March 21, 2009
Stanford Persuasive Video Example: Thru-You
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.
Posted by Enrique at 02:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 14, 2008
Obama Facebook Page Reaches Historic Activity Levels
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
Posted by Enrique at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2008
Donate Your Status Message for Votes and Psuedo-Community
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
Posted by Enrique at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2008
Lifestreaming diet challenge
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
Posted by Enrique at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2008
Did Web 2.0 really help people during Hurricane Gustav?
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!
Posted by Enrique at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2008
How does Facebook motivate you to update your status?
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?
Posted by Enrique at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
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 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 16, 2008
Attention through Status Message Update (SMU)
Through the Psychology of Facebook and Data Mining and Electronic Business classes at Stanford, I propose the term:
Status Message Update (SMU).
SMU is a unit and mechanism of asynchronous light weight communication distributed to an audience. SMU can be a currency and service, similar to SMS.
Communicating "status" is essential to our most valuable source of capital- attention. We are experiencing a temporary attention micro-economy right at this moment if you are reading this. However, attention does not come in precise, indistinguishable units. SMU is a metric emerging from social media that can potentially help us better understand attention.
How to persuade attention through the Facebook SMU?
Getting attention is more than a momentary thing because you build on a SMU stock. For example, if I post a SMU to "BUY THIS VACUUM CLEANER!" every five minutes, my network of friends would change their privacy settings and think some combination of the following:
a. I'm wasting a 100k at Stanford
b. I have OCD
c. Some advertiser is paying something worth more than my soul
However, if your SMU is new, real, original, or provocative then you might start acquiring subscriptions exponentially through Facebook's various viral channels. Thus, obtaining attention through SMU is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in the VIP seat to get anything the attention economy offers.
"Contrary to what you are sometimes urged to believe, money cannot reliably buy attention."
-Michael H. Goldhaber
Stay tuned for the next addition of Kairos through Status Message Update (SMU). Please feel free to contact me and shred this post to pieces!
Thank you for your attention,
Enrique Allen
Mark reviews services like ping.fm, hellotxt, MoodBlast, and Socialthing that hopefully facilitate valuable SMU for you.
Facebook, if I get your attention, I would greatly appreciate analyzing your status data and comparing it with Super Status lol!
Posted by Enrique at 04:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2008
World Movement for Democracy
The World Movement for Democracy is a global network of democrats including activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders, who have come together to cooperate in the promotion of democracy.
The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab will be sharing insights during a workshop entitled, “Using New Technologies for Advancing Democracy,” at the Fifth Assembly in Kiev, Ukraine.
--Enrique Allen
Posted by Enrique at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2008
Digital Curators
In a compelling post by Steve Rubel, he argues that digital curators are the future of online content. With never-ending information flow and entertainment overload, demand will never scale to match the supply of content. Curators are selfless experts that guide us to the most relevant information unlike memetrackers and social news sites like Digg. Curators are NOT editors according to Rubel because "the notion of editor implies that space is finite. Online it's not. Curators don't need to necessarily be trained in cutting, but in knowing where and how to unearth those special high-quality "finds" and to make them presentable." How do we identify the best "curators" on sites like del.icio.us and what behavioral patterns or characteristics do they share?
Posted by Enrique at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2008
Mobile People Discovery
iFob acts as a beacon, saying “I am here!” and automatically exchanges “micro profiles” with other other iFob users in the area. You can maintain privacy with this mobile application by simply listening for other iFob pings and reaching out when you choose. This is a converging step towards discovery, status updates and serendipity with existing applications like twitter and dodgeball.
--Enrique Allen
Posted by Enrique at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2008
Social Platform Sustainable Game Mechanics
Following a post by Max Levchin, CEO of Slide, platform teams must sustain a developer friendly ecosystem by manipulating elements that compose a mass multiplayer game of persuasion.
Platform developer goals:
1. Earn money
2. Acquire fame
3. Procure intellectual stimulation
Platform Owner Goals:
1. Attract and keep top developer talent
2. Encourage development of net-positive products
3. Maximize constructive competition among developers
4. Minimize objectively net-negative developers & products
--Enrique Allen
Posted by Enrique at 02:07 AM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2008
From Freerice to Mobile Mechanical Turks for Peace
Can we provide the right incentives for people to Subvert and Profit for things that increase positive net benefit like possibly an anonymous witness program to help solve problems such as too many unsolved murders right here in East Palo Alto.
How can we design more applications like FreeRice that incorporate the model of the Mechanical Turk to provide human intelligence tasks like analyzing the geospatial footage of Bhutto's recent assassination (people did it for Steve Fosset and Microsoft's James Grey). Lots of authentication and security issues but the take home is mass interpersonal persuasion of people in the wired world to do "good" things with their collective knowledge and providing meaningful opportunities for the developing part-time internet workforce. Just imagine what we could do with a mobile Turker Nation of crowd sourcing and more applications like Plusmo.
--Enrique Allen
Posted by Enrique at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)
January 02, 2008
Mass Communication Subversion
While ad revenue continues to drive many web 2.0 companies, Subvert and Profit is not the first attempt to employ "crowd hacking" techniques to let people pay to get their content on Digg, Stumble Upon and more recently YouTube. Without trying to spin their business into something socially acceptable, advertisers pay 9,000 users internationally to pollute big social sites and get traffic. The rate for Diggs and Stumbles runs at $2 a vote and users receive $1 for their contribution. You can also earn 20% of the earnings of any friends you refer, and 10% of the cost of advertisements from any advertisers you refer. The service is shrouded in promises of secrecy for their clients and difficult to measure how it actually contributes to the success of content. Despite all the ethical questions, envision a similar model for subversion that may increase positive net benefit for our society like creating incentives for citizens to participate in our democratic process.
Posted by Enrique at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
November 30, 2007
Web Apps Increasing Access to Aid
ParentHelp123 is a wizard that determines your eligibility for programs like food
stamps and basic health, you can choose to apply for the programs and go
through the application process. The system generates an auto-filled pdf
using a Ruby-Java bridge. Lead developer Kara Chanasyk aims to scale the platform to increase access to aid for communities worldwide.
Posted by Enrique at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2007
Embodied agents in China's online panopticon
The AP reports that China's existing surveillance and restriction of Chinese Internet use will be augmented by persuasive (and frighteningly cute) embodied agents designed to remind surfers of the potential of being constantly watched.
The animated police appeared designed to startle Web surfers and remind them that authorities closely monitor Web activity. However, the statement did not say whether there were plans to boost monitoring further.
It is worrisome, but expected, to see the idea of a panopticon -- a prison in which inmates each might be under surveillance at any moment -- continue to be applied in interactive technology designed for controlling citizens.
Bentham's panopticon
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses the panopticon as an important element of his genealogy of Western penal systems. At the second Persuasive Technology conference this April, Julie Leth Jespersen, Peter Ohrstrom, Anders Albrechtslund, Jorgen Albretsen, and Per Hasle from Aalborg University presented a paper which addressed the concept of a panopticon in interactive technology.
-- Dean Eckles
Posted by Dean Eckles at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2006
Captology: A Critical Review (now available online)
In a previous post I said that for me the most interesting presentation of Persuasive06 in Eindhoven was a critical review by Bernadine Atkinson. Her paper appeared in the conference proceedings, which I have here on my desk but can't easily share with you. Just now I found a summary online:
Captology: A Critical ReviewBernardine M.C. Atkinson
School for Environmental Research, Institute of Advanced Studies, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia
Abstract
This critical review of B.J. Fogg's book Persuasive Technology regards captology as an eclectic and formative work. It summarises two other reviewers' work and identifies several new strengths. It scrutinises Fogg's functional triad - computers functioning as tools, media and social actors - and some categorical changes are recommended. It investigates further Johnson's concerns about specific ethical omissions, nominating a new term, compusuasion, for the resultant but unintended, exogenous behaviour/attitude change effects of captological design. The review commences to more carefully define what constitutes persuasion and draws attention to the distinction between persuasion techniques in general and the behavioural changes that result from advocacy and education. The reviewer concludes that a fundamental ethic be that the designer's intent be exposed at the commencement of the user's engagement with the program and proffers the idea of persuasion resulting in a new conviction, induced by others, as a helpful definition of persuasion.
Apparently, you can order a digital version online. In the future my students will read Bernadine's paper. Even though I don't agree with all she says, I think it's important to view captology from different perspectives.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2005
Where do captology ideas come from?
Lots of places. I ran across this article today:
Depression and trust in their doctors are important factors influencing whether patients take their prescription medicines, and this may be especially true when medication costs are high, researchers report.
As a Lab, we might decide this is interesting and try to dig into the research. Is there a way to replicate doctors' trust using technology? What would be the advantages and disadvantages? How could we set up an experimental design to test our hypotheses?
So one of our main resources for new ideas is emerging research. And we use many, many disparate areas, including social psychology, organizational psychology, sociology, business, economics...essentially any area where people are involved.
Another source of ideas is a top-down approach: We come in having decided there is some kind of problem and try to investigate the best ways to solve this. For example, we might say "How can we help people exercise more?" There are ethical concerns with this approach and we're careful to think them through.
Finally, to find even more ideas, we work from the bottom up: Sometimes in our Lab meetings, we'll brainstorm a general question like 'What's the best persuasion tactic that has been used on you in the last week?' or 'What do you wish you could persuade someone to do?' Then we brainstorm and almost always find interesting collective ideas that we hadn't individually realized.
So captology ideas come from everywhere. For us, the key is running them through our captology framework and seeing if they can be experimentally tested, ethically validated, etc. And most importantly--does the idea matter?
If you have any ideas, feel free to send them our way!
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
Search Engine Loyalty
Search engines survive on money generated through page views. The more people you have using your engine, the more people you'll have clicking your ads - this translates into revenue.
It's pretty clear that search companies should try their hardest to get as many users as possible, and that's where captology comes in. After all, their job is to persuade us, the user, into using their service instead of their competitor's.
So, what are some ways that the big search engines try to get us to use their particular service? Well, Yahoo! is betting that size matters. Last week, Yahoo! announced that they were increasing their searchable index to 20 billion objects (19.2 billion of which are web pages). This created quite a stir in the search community, for good reason. 20 billion pages is a lot. More than double Google's published index.
Bigger is better, right? It worked for computers and digital cameras. However, in Yahoo!'s own blog entry, the author notes that "size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine." Indeed, in a news article I read repeating Yahoo!'s announcement of their increase, the article was quick to mention that this increase in size did not necessarily mean that Yahoo!'s results would be better than Google's.
So much for size. What about the interface? Usability can be extremely important in software. Now that I think about it, Google and Yahoo! look pretty identical these days...
How about branding? There's no denying that Google is hot right now. Yahoo! has little trouble hiring smart people, though, so their brand is still fairly strong. And really, I don't think any number of news articles would cause me to switch search engines.
So, what's the point? There's more than meets the eye to persuading users to change something as seemingly easy as their search engine. I don't think one single factor will change someone's preferred engine, but a combination of factors might be enough to tip the scale one way or the other.
Posted by Gregory Cuellar at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
"Tunneling" Consumers and Venezuelan Radio
I've long held a theory that people buy what they're sold. In other words, when it comes to making certain purchases, people buy from a selection of what they're shown. This may seem pretty obvious, but it always burns me when record companies, car manufacturers, etc. rely on the defense of "it's not what people want" when asked why they don't produce more musically complex albums or environmentally-friendly vehicles or more ergonomically designed widgets--whatever the product may be.
Clearly, the average American consumer isn't going to buy a hybrid if you make it look like a hyperlame geekmobile with the all power of a steam-powered go-kart. My theory is that people simply aren't given compelling choices and so, either out of ignorance (meaning ignorance of their true options, not stupidity) and/or a desire for expediency, they take what they're offered as opposed to demanding something different. It's a kind of passive consumerism. Is it any coincidence consumers happen to buy those products which result in the greatest profits for the producers of those products (SUVs, one-hit-wonder bands, etc.)? No. It's "tunneling" in action. By controlling every option the consumer has, a company can, in certain cases, effectively steer decisions made by consumers.
The real question to me has always been: what would happen if you could change such a market in one stroke? Would the people demand a return to the old? Would they just adapt and deal with it? Would they actually come to prefer the new system imposed on them? Would riots break out to demand Britney Spears get more airplay?
While those leaders in history who have held the power to make such sweeping moves have made some pretty grim decisions (say, Stalin with the extermination of the kulaks, Mao with The Great Leap Forward, etc., etc.), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has also taken a hard, yet comparatively bloodless line--and helped me out by setting up an interesting experiment.
According to the Washington Post, the Venezuelan National Assembly (which the Post views as a rubber stamp of Chavez's positions), "recently passed a law requiring that no less than 50 percent of all music played on the nation's radio stations be Venezuelan." The law mandates that, "no less than 50 percent of all music played on the nation's radio stations be Venezuelan. Of that, half must be classified as 'traditional,' showcasing the 'the presence of traditional Venezuelan values.'"
In response many Venezuelan artists have begun to cover traditional songs and record sales of Venezuelan music have skyrocketed. Informal polls report that Venezuelans are enjoying the new selections and, indeed, it's become somewhat fashionable to listen to traditional music in recent months. The manager of one of Caracas' largest music stores told the Post, "We've always had traditional Venezuelan records in stock, but before a few months ago we never sold any -- not one. It was all Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and that sort of thing. But now I'd say one-third of our business comes from Venezuelan artists, which is absolutely incredible."
In this case, given variety (50% traditional, 50% standard fare), a significant portion of the population has opted for the alternative. Is it wrong to partially control what kind of music can be played on the radio? U.S. recording companies and their lobbying groups think so and strongly condemn the move. Of course, for Venezuela, it keeps a significant chunk of money in the Venezuelan economy supporting Venezuelan culture and artists that would otherwise be subsidizing Britney's latest bling binge. Maybe it's not so crazy and dictatorial after all....
Posted by Matt Markovich at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
Google and Language Use, Part II
Where I was content to speculate about the role of Google as a barometer and catalyst of language use, linguists at Language Log have been taken to both using and examining Google in the former capacity--as an access point to a wealth of information about how people use language. (See, among many others, "Is 'compound' code for 'cult'?" and "Pass the Hat").
But what about the second part of my speculation?--that Google influences language use both on- and off-line. This is of considerable interest to anyone following persuasive technology: a hugely popular service that rewards both searches and websites being indexed for particular language use is worth a close examination.
So here's a couple of links to commentary around the web on this very issue:
Joel Walsh posts at Search Engine Journal about Google's apparent use of heuristics that pick out "good writing" in determining rankings of search results.
Phil Robinson at Search Engine Watch reports on how Google is considering how language shortcuts and idiosyncrasies in text entered on mobile keyboards are important for search in the future.
Posted by Dean Eckles at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)
Mobile Phones for Children
Recent developments in the area of children and mobile phones.
From Disney Mobile press release:
"The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG) and Sprint (NYSE: FON) today announced an agreement through which Disney will create the first national U.S. wireless phone service specifically designed for families. The service, called Disney Mobile, will use the Sprint Nationwide PCS Network and is slated to launch next year. ...
'As one of the most powerful brands in media and entertainment, Disney Mobile will appeal to families and loyal fans who want an immediate way to enrich and personalize their wireless communications experience," said Tim Kelly, president, Sprint Consumer Solutions. "Combining Disney's family-friendly content and applications with the Sprint Nationwide PCS Network will help spur consumer demand for data services within this important segment.'"
Firefly mobile phone for kids announcement:
"Firefly Mobile, Inc., a leading developer and innovator of mobile phones and services that uniquely address the needs of underserved customers, today announced the launch of the Firefly phone, the first and only mobile phone explicitly designed for tweens that satisfies parents' concerns about unrestricted mobile phone use and monthly costs. The Firefly phone is a pioneering voice-only phone designed for the smaller hands of kids aged eight to 12 years old. With just five keys instead of a regular dial pad, parents use a PIN to program up to 22 outgoing numbers into the phone, including speed-dial keys for Mom and Dad. The patented phone lights up like a firefly when in use and intermittently when in standby mode. It is about the size of a small pocket calculator and weighs two ounces. The Firefly phone is currently available through select regional wireless operators, and will be offered nationwide at www.fireflymobile.com in May, 2005. In July 2005, Firefly phones with a Firefly branded, pay-as-you-go/pre-paid calling plan will be available through Target stores nationwide. ..."
Posted by Steve Wilhelm at 09:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 13, 2005
3 differences between "regular" persuasion and captology
Yesterday, somebody asked me what the difference between captology and "regular persuasion" was. There are a lot of similarities (both try to change attitudes and behaviors, both have many ethical concerns, etc) but there are also many differences. Here are a few factors of captology we've realized are different from traditional persuasion. (This short list isn't inclusive!)- Captology gives designers the ability to scale. BJ Fogg pointed this out in a talk we attended in Japan: "Even if you were the best salesman in the world, you could only affect a limited number of people. But if you wrote software to do the same thing, using tailored persuasion strategies, you could theoretically apply that to thousands of people at once." This is why Amazon can act as a mom-and-pop shop, giving you recommendations and personalized services as your corner store would.
- Captology is novel--but that's wearing off. In some of our studies, we were worried about users being persuaded simply because of the novelty of seeing things on a PDA, mobile phone, or computer screen. It's true--novelty is a powerful factor for persuading because it puts people in ambiguous situations where they look to external cues for guidance. We know from the literature that people are dramatically more susceptible when they are in novel on ambiguous situations. But we've been noticing that the novelty is wearing off quickly; people are familiar with most technologies now. In any case, novelty is a poor persuasion technique for long-term change. What this means is that captology designers have to go back to basics and read the persuasion literature to guide their designs. There are literally thousands and thousands of studies examining the details of persuasion. Did you know, for example, that group members who have to work extremely hard to join a group overvalue that group? Do you know which is more effective in persuasion, speaking first or last? Do you know how to induce (and resist) conformity? The literature is very clear on these questions. As captology designers, we can't just depend on novelty any more (plus it's fairly useless for inducing long-term change).
- Captology lets us rapidly test persuasion. If we implement a new captology design, we can distribute it to hundreds of people, test the design, analyze the findings, and iterate very quickly. With traditional persuasion, you can't do that. This isn't to say that captology is better or worse than traditional persuasion--there are different places for each. For example, your local Tiffany's Jewellers will probably always have human persuaders. But captology is different in the sense that testing and iterating becomes very easy and quick.
Posted by at 09:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 03, 2005
Web Credibility for Tsunami support and 10 interesting technologies
Web credibility may need to play a larger role in discerning which donation sites are spurious and which are genuine: Internet Aids in Tsunami RecoveryWhat Trevor Baylis, one of Britain's leading inventors and the founder of Trevor Baylis Brands, thinks of 10 technological ideas: Will your ideas work?
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December 12, 2004
Kid Culture & Legislation for Cellular Telephones
A few weeks ago, New York Times Magazine featured a spread on "The Thoroughly Designed American Childhood" with many articles focused on persuasion towards youths and their gatekeepers (e.g., parents). The Thoroughly Designed American ChildhoodAlso, here are some articles on the influx of mobile phone users since 2000 and some new legislation enacted for camera phone voyeurism: Report: Mobile phone users double since 2000 New bill targets some peeping Toms
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December 09, 2004
Students and Online Sources
The Associated Press reports that professors and others are worried over students reliance on online sources and their methods of assessing the credibility of those sources. They find that students think going to a physical library to find a good source is often out of the question or thought to be too much work. And their choice of online sources may be poor: For instance, 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations only visited the company's Web site in search of the answer. The article also partially addresses the apparent advantage that children and young adults have over older people when it comes to accessing credibility online. I wonder how credible the views in the article are: the small amount of hard data included was gathered in unreliable ways, the rest of the article relies on anecdotal reports that are not very convincing, and it doesnt at all address the huge archives of academic sources traditionally only found in print that are now available to most college students from their personal computers. The article does briefly mention the new challenge web users in assessing the credibility of wiki sources:"Another potential minefield is the growing phenomenon of collaborative information assembly. The credentials of the people writing grass-roots Web journals and a committee-written encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear. Nevertheless, some Internet users believe that such resources can collectively portray events more accurately than any single gatekeeper. "In many ways, the greater diversity of information is healthy." (Consumer WebWatch, part of Consumer Reports, which is quoted in the article, collaborated with the Persuasive Technology Lab on a web credibility study reported on here.)
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November 16, 2004
How Larry Page Changed My Life in 15 Minutes
Ill admit it: Im a Google fanatic. I love their products, I love their culture, I love that they search my desktop better than Microsoft can. I can say, without reservation, that I want to work there when I graduate at the end of this year. So you can imagine my rapture when the co-founder of Google, Larry Page, approved of my work. Let me back up. On the weekend of Nov. 5, BJ participated in Accelerating Change, a conference hosted at Stanford. He saw the conference as a great opportunity to present BuddyBuzz, the project that another student and I worked on over the summer. If you havent heard about BuddyBuzz, go check it out! Now, we think this is a pretty cool application, and we want to share it with the world. So, during Accelerating Changes demo night, a group of us from the lab set up a booth, donned matching yellow shirts, and showed off BuddyBuzz to a crowd of technology enthusiasts, industry professionals, and all-around smart people. My highlight of the night came when Larry came up to the table, asking about BuddyBuzz. I spent 15 minutes talking to him about our technology, commiserating about programming for mobile phones, and installing BuddyBuzz onto his phone. He was one of the most interested listeners of the night, commenting on how Google was headed in similar directions (for example, with their new SMS service). He even mentioned that I should consider going to work for Google! It was very rewarding to hear praise from someone who understands technology as well as Larry Page. In those 15 minutes, all of my hard work during the summer paid off, and I got to show off BuddyBuzz to someone whose personal interests lie perfectly in line with the goal of BuddyBuzz: changing the way people get information. So, Larry, if youre out there: Thank you for your interest, and maybe I'll see you when I graduate. And keep Buzzing!Posted by at 02:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 19, 2004
'Interesting blog' � we're number one?
Scanning the statistics calculated from our web server logs, we noticed that we were getting referrals from searches for 'interesting blog'. Just to check this out, I googled those two words to find our notebook listed as the number one result! And we don't even have both terms anywhere on our page; we only have 'interest' and 'blog', separated by plenty of text. Rather, it is the homogeneous links to us that gave us this Google rank: one blog I know of linked to us with 'interesting blog' as the link text, and I've seen that post quoted elsewhere. Noting that we certainly aren't the most interesting blog on the net, I wondered why someone would search with those terms�would you really expect Google to know the Answer, to have the single universal ranking of interesting blogs? By crawling through the web and abstracting rankings from online content, Google becomes a barometer of language use. And for subscribers to popular "use" theories of meaning that tie the meaning of an expression directly to its use, Google is also cataloguing meaning on a global scale. But unlike those philosophers of language, Google has to actually choose a particular algorithm to draw something out of what is otherwise just millions of linguistic tokens stored in servers scattered across the globe. And this choice is certainly not uncontroversial, or without consequences. Since Google is so incredibly popular�40.9% of search referals in the US, over 65% in the UK, Germany, and China�the system that Google has chosen, or that is Google, has influenced many decisions about how to use language on the web: webmasters looking to get top search rankings optimize their sites specifically for Google, those with top rankings sell links on their highly PageRanked front pages not for click-throughs but for the boost in Google's algorithms provided to the linked-to site. Even Google's users modify their language use based on Google's choices as success and failure in searching influences their future choices of search terms�and perhaps even language use elsewhere. For me, the idea that global language use online�and Google's choices about what to draw from that use�can affect how we use language in the rest of our lives is an interesting one, especially because some of the algorithm choices Google has made give huge power to individuals like bloggers who, in any other system, would have very little influence over English semantics globally. "For a large class of cases--though not for all--in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language game."And the "meaning" of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, S43
[editted for spelling]
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