Persuasive Technology for Peace: Stanford Research

[00:00:09]good evening singapore wow i get to be the opening act for tedx krp it's such a privilege to be here my name is margarita kiwis and i'm with the persuasive technology lab and i have to tell you that the information i'm going to present to you today is from the work and research of dr bj fogg who's the head of the persuasive technology lab at stanford so i am only his messenger and his disciple i will not take credit for the frameworks and the information that i'm going to give you today it is all from his brilliance so today i'm going to talk to you about persuasion for revolutionaries how many of you been keeping up with current events over the last few weeks in the arab world amazing isn't it let's talk about what's going on if my clicker works hang on let's see i ran across this great illustration by mike arrows and he was talking about this about a year ago and his blog is for people who do social media and marketing and things like that but i thought it was brilliant because it's an iceberg it says what the internet is good for the tip of the iceberg is awareness and persuasion but what the internet is really about is sharing cooperation and collective action right so in the persuasive technology lab what do we do we study how technology changes what people think and do and that's what we care about and i'm going to talk to you about how you can implement persuasive technology not only for your startup but for your social cause and to change the world so first i'm going to go into the fog behavior model the fog behavior model is very simple actually behavior if you want to create a behavior change in anyone and at the end of the day when we want to have impact we want people to do something very specific you need to have three things in in order for that to happen you need to have motivation to overlook and behavior is ability and trigger so people could be highly motivated to do something but if it's not easy for them to do they won't do it so when we think about ability when you design an intervention you have to consider does the person have the time do they have the skill does it require money does it require them to think too much any of those things will act as friction will act as a barrier for people to act the other thing is that even if people are motivated and they have the ability to do it if there's no trigger to tell them to do it they won't do it now who what is the best trigger in your household i know the best trigger in my household for my son it's me because i go benjamin have you done your homework there's the trigger the call to action there must be a call to action devices can do that iphone apps might do that facebook when it sends you an email that says that you've been tagged in a photo what do we do you got to go check out that photo because we want to see if we look good in it and the next thing you know we spent an hour looking at that person's photo gallery very persuasive so triggers can lead to a chain of behaviors and so in the lab we always talk figure out what the minimum effective behavior is that you want someone to do whether it's for your cause for your company you want people to go on a diet what is the one little thing that they can do in startups we call this minimum viable product okay there's a lot of overlap between persuasive technology and lean startup methodology i'll let you know just to let you know but remember everything big starts very small and bj often tells us students do not fall victim to the big brain problem because god knows by the time we get to nus or stanford or any great university we've been conditioned to make things very complicated and very elaborate and very big but it turns out that in real life things need to start out small right and if you do something that's small you can actually measure whether it's effective or not because there's only one variable so we often tell people if you want to get people to floss tell them to just floss one tooth and you get credit for that baby steps very very important awesome i'm only three minutes 50 seconds into my presentation doing well so the eight steps for designing for persuasion and this is from bj's um article that he wrote in 2009 there's one choose a simple behavior one little thing right two choose a receptive audience which means we need to find people who are motivated to do it there's no point pushing a rope if people aren't interested don't bother but if there's a cohort of people who are very interested in something work on them find out what's preventing the target behavior what is the barrier how can you remove that choose an appropriate technology channel the reason why we like persuasive technology is we can measure effectiveness if you can't measure it it's not worth doing five find relevant examples of persuasive technology that you can look at and six imitate the successful ones because what did picasso say good artists borrowed the great artist still right so you're gonna find something that's great in one domain you're gonna say i'm gonna take that and i'm gonna replace it with something else boom go seven test and iterate quickly you want to get results quickly this is the agile you know product development process now that we have things like google analytics and kiss metrics and all the facebook insights and everything else there's no reason why you shouldn't be testing to see whether or not something's working and then expand on it right you got the person to floss one tooth can you get them to floss too can you get them to do that you know the all the teeth on top on bottom every day very good next mass interpersonal there's a word missing persuasion in 2007 bj fogg and dave mcclure taught a class on facebook applications shortly after facebook made that platform available and what they discovered in those 10 weeks with that facebook was a weapon of mass interpersonal persuasion 100 students created facebook apps and over six months they had over 20 million downloads astonishing absolutely astonishing what did they learn from that one my slides are all screwy they resulted in a paper that basically outlined the elements of math interpersonal persuasion one you want to create this persuasive experience two you need to have an automated structure turned out that facebook facilitated things you know prior to facebook if you wanted to get the word out and say you want to do an email then you say like whom two one two three you know how do you organize all that was very hard social distribution is very important you need to have a rapid cycle so that way you can iterate it's helpful to have a huge social graph in 2007 facebook only had 50 million people now it's half a billion and increasing and then of course you want to be able to measure the impact so what does this have to do with revolutionaries well you know if we look at what happened in egypt and this had been happening over a long period of time not just in the last few weeks they looked at appropriate technologies that leveraged twitter facebook and mobile technologies one of the first things they did was create a facebook page this is we are all khaled saeed it is a multilingual and so people and what they were able to do was they were able to test if people cared about this there was a lot of testing a b split testing um measuring the interest of people in this cause okay and you know if you're familiar with facebook pages you can see the number of friends who like this and then the number of people who like it collectively you also need to have video a video is very important and it's very very persuasive and what all these things do is that it allows people to indicate whether or not they were aligned with this cause they could like they could comment it they could also share and when people could share things and they were the amazing thing about social media is it allows people to synchronize their thinking all right so what is going on here we have social facilitation there's a lot of social psychology that goes on with facebook and with twitter so that also happens in real life but what's interesting about these platforms is that it surfaces it in a way that is unprecedented so if you want to change behavior people like to work operate when whatever is the perceived social norm and certainly in singapore i've noticed that you leverage that quite a bit so if the perceived social norm is that you're not allowed to chew uh gum and spit it on the sidewalk and you look around and you're you know you're ready to chew some gum but you're noticing that nobody else is doing it you're not going to do it right in real life what these platforms allow is that people could see if their friends were also going to participate if they liked something if there was some sort of consensus coming around on a particular issue so on the we are all uh 98 000 people like that that is social validation so if i like that as well there's less risk because i'm going like oh this seems to be the consensus people are really coalescing around this idea this is an interesting page this is a page for a syrian day of rage and they designed it as a facebook event so um you know on facebook you could say i'm attending i'm not attending or i'm not sure right maybe i'll go you could see the 194 people who are attending and if they're your friends that might nudge you to go as well to these events what was interesting um about the situation in egypt is that they did a lot of test marketing on uh protests and rallies prior to january 25th to test and see if there would be sufficient people to come and gather and they tested it through this saying well how many people are rsvp'ing to show up if 500 people are as vp then maybe we have enough people to go ahead and do a rally so we can pre-market it and if it's not then we don't have to do it designed for metrics no matter what you do you should always be able to design for metrics otherwise you're wasting your time one of the saddest things that you can do is be a social entrepreneur trying to make social change you spend 20 years of your life and you can't measure the impact what's the point of that with social media you can test you can test with your website you can test with your messaging you can test with twitter you can you know there's there's an infinite number of things that you can do a b split tests on you know the wording that you use for call to action you can you you can do different bitly links and see what people click through and so on it's awesome this is a sample of a facebook insights page for my peace dot i just pulled it up just because i don't know how many of you have used facebook insights yes no okay um you can look at interactions it'll tell you about page posts and the impressions and feedback so you can put a message out there and see has anyone actually looked at it did they comment on it and so on you can further drill down and you can look at demographics you can look at gender age the distribution the countries of origin the cities the languages and so on so this is sort of like google analytics except for people and this isn't facebook insights so when we think about how to move people in action in baby steps there's a continuum you can move people from being sympathizers to activists right and so sympathizers the baby step is some simple action some simple small participation maybe they're reading an article maybe they're they're liking something maybe they're sharing something and it escalates and the the thing that you want to do with these baby steps and especially what was interesting in uh i was at the bits and blogs conference last week at stanford and we were talking about what was going on in the arab world and some of us were wondering if uh because there is very weak civil society institutions in these countries did facebook provide some sort of train wheel for people to test their public voice so if you're in an area where you cannot publicly express yourself do activities like participating on facebook walls allow you to test what it's like to voice your opinion in small ways you know to feel like you can be heard in small ways and does that action then translate to the offline world this is still things that are still to be discovered when we look at the power law of participation which is the wrong slide i had a better slide it has disappeared now there is um a continuum of low threshold and here you can't see this but i'll read it to you reading favorites tagging commenting subscribing sharing networking writing and so on really trust me it really says that leading moderating and so what people tend to overrate is they think well you know i i created this community and you know 500 people are involved but only 50 people are active members well that's that long tail that you're seeing but do not discount the people who are silent in the open source world they think that lurkers are good and this is one of the things that i've learned from one of my researchers ryan singer at stanford he says lurkers are good because they're there they're reading everything they may not actively participate because there hasn't been a trigger that says ah finally you've gotten to something that i specialize in that i can do something about but when that moment comes those people will appear in the meantime what you've done is you've been curating them and you've been bringing them along in your cause and even though they're not actively participating they will show up when the time is right so you have to trust in that awesome 14 minutes so the engagement plan you always need to have an engagement plan and as the former vc that i am it always comes down to the elevator pitch you need to boil it down to the core what is it that you want people to do they have to be able to remember it why because they have to be able to repeat it to someone if it's 14 paragraphs long it ain't gonna happen i know that from business plan competitions it's like well what is this company about well it's about you know it's too much trouble if you give it to me in one pithy sentence whether it's a startup or a cause it will be memorable so what's a good example of that we are all khaled saeed that is a message that resonated in the arab world it synchronized people's emotions it encapsulated the frustration that had been going on there for decades we are all khaled and what was amazing about that was that this grievance this feeling of disconnectedness that people had individually all of a sudden through this youtube video and through people talking and writing and blogging and all these things that they've been doing over time and certainly with the egyptian bloggers over years it finally crystalline said like oh it's not just me that feels that way you feel that way and you feel that way and all of you feel that way all of a sudden we have this collective grievance and the shift in mindset was amazing because it went from this fixed mindset of nothing is possible it is impossible to change the way things are and then it flipped and said it is possible why because they changed the way they thought about it and that was influenced by seeing the social proof that other people agreed and that was very powerful so i should stop there because that was pretty good engagement plan you know any good startup any good entrepreneur you need to figure out what that plan is is way too much detail i don't expect you to read it and then you need to have success metrics in a business you know you might have it could be content rating or visitors or member status i mean whatever the metric is pick one and then test and see if you can move the number if you can move the number then you know that you've got something there if you're doing an intervention and the number doesn't move stop doing that it doesn't work because it's not connected the process that you need to go through is one of trial and error to see how what is it that i want people to do is it engagement is it that i want them to retweet is that i want them to all show up on twitter square on january 25th what is the number figure that out test for it you know there's been a lot of debate in the media of whether or not it was a twitter revolution or a facebook revolution or anything like that i'm not egyptian it's not for me to say but what i can do is show you what they said and here it is from khaled el salman thank you facebook for making a revolution possible the egyptian youth and with that i'm done thank you very much you