Captology Notebook

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!

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

Psychology of Facebook - a special course at Stanford

I'm looking forward to teaching a new course: The Psychology of Facebook.

The goal is to make students experts in this topic, especially as it relates to persuasion in social networks.

I've created a Facebook group (what else?) to share more info: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22841903424

If you're not a Stanford student, you can still join this group to stay connected to what we're doing. We'll likely involve people outside the class.

Students need to join the group and register on Axess. Below is the info.

Spring 2008
SYMBSYS 230
Thursdays, 1:15 - 2:45
2 units

NPR covers captology (Science Friday)

Last week NPR's Science Friday interviewed MIT's Stephen Intille and me about persuasive technology. The show host, Ira Flatow, got a lot of content out of us in 45 minutes.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87984362

--BJ Fogg

Slides from our Facebook presentation last week

We spoke last week at the Graphing Social Patterns event in San Diego (created & hosted by my co-teacher Dave McClure).

The slides aren't pretty, but they convey some aspects from last fall's course on Facebook.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dcqn4jpj_126dz2zr3hc

Sharing the stage with me: Rob Fan and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg.

--BJ Fogg

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?

--Enrique Allen

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

Mobile Checkout at the Bustop

Bus operator Go North East claims to be the UK's first cashless and paperless fare system allowing customers to order and receive tickets by texting "txt2go" to the number 60060. The system was developed by Go North East in partnership with IT services company Atos Origin and mobile-ticketing specialist Swiftpass. I hope at the very least we can save a few trees.

--Enrique Allen

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

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

Persuasive Tech at AISB (Scotland) - Submit soon!

You still have a few days to submit a paper to the Persuasive Technology Symposium taking place in Scotland on April 1-2.

Find more info here: http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~jmasthof/Persuasive/

MoveOne uses video to persuade (not text)

Today MoveOn started using online video to persuade supporters. For years they've relied on text.

However, with the U.S. election heating up (and perhaps declining response to email), MoveOn has created a persuasive video message, re: the link below. It's about one minute long.

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/elivideo2008.html?id=11950-2869739-r.Zq39&t=77

The age of persuasive video is just beginning. The success of video will make text seem old fashioned.

My advice to persuaders: Get out your video cams and start practicing! (And be sure to learn what works: brief, authentic, direct call to action. MoveOn does it well.)

--BJ Fogg

Keys to viral success with Facebook Apps

The course I co-taught about Facebook apps last fall led to over 16 million people installing the apps our students created.

Now, class coach Yee Lee summarizes some insights about creating viral apps for Facebook.

Yee is very smart. His new post is certainly worth attention.

BJ Fogg

Persuasive 08 gathers the best research

You can still submit a paper to PERSUASIVE 08. Here's the scoop . . .

The organizers have received many submissions, but I'm told they will accept papers until JANUARY 14th. This date is not listed on the web site: http://www.persuasive2008.org . They said I could share this info with you.

]]> You don't need a Ph.D. to submit to this academic event, though your work will undergo scientific peer review.

Below are links that show papers accepted at previous PERSUASIVE conferences. Good luck!

--BJ Fogg
Stanford University

-------------------

---PERSUASIVE 06---

Program - http://persuasivetechnology.org/persuasive06/programme.html
Proceedings -- http://www.springerlink.com/content/j00v68777513/

---PERSUASIVE 07--

Program - http://www.persuasivetechnology.org/agenda/agenda.html
Proceedings - http://www.springerlink.com/content/uj653l358x2g/

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