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May 21, 2008
Persuasion through Status Message Update "SMU" on Facebook
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?
Posted by Enrique at May 21, 2008 12:50 AM
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