Captology Notebook

September 25, 2008

Texting Your Way to Love

WARNING PG-13: Possibly inappropriate for young viewers

Pay attention to the following steps and watch how to text your way to love:

1. The first text
2. Flirxting
3. Drunk Texting
4. The phone call
5. 80's party
6. The text message breakup

Enrique Allen

Posted by Enrique at 08:22 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.

Social software challenge to lose weight, join us!

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!

--Enrique Allen

Posted by Enrique at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2008

Obama & persuasion via mobile phones

Brian McConnell writes a good article about how well the Obama folks are using mobile phones for the campaign.

http://gigaom.com/2008/08/24/what-obamas-text-message-campaign-reveals/

--BJ Fogg

Posted by BJ Fogg at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2008

Tricking the customer with visual design

Network Solution uses a clever technique to trick the user into adding a $12 service to an order. See the image below that shows the steps in their check-out flow.

No doubt this has made the company lots of money --BJ Fogg

Posted by BJ Fogg at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2008

Social Network -- good summary & Stanford angle

The Stanford Magazine published a good summary of social networking. This article includes a Stanford angle, of course.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/julaug/features/networking.html

Posted by BJ Fogg at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2008

5 iPhone apps for health - but no real innovations

You'll find five iPhone apps for health at this web page:

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/07/5-great-health.html

Another list of health apps is here:

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/features_julieshealthclub/2008/07/iphone-on-call.html

Our lab reviewed health apps for handhelds in 2001. The story today seems the same: Most apps are either reference tools or they allow you to track your behavior (food diary, exercise log). Again, this is precisely what we found in 2001 when reviewing "state of the art" health apps for PocketPC and such. Back then and today, surprisingly few mobile apps use more interesting forms of motivation.

Where's the innovation?

--BJ Fogg

(Thanks to former lab member Rupa Patel for the initial pointer.)

Posted by BJ Fogg at 08:17 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?

--Enrique Allen

Posted by Enrique at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2008

Join our review board for "The Psychology of Facebook"

Building on the course I taught at Stanford during spring 2008, my colleagues and I are creating a book likely called "The Psychology of Facebook." This edited volume will include about 25 chapters by different authors. We have over 70 submissions in hand now and are seeking people to help evaluate the contributions.

Below is how you join our review board. -- BJ Fogg

Posted by BJ Fogg at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)