little box even if it only makes sense to you. SMU on Facebook is like being on a stage but you can't always tell who watching.

Unless you subscribe to status updates on your phone like on Twitter or actively micro-blog, the chances of someone explicitly encouraging you to update is low. Therefore Facebook must use scheduled reinforcement to remind users to update their status regularly or face the punishment of a looming question (conditioning).

By asking what users are doing next to updates from friends, Facebook also encourages users to internalize their actions in relation to others. Facebook recommends SMUs from certain friends based on previous interaction (tailoring). The SMU algorithm senses interaction like chating or common group membership with someone and tries to display the most relevant SMUs. When you befriend a person you are telling Facebook that you are interested in this person right now. Facebook sees this as an opportunity to create an interaction point and displays your new friend’s SMU. The process of Facebook monitoring you is persuasive because people are more likely to change their status if they know Facebook is paying attention and friends they care about are doing it too. When users fail to disclose new information, Facebook increases motivation by using a combination of surveillance, tunneling (info), conditioning, and tailoring strategies.

What motivates you to update?

--Enrique Allen

Join our review board for "The Psychology of Facebook"

BJ Fogg — 2008-07-11T11:28:17-08:00

Building on the course I taught at Stanford during spring 2008, my colleagues and I are creating a book likely called "The Psychology of Facebook." This edited volume will include about 25 chapters by different authors. We have over 70 submissions in hand now and are seeking people to help evaluate the contributions.

Below is how you join our review board. -- BJ Fogg

Update to Psychology of Facebook Group

BJ Fogg — 2008-05-21T18:42:21-08:00

Again, I'm going to post something unusual here: my update to 800+ people who belong to the "Psychology of Facebook" group interested in my course at Stanford. The post is long. It may be boring.

----------
Hi, everyone . . .

A few updates from the Psych of Facebook class at Stanford

1. Two classes remain

We have just two class periods remaining in the Psychology of Facebook course at Stanford. If you haven't already, now is the time to tune into our class via web video. We go live each Thursday about 1:35 PST at this URL: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/psycholo
gy-of-facebook

(See my thoughts on broadcasts at the end of this note.)

2. Join this Facebook Page soon

After our course ends, we'll continue learning together via Facebook. But we won't likely use this Group (it will soon grow too big for me to email you). Instead, join this Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Psychology-of-Facebook/21745304968

3. Topics for this week

This week we're exploring the psychology of Facebook App Adoption and the psychology of Facebook as Ritual. You'll find readings listed at this page: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dcqn4jpj_230f4phghfm&hl=en

4. Chapter submissions due on Saturday

Saturday is the deadline for submitting your work for consideration in "The Psychology of Facebook" volume we're publishing in late summer. If you absolutely need an extension, it is possible. But I need to know your intention by Saturday, end of day. Email me: bjfogg@stanford.edu (Don't send it via Facebook because I can't filter or organize messages)

More info here: http://www.psychologyoffacebook.com/authors.html

5. Please appreciate help from Nao Ishitsuka and Daisuke Iizawa

I hope everyone will appreciate the work from two visiting researchers in my lab to make the class broadcasts possible (and the overall class easier). I did not have a teaching assistant this quarter, even though more than 100 people were involved in some form each week. So these two super people stepped up. Their volunteering made the course worse for them but better for many of you.

If you want to thank Nao and Daisuke, send a short email my way -- bjfogg@stanford.edu. I'll forward it.

That's all for now (except my thoughts about broadcasting below)

BJ Fogg
Persuasive Technology Lab
Stanford University

-----------
-----------

Thoughts on broadcasting our course live to people around the world

I didn't intend to broadcast this new course live over the web. In fact, I was hesitant to do this because I thought being on live video might hurt the classroom experience. Also, because this is a new course, I didn't want to broadcast all the mistakes I might make in running the course. But many of you wanted to peek in, so we complied. Overall, I'm glad we did. I've received some nice notes of thanks, including from places I'd never expect.

I feel we've pushed the edge a bit in teaching & sharing. To broadcast our course we used no special gear, no budget, no advanced preparation. Today, any teacher with a computer, a web cam, and an internet connection can broadcast live. But the question remains: Why would a teacher want to increase complexity and stress in the classroom? I received no direct benefits for broadcasting except your notes of thanks. Somehow, making this content available to a wide audience felt like the right thing to do.

We got a rocky start with the technology, especially the audio. But we eventually improved. The audio/video quality still isn't superb, but it's decent. And for those who are interested in this topic, even a low-quality connection is much better than nothing at all.

I didn't expect that Ustream would record and save the video on their site. In fact, I explicitly didn't want this to happen. Yet I've heard good things from people who have watched the recordings. I worry about archiving the informal things we've said. The idea of being recorded does (or should) make you think twice before you speak. At times there were things I wanted to say but did not, knowing this was being recorded. This sensation, I suppose, is not so different from the effect Facebook is having on students these days while on campus: they know anything they do with friends in real life could appear on Facebook in a photo or Wall post.

Would I choose to broadcast the course live again? Perhaps. Would I save the videos online? I'm not sure. I may remove the remove the videos at some point. They seem to pose a liability, with no clear benefit in return.

One more thing . . .

Having a Facebook group -- all of you -- as supporters was definitely a big plus. It was helpful to get your feedback and input. It was fun to update you every week or so. Yes, I will definitely start groups for future courses. I hope to learn how to involve you in the course more. One barrier is time. But another problem is that the features in "Facebook Groups" are not so good. I've asked a few people at Facebook to make improving Groups a priority, but they don't seem to understand the new value they can create by making their Group offering "world class" and not merely mediocre.

Those are my thoughts for now . . .

Persuasion through Status Message Update "SMU" on Facebook

Enrique — 2008-05-21T00:50:35-08:00

Building on a recent presentation to the Psychology of Facebook Course at Stanford University and a previous post, it's time to addresses SMU persuasion at the platform level.

Behind the scenes, how is Facebook slowly persuading people to use SMU?

Lets start with reviewing the Facebook SMU calls to action:

-Asking users "What are you doing right now?" by automatically changing blank SMUs and placing the call to action prominently on the profile page of users (Strong)
* Similar to the hallmark persuasive tactic of putting a large ??question mark?? on blank profile images, users either ignore the question or answer it. The strength of social proof and impression management triggers increase when all your friends are answering the question but you aren't.

-View Status Stories (Weak)
* Just ask yourself how often you have viewed SMU stories. I would like to see Facebook analytics on this.

-Subscribe to status messages via RSS and SMS (Weak)
* Just ask yourself how many people you subscribe to directly from Facebook. Unlike Twitter and other platforms built around SMU, Facebook does not have a culture of "following" people.

Other interesting persuasive strategies:

-Displaying SMU during chat sessions
* By increasing the amount of times a user views their own SMU, the probability that they will change their SMU increases. Unless you really want to see the same SMU for a long time, you are likely to erase or change it after it becomes stale.

-Mobile interface news feed algorithm places more emphasis on SMU browsing in Home and Friends tabs
* When you are on your phone, SMU can be more useful especially when users disclose location and potential interaction points, like the intention to go...

-Automatically sensing status
*By far the most interesting aspect of SMU that I will explore more in my paper. How do you feel about Facebook sensing your status?

Where should Facebook go with SMU?

Currently Facebook SMU functionality includes:

1. Unlimited SMUs of 68 characters each

2. SMU with HTML links

3. SMU time stamp of minutes, hours, days, week, month

4. Personal SMU "stories" of 50+ days

5. Selective SMU viewing and subscription

6. Distribution of Status Message Updates
a. Profile Page Mini-Feed
b. Home Side-Bar
c. RSS and SMS
d. Chat
e. Friends Page

SMU can have multiple purposes ranging from perceptive presence to microblogging, but essentially it's all about managing and acquiring ATTENTION .

On Facebook many SMUs fall into the following categories:
-Materials: "lost money in a lottery half way around the world!!"; "is drinking a fine glass of Floral Springs Cab."
-Emotion: "is trying to relax."
-Health: "is about to start exercising... day went by quick!"
-Location: "is vegas"
-Recommendations: "eating organic stuff...you should too! :-) (And go hug a tree while you're at it)."
-Relationships: "just had the best talk with her dad :)"
-Tasks: "furiously preparing for Web 2.0 Expo SF!"
-Marketing: "says to check out http://getbackboard.com."
-Any other categories we are missing? Please comment

We cannot engage with SMUs posted by other users through commenting/sharing/rating and it's unclear where the conversation goes after someone reads an interesting SMU. People can react to SMUs through all the channels on Facebook (wall, poke, message, apps, etc) but Facebook isn't tracking this explicitly. Apparently, Facebook doesn't even care about your SMUs after a few weeks and deletes them, further decreasing the incentive to update frequently. In addition, we can only express ourselves through text based SMU instead of emoticons or anything else that can fit in the SMU box. Rather than push the limits of SMU, Facebook will wait to glean best practices from other companies and apps in the space.

Context will continue to be the most important persuasive element for platform developers as users express variations of the same content (text, images, video) through SMU. How can you design SMU features to harvest the most valuable content at the right time. More importantly how do you value some SMUs over others in aggregate?

--Enrique Allen