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)
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)
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)
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 17, 2007
Picture Persuasion in Facebook
Part 1 of 3
Written for the Facebook Group Psychology of Facebook with Dr. BJ Fogg
This Facebook image has persuaded millions. Here's how . . .
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Picture Persuasion in Facebook
BJ Fogg
Persuasive Technology Lab
Stanford University
Our young friend Facebook would have died long ago if the site didn't push users to upload Profile Pictures. Yes, it's true: on Facebook our mugshots are much more than decorations. The images we post do more much than amuse our friends.
As a psychologist I'm intrigued by Facebook's approach to Profile Pictures. In fact, I believe this little feature has been the launching point for Facebook's enormous success.
In this post I'm not talking about the photos themselves. (I'll write about that later.) My intrigue is in how Facebook leverages Profile Pictures to start people down a long path of future persuasion.
When you upload your mugshot in Facebook, you signal to yourself--and to your friends--how you'll respond to influence attempts farther down the Facebook road. With that confirmation, your whole network creeps forward, a caravan of compliance.
Think about it: On Facebook almost no one refuses to post a Profile Picture.
Who can resist?
Here's the situation: You've already joined Facebook, you see all your friends have posted photos, and then you post one too. At that point none of us is thinking about being persuaded or manipulated. We just want to move on to the real business of Facebook: accumulating friends.
But wait!
Something important just happened, and we didn't even notice.
At the point we posted our mugshot, our friends could all see we said yes to "Upload a profile picture." Ah, the joy of social complicity! But even more important, this simple act changes us, deep inside. Our relationship with Facebook gets cozier. Facebook is no longer a stranger; it's a friend. And as such, we become much more likely to agree to future requests on Facebook. Yes, the picture compliance seems small, but the timing is ideal for training us well.
That's the genius of Facebook. The pattern of persuasion is established early and often. Indeed, this pattern has made Facebook, Inc., enormously wealthy.
I find the whole thing fascinating.
Facebook is a persuasive technology. By this I mean that Facebook is a interactive system designed to change human behaviors.
I've investigated persuasive technology at Stanford since 1993. I can say that during this year, in 2007, no other technology system has been more powerfully persuasive than Facebook. That's something I admire. I must say that if my Stanford Lab were giving prizes in persuasive technology, we would award Facebook this year's gold medal.
---
Here's the technique behind Profile Pictures . . .
When you first join Facebook, your Profile Picture is a large, ugly question mark. This was an excellent default choice by Facebook. The question mark naturally calls to be replaced. And this act is important: Every time someone uploads a new picture, they add value to Facebook, Inc.
But what happens when someone doesn't upload a photo?
Maybe you've seen this before . . .
When deviants don't upload a Profile Picture, their friends may start to apply pressure, enforcing the culture of Facebook. Friends may write comments on the deviant's Wall. They may say, "Hey, upload a photo!" or "Where's your face pic?"
Eventually, the compliance rate is almost 100%. That's remarkable. I can think of no other persuasive technology that performs better than Facebook's Picture Profile system.
The universal compliance is even more remarkable when you consider what a big step it is to upload a photo. First, you have to think of a photo you want to post. Then you have to find the digital file. And then you need to upload the photo and set your thumbnail. (If this sounds easy to you, then you've joined way too many social networks!)
Most Facebook users replace the default question mark with their own photo, not of Mickey Mouse or Madonna. This is important to Facebook's commercial success. Every upload of a real photo enhances the credibility of Facebook. And it's precisely this--credibility--that sets Facebook apart from most other social networks. In practical terms, the cumulative credibility allows Facebook to charge more for advertising.
Facebook credibility, of course, is not the end user's goal when uploading a real photo. As users we don't care much about what Facebook can charge for ads.
When we post a photo, we're trying to achieve our own goals, not enhance Facebook, Inc's bottom line. Even though our personal goals vary, it seems clear we all select a photo that we hope affects how our friends think about us. In other words, mugshot selection is a persuasive act. This is a topic I'll address later.
So . . . until we open that new can of worms, I'll wrap up with this teaser: Your mugshot is the most important element on your Facebook Profile Page, even more important than your name.
--Dr. BJ Fogg
September 2007
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For more on the psychology of Facebook, see our lab's Facebook page here: http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook.html
Posted by BJ Fogg at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
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)