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)
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
Update to Psychology of Facebook Group
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.
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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
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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 . . .
Posted by BJ Fogg at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
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)
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 26, 2008
Video - Stanford Facebook class insights
The day before our Facebook class gave final presentations, some of us shared work at BayCHI. This event was probably better than the final. It's shorter and more direct.
You can watch the video below (with many thanks to BayCHI).
http://www.archive.org/details/baychi20071211v
You'll see how Facebook is a persuasive technology, what the students did to reach millions of users in a few weeks, and how this relates to the larger projects in our lab, including Peace Technology.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2007
Quick update on Stanford Facebook course
The Facebook course I've been teaching with Dave McClure has been in session for two weeks. We are setting up a blog exclusively about the course. In anticipation, we've been holding back our posts. But there's so much to talk about, I want to summarize a few things:
More than expected, the media has covered the course. The reporters usually spin our course to intrigue their readers, even if the story is not totally accurate. (For example, many say that we're hosting an expo in December for investors. Not true. And we keep telling reporters the investor angle is not true, but they keep writing this into their stories. More on media in future posts.)
The students have been superb: smart, flexible, dynamic . . . This is the best part: working with students.
The course has gotten richer as we've expanded our Tuesday 3-hour labs to bring in experts from Slide, Rock You, and more. We're also able to give students more hands-on technical help than we expected.
We've settled on short name for the course: "Persuasive apps & metrics." Coming up with a short name that captured the course well wasn't simple. But we're mostly happy with the result.
Biggest surprise: How many people and companies have offered to help us (thank you!). Of course, each person has a motive, often the ability to later recruit talent. Not all offers are useful to us, but we've welcomed talent and services that improve the course.
That's the quick update. More soon.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2007
Musings on Facebook from an 8th-grader
Brian Kong is 13 and in 8th grade at a school in Palo Alto. He's been participating in our lab for the past month and helping us understand the psychology of Facebook across different age groups. Here is a summary he's written of his findings, and some of his ideas for how to improve Facebook.
- Dan AG
As a 13 year old, I'm pretty sure I'm not part of Facebook's target population. However, more and more, I think that I'm beginning to understand why some of my friends started using Facebook, and what persuades more to join. Most of my friends use Facebook for one primary one reason: to tell about their lives and look at the ones that their friends or classmates live. Facebook is picking up success right now among my peers, because during the long summer break when my friends couldn't hang out or verbally update each other on what we did, we needed to find a newer, quicker outlet to keep in touch. This summer for me, the new outlet was Facebook. The word spread through emails and the urge to be part of this new "trend" caused many of us to join. After joining, we realized that it was a great site, and we stuck to it. The applications are also key to Facebook's success in capturing my attention. They provide a little more fun, such as super poke or zombie. So far, my friends are all zombies, and repeatedly try to bite me, as they probably do to other unbitten friends as well.
Facebook is great, but there are a few ways that it could be improved—maybe through new apps that others build. I would think that they should have some form of live video messaging so that the chatters could see other through a web cam. And then, maybe on the side of the video chat window, there would be a small summary of the other person's recent adventures, allowing people easy access to personalized conversation topics. They can even have an area on the screen that links or displays what chatters are currently discussing, such as a picture, an URL, a word document, a video, etc. This would be even cooler than a face to face conversation, and help increase communication and collaboration.
A few new features might also help Facebook expand. There should be some feature where based on your interests, a matchmaking game is set up. It brings you together with another random person with the same hobbies, and makes this little game to help you understand each other better and work as a team. This would also cause more friendships to be made over Facebook, increasing the time that a person would want to spend on Facebook. Of course, this idea is just one out of many, but features like this are generally what would make Facebook more popular and used over longer periods of time.
--- Brian Kong
Posted by Dan at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2007
"Support the Monks' Protests" - Persuasive Technology for Peace on Facebook
I just stumbled across the 337,000-person strong "Support the Monks' Protests in Burma" Facebook group. From the Persuasive Technology Lab perspective, this Facebook group is a timely confluence of our lab's academic interests:
(1) We are teaching a class on building engaging and persuasive Facebook applications
(2) We are studying the psychology of Facebook
(3) We are beginning to dive deep into a project related to "Peace Technology," and we aim to provide insight into how to build persuasive and effective technologies that can help bring about peace on a local level and on a global scale.
The Support the Monks Facebook Group currently has 337,000 members and 6,000 wall posts from members and appears to be extremely successful in raising awareness on Facebook using Groups and Events. According to the group, this Saturday is the "International Day of Action for a Free Burma." From the Facebook group: "We are marching in solidarity with the monks and ordinary people of Burma who are risking their lives for freedom and democracy."
According to an article in Wired, Group leaders anticipate tens of thousands of people taking to the streets around the world Saturday in Facebook-fueled marches, mass protests against Myanmar's recent crackdown on monks' pro-democracy demonstrations. The marches, organized by volunteers using Facebook, show the increasing power and reach of Facebook, and a user's unique ability to leverage his/her individual social graph to spread a message.
Events are scheduled in major cities worldwide, including at Stanford University, this Friday at noon. Scheduled to speak are Mark Gonnerman, a Stanford professor of Religious Studies and founding director of the Aurora Forum, and Nick Harmony, a Board Member of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance.
A question to our readers: What other interesting examples have you found of community organizations using Facebook to promote peace, and what methods have been most effective?
Posted by Dan at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2007
105 students join Stanford Facebook Course
Yesterday we taught the first Facebook class at Stanford, with over 100 student crammed into a temporary room that still wasn't big enough.
My co-teacher Dave McClure, my trusty TA Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, and new Team Coach Yee Lee helped teach the 3-hour class. We had a lot of fun.
We've set up more info on the course here: http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook.html
You'll see that our course isn't about the code part of FB apps. We're focusing on the psychology and metrics of Facebook, and how understanding these two pieces can help developers create superior applications on Facebook--or on whatever platform opens up next (and apparently more are coming soon).
What's new here is how Facebook Platform has brought the creator and user close together through Facebook product features like Reviews and Discussion Boards, as well as built-in metrics of uptake and engagement. Anyone can see exactly how people are responding to a Facebook app, both individually and collectively.
The feedback loop between creator and user is so small now that we've crossed a threshold--an important one. I believe we're entering a new era for designing interactive products. And that's why this course matters.
That said, we all agree our new course is risky. It could turn out to be a disaster, not just for a few students but for over 100 students, some of whom came back to school from academic leave to enroll in the course.
So I gotta hand it to Stanford University. This is an institution that welcomes innovation, like this new course. I hope our students appreciate this fact. I sure do.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 02:10 PM | Comments (1)
September 16, 2007
New Stanford Course on Facebook Apps (well, sort of)
So I can finally announce that I'm teaching a new course on Facebook this fall with Dave McClure and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg.
Students will focus on creating Facebook apps and using metric tools (like Google Analytics) to optimize the apps. We'll grade students in part on how deeply their apps engage users.
I proposed the new course because I believe we've entered a new era of interaction design. The distance between creator and user has become extremely small, thanks to Facebook Platform. This is the shape of things to come, and I want to understand it early.
Persuasion plays a key role in all of this. Facebook is the most persuasive technology of 2007. Studying the psychology of Facebook and the new apps available there should be both fun and enlightening.
I've posted a bit more on another page.
--BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)