Persuasion is one of the most important constituents of any online engagement strategy. These slides are highlights from a presentation delivered to a number of corporate clients including Barclays Bank, Ministry of Sound and the Carbon Trust. They look at the theories behind ethical online persuasion and raise some ideas about how persuasion is relevant in the world of web2.0. A recording on the presentatin is available at http://richard-sedley.iuplog.com/default.asp?item=253061

1. Persuasive solutions
for demanding times
Richard Sedley
Director, cScape Customer Engagement Unit
cScape Breakfast Briefing
15 March 2007, Soho House, London

2. A bipolar credibility test was undertaken on each of the pages above.
Participants were given half a second to rate credibility against specific tasks.

3. The need for
decisional heuristics
4 seconds to
500 milliseconds to
determine usefulness
determine credibility

4. How we make our decisions
Elaboration Likelihood Model
• High elaboration (central route)
Requires great deal of thought to make a
decision
• Low elaboration (peripheral route)
Requires little thought, reliant on decisional
heuristics
Petty & Cacioppo, 1981

5. Background Practice
Theory

6. The need for Persuasion
An attempt to change attitudes or behaviours
(or both) without using coercion or deception
Acquisition Conversion Retention
Findability Persuasion Engagement

7. History of persuasion
Classic Modern Post-Modern
Treatise on Rhetoric The Hidden Persuaders Influence: The Psychology
by Aristotle By Vance Packard of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini

8. The functional triad
How computers can be persuasive
Tool Social actor
Increases capability Creates relationships
Can be persuasive by: Can be persuasive by:
•Making target behaviour easier •Rewarding people with positive feedback
•Leading people through a process •Modeling a target behaviour
•Performing calculations or •Providing social support
measurements that motivate
Medium
Provides experience
Can be persuasive by:
•Allowing people to explore cause-and-effect relationships
•Providing people with vicarious experiences that motivate
•Helping people rehearse a behaviour
BJ Fogg, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think, 2003

9. Six key advantages
of computer interactivity
• Persistence
• Anonymity
• Data handling
• Use different modalities
• Easily scalable
• Can be ubiquitous
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003

10. Four types of credibility
• Presumed = General assumptions in the
mind of the perceiver
• Surface Simple inspection or initial first
=
hand experience
• Reputed Third party endorsements,
=
reports or referrals
• Earned First hand experience that
=
extends over time
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003

11. The power of credibility
B
A
Marketing Experiments Journal, Feb 2007
Conversion rate = 3.03%
Conversion rate = 2.69%
% change = 12.64%
Projected monthly gain = $30,582.30

12. Principles of motivation
• Reciprocity
• Commitment and consistency
• Consensus
• Affinity (Liking)
• Authority
• Scarcity
Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984

13. Consensus (social validation)
An experiment was done in the 1960s where a guy
walked in to the middle of a street and looked up.
Four per cent of people who walked past him within
a set time period joined him in looking up.
When they repeated the experiment with five people
looking up, 18 per cent of the passers-by stopped and
looked up in the air.
When they had 15 people standing around, they
managed to stop traffic within a minute and 40 per cent
of the people passing looked up.
Experiment: Milgrim, Bikman and Birkowitz

14. Kairos
(Persuasion windows)
Has anyone heard of the term kairos?
Timing is everything – it’s critical for any persuasion tactic to be effective. Those of you
who were at a presentation I gave in the middle of last year at Microsoft will know that I
gave some examples from my daughter’s nursery where we managed get people to stop
dumping rubbish outside the nursery simply by displaying a map of where the dump was.
The idea was that when people came to drop their rubbish off that was the most opportune
time to persuade them not to be anti-social. Putting leaflets through their door had almost
no effect. So the concept of timing is ever important.
I have a question to throw out to you: If we’re going to say we need to be in the right place
at the right time, how can we create the right place and the right time? Because nine times
out of 10, you don’t know exactly what’s in people’s heads, what they’re trying to do when
they arrive at your site. I want to try and give a bit of structure to that by saying if you can
shape some of the elements listed on the next slide, you can start to shape the right place
and the right time.

15. Kairos
(Persuasion windows)
• When you are in a good mood
• When your world view no longer makes sense
• When you can take action immediately
• When you feel indebted because of a favour
• Immediately after you have made a mistake
• Immediately after you have denied a request
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003

16. What’s the second best thing about skiing? It’s got to be après-ski, right? As a non-skier I know that!
Here’s a photograph of something brilliant – it’s a chalet in the Alps. Inside is a purpose-built, a
bespoke, bar in Swiss chalet style. But the bar is six inches lower than any standard bar and above it,
tucked in to the ceiling, is a hand rail.
So people go here on holiday, they have a really nice time. Then they go home and talk to their mates
and they say “it was such a good holiday – it was so good people were even dancing on the bar”.
What they’ve done through persuasive design is they’ve shaped the way that people are going to be
able to spread the news about this particular holiday. It’s very clever and encourages people to spread
the word.
If they’d put up a sign saying Dancing on the bar is permitted do you think it would have had the same
effect?

17. What is the
most powerful page
on your site?
Does anyone have any idea of what the most powerful page on your site is? The homepage?
OK, anyone else? Well, it’s probably your thank you pages. There you’ve got a persuasive
window, there you’ve got an opportunity to talk to people, you’ve got a situation where someone
is already committed to you and has already decided to do something.
Marketing Sherpa did an analysis in January this year where they looked at their own thank you
pages. 39 per cent of the people who viewed them accepted offers for something else. Where
else do you get 39 per cent of your audience committing to do something else? What was
interesting was that 29 per cent went for the most popular offer and 10 per cent went for other
offers. So showing one offer is not enough. You need to be able to give people choice in these
kind of moments. These are your moments of power, these are your persuasion windows that
you need to make the most of in order to maximise the impact that you have on your sites.

18. Web2.0: Persuasion as a dialogue
To influence a
person to change their
The process of
attitude or behaviour
persuasion changes
the persuader

19. I thought I’d give you a very simple example of ‘Persuasion as a Dialogue’. This is something I’ve
started to use on my blog. It’s called a ‘swiki’. It’s basically a search result that’s also a wiki, which
means that these search results are editable by the people who find them.
So you are allowing people to navigate into the search results page and then – what I’m showing you
here is a very simple example around Alzheimers – you’re giving them the opportunity to say ‘this is a
very good result for me, that isn’t and that is completely inappropriate’. And over time, what happens, as
you can see, is that the user-generated aspect of it is beginning to shape the site. It’s beginning to
impact on the site so that it’s becoming more persuasive and more useful. All of this is a result of you
persuading someone else to interact with your content.

20. The value of persuasion
Persuasion is about aligning our needs and
desires with the needs and desires of our
customers - for mutual benefit
• Creation of persuasion pathways
• Right touching through persuasion windows
• As part of engagement modeling

21. Questions
• How can we use iterative interactivity to motivate?
• How can we encapsulate the four types of credibility
into a single site or even a page?
• How can UGC be used to motivate?
• How can we create the right place and right time for
persuasion?
• How ethical is persuasion?