Captology Notebook

June 27, 2008

Vote on book cover design

We are editing a book on text messaging to promote health behavior. Please take a minute to give feedback on some potential designs for the book cover.

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Posted by BJ Fogg at 05:43 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?

--Enrique Allen

Posted by Enrique at 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 20, 2008

My response to a PhD proposal

A colleague from another country asked me to review and respond to a student's dissertation proposal. Overall, it was well done. The student showed strong skills in many areas.

But they wanted feedback to make the proposal and research better. So I typed out a variety of my responses. Below are excerpts.

(I believe I've removed all the personally identifying markers)

This is an unusual type of blog post for me. See what you think.

--BJ Fogg

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-----Focus on an EASY behavior change

The proposal uses exercise as the DV, the behavior change of interest. I would suggest picking something easier, a behavior that's fairly easy to achieve. Exercise is not one of those. (I realize the program and school may have reasons for picking exercise, and previous work may suggest this. One good thing about being an outsider in viewing this proposal is that those things don't enter into my evaluation.)

Why not exercise? It's tough to get people to do this. They don't like sweating, it takes time, they've been prompted to do this for ages. People are probably resistant to new appeals to exercise.

Instead, I would pick something simple, like writing for 5 minutes in a journal each day, or texting a friend a compliment each day.

The thesis is not about exercise. It's about principles and systems that lead to behavior change. If the behavior change is too demanding, then you won't be able to see the effects of the variables. Let me push this to extremes . . . imagine the student was proposing a study where donating $1,000,000 was the target behavior. The student would do the research -- perhaps great research -- and find no impact. The conclusion would then be "arguments systems don't work" or "characters don't work." The problem, of course, is that the behavior is exceptionally hard to achieve.

If you pick an easy behavior to change (like 5 minutes of journal writing each day), then the variable effects of the experiments are more likely to show up. Once you learn about which principles are most powerful, THEN you can apply those principles to tougher behaviors, if you want to have impact in health change.

-----Focus on real outcomes, not proximal measures

The proposal has quite a few measures that are NOT directly assessing attitude or behavior changes. They are proximal or mediating steps to persuasion. I would try to measure persuasion (attitude & behavior change) and reduce the focus on mediating steps to persuasion.

The last part of the proposal worries me because I see various measure proposed and none are measuring persuasion (attitude or behavior change), just approximations or mediating steps to persuasion (like moving forward on the stages of change).

I suggest taking a look at all the proposed measures. Do away with those that are intervening steps to persuasion and measure persuasion itself -- attitudes via self-report, behaviors via record keeping, self-report or direct observations.

-----Don't assume previous research was well done

Personally, I pay attention only to research that works, not to studies that don't work. Studies fail for many reasons, not just because the concepts were wrong. Often the stimuli is quite bad. For example, in testing the persuasive impact of video, a researcher may have created a poor video. In looking at the persuasive effect of images on web sites, the researchers may have chosen corny photos that are not credible (of the 16 in the proposal, some of those photos look fake -- a marketing photo done by actors, not real people). It takes a great designer to make an effective persuasive technology. Most researchers are not great designers. It's a problem to draw general conclusions based on stimuli created by researchers.

(I like that the proposal talks about pre-testing the images and such. This is very important. In fact, the most important testing in persuasion experiments happens before the actual experiment begins. You need to make sure your stimuli has impact with your audience.)

I assume that most studies that fail were poorly designed, operationalized, or executed. I don't rule out possibilities based on failed studies.

The proposal seems to take all research findings at face value, weighing the failures against the successes. If we took this approach to creating new businesses, we would overwhelmingly conclude that businesses don't work. Well, they do. It's just that most people don't know how to run businesses well.

Lots of the research cited in the proposal focused on difficult behavior changes. I would include these studies in the lit review, but I would not let failures here sway research. I think we're early enough in persuasive tech that it's hard to do good experiments in this area. The operationalization and measurement issues are difficult. Build and focus on studies that have worked. Assume most failures were the result of problems in the research method, not in the concept. Again, there are many reasons a study fails to show results.

-----Comparing Genres is really hard to do well. I advise against it

For years I've spoken against studies that attempt to compare the persuasive impact of different genres. For example, some try to compare the impact of video against web sites. The problem is one of media sampling. What video do you select? What web site? What if you select a great video and a crummy web site? Then the video wins. What if you do the opposite? Then the web site wins. How do you select equivalent media in each genre? I believe you cannot. That's why these studies will always be flawed. (You can select the "best" example in each genre, but then the study is about the "state of the art" and not some generalizable principle)

In the same way I'm not optimistic about trying to compare genres of persuasion, such as advice versus argumentation. What advice system will you choose? What argumentation system? It poses the same problem as video versus web site. The study results will hinge mostly on the media samples you choose or create. Often the results will be misleading because people will generalize your findings widely, well beyond the scope of the research performed.

Comparing features within a genre are good: multiple photos, depth of argument, tailoring of message, etc.

------Getting clear on Motivation versus Ability

The student should get clear about the roles of motivation and ability in behavior change. Certain studies and variables focus on increasing motivation as a step toward behavior change. Others focus on ability (meaning either training/education or reducing barriers).

I will be speaking about this important conceptual distinction the at the doctoral consortium at Persuasive 08. I won't type it all here, hoping the student will be at the DC. The past research reviewed and the proposed research will be much clearer when viewed from a behavior change framework that unpacks motivation and ability. More in Oulu.

Posted by BJ Fogg at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

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)