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)
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)
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)
October 07, 2007
Deciphering Trends in Mobile Search
Google researchers published an article in the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Magazine showing that cell-phone subscribers are typing longer queries in less time and clicking on more results.
--The average mobile query was 2.56 words and 16.8 characters. Smartphone query strings were 2.64 words. (By contrast, PC search strings are roughly 2.5 words.)
--In 2005, users followed less than 10 percent of queries with at least one click on a search result. In 2007, that percentage rose to well over 50 percent. Additionally, the percentage of queries followed by a request for “more search results” increased from 8.5 percent to 10.5 percent.
--The number of queries per session has increased more than 25 percent from 2005.
Posted by Enrique at 01:57 AM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2006
Why promote health online? (and why not)
A recently published article reviews why 37 research teams chose to do health interventions online. The content below is from the article. --BJ Fogg
Reasons for Internet delivery:Reducing cost and increasing convenience for users
Reduction of health service costs
Reduction of isolation of users
The need for timely information
Reduction of stigma
Increased user and supplier control of the intervention
Possible drawbacks of Internet interventions:Potential for reinforcing the problems the intervention was designed to help
May overcome isolation of time, mobility, and geography, but may be no substitute for face-to-face contact
Elements of future evaluations:Incorporate the cost not just to the health service, but also to users and their social networks
Be alert to unintended effects of Internet delivery of health interventions, and include a comparison with more traditional modes of delivery
--------------------------------------------
Why Are Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet? A Systematic Review of the Published Literature
Frances Griffiths1, PhD, FRCGP; Antje Lindenmeyer1, PhD; John Powell1, PhD, MFPHM; Pam Lowe2, PhD; Margaret Thorogood1, PhD, FFPH
1Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
2Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, UK
Posted by BJ Fogg at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)