Social Media and the Art of Persuasion

After braving the high winds, rain and herring here today in Aarhus, Denmark, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the J.Boye keynote session by BJ Fogg of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab.

BJ's topic was how social media uses (and we can leverage) persuasion techniques to influence behaviour. As an intermittently avid and lapsed Facebook and Twitter user, most of this talk felt like a session "on the couch" trying to deconstruct why we do what we do...

Triggers, Motivation & Ability

BJ started his talk with the notion of hot vs cold triggers. Hot triggers give users an immediate and obvious call to action (e.g. a sandwich board inviting you to come inside a store to have a coffee for 1$). Cold triggers are calls to action that can't be immediately acted upon (e.g. an advertisement for a movie or play - you have to call or go to a location to buy tickets).

Social media often uses hot triggers, sending you notifications to see people's feeds, see who has friended you, etc. But as BJ explains, triggers are not enough to create behaviours. You also need motivation.

Motivations for behaviour include:

• Pleasure / Pain
• Hope / Fear
• Social Rejection / Acceptance

So, I might decide to get involved in Facebook because I enjoy seeing what my friends from high school look like 15 years later (which counts for both pleasure and pain in many cases), or because I fear being seen as a old fuddy-duddy who doesn't keep up with the times, or because I want to relive the awful dance of social acceptance and rejection from high-scool.... ugh.

Filling out the triangle is ability. You might have high motivation to perform an action, but if it's really complicated, you may not follow through. The simpler it is to act, the more you will perform the behaviour.

Rituals

A confluence of these elements - triggers, motivation, ability - creates ritual. You check your Facebook when you get a notification. Then you start checking it daily, notification or no. Then you start checking it 2 or 3 times a day. The social media boon is all about ritual... (or addiction, perhaps a better name when you consider some twitterers and facebookers).

Shaping Behaviour

So, with the golden trio of triggers, motivation and ability, you are ready to start persuading people to change their behaviours. BJ stressed the idea of starting small - pick a simple target behavior, choose an audience, figure out what is preventing the behaviour, and select a technology channel to enable the change. He gave a funny example of using a video on Facebook to get people to eat lettuce... But, he ended by saying that he hopes we use these principles for good and not evil. It can be about world peace, not selling more widgets. Literally, world peace. Fogg started the "Peace Dot" movement, which encourages people/organizations to use simple technology innovation to create peace solutions.

What does this have to do with taxonomy?

Well, look at the diagram again.

Motivation and ability determine likelihood of behaviour. We need to remember that most users are not terribly motivated to tag in the enterprise. There's no obvious benefit, and furthermore, it tends to be complicated with multiple drop-downs, levels of hierarchy, terminology they don't use, etc. (i.e. low ability). So we end up in the bottom left corner of the diagram. In some cases, there is high motivation in taxonomy use - findability. Someone is using a navigation or faceted taxonomy to try to find a piece of content. But they still might be foiled by overly complex interfaces that make it difficult for them use these structures, then we end up in the top left corner.

This is why social tagging (folksonomy) is so much more popular these days than taxonomy. There's a high motivation (personal findability, self-promotion, marketing, etc.) and a high ability (just type and hit enter).

As taxonomy and technology designers, we need to ensure that we take a lesson from this and address both the motivation and ability factors to trigger the behaviours we want. We need to create simple tagging and browsing interfaces, hot triggers that drive users to tag, as well as targeting taxonomies to support particular motivations.

More to come on this topic, but great start to day 1 of J.Boye - looking forward to the rest...

(As an aside, I must applaud BJ for his inventive use of self-portrait, stuffed monkeys and live improv during his session.)