1. Business Strategies for Social Media
Leveraging Persuasive Architecture
Presented to Central CT Society for Information Management
October, 2011
Michael Rawlins, User Experience Strategist
2. About me...
Michael Rawlins
eBusiness Product Manager at Cigna
•Certified Usability Analyst since 2003
•Certified User Experience Analyst (late 2012)
•Early adopter of Social Networking
•Instructor of:
•Usability Testing Methods
•Interaction Design Techniques
•Persuasive Design Techniques (PET)
•Social Networking Strategy
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3. Why is social media compelling?
Shifting Technology Focus...
Big Hardware Smaller Hardware Software People!
60’s - mid 70’s mid-70’s - 80’s 90’s Now
Social Media...
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4. Growth Statistics Since 2005
Facebook has Linkedin has
reached 800 over 100 million
million active profiles...
users...
http://www.facebook. /press/info.php?statistics
com http://blog.linkedin.com/ /03/22/linkedin-100-million/
2011
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6. Social media becoming routine...
Becoming routine for
many people
Communities
are becoming mature
and diverse in types of
subscribers
More multi-channel design
expected
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8. What are people doing?
Connecting with friends,
family and work peers
Promoting businesses,
causes and interests
Redefining how they
communicate
Source: Pew Research
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15. Form Factor
Cognitive
Involvement
Persuasive
Design
Source: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-the-growth-of-social-media-2011/ 15
16. Persuasion theory...
Life = making choices
More information = more difficult to choose
More choices available = more difficult to choose
People have developed semi-automatic reactions
to help make choices
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20. Social motivators
Recognition Cooperation
Belonging Competition
Comparison Social Control
Facilitation Loss Aversion
Peer Pressure Dissonance
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21. Leveraging persuasion...
Use reciprocity to give things away for free and
people will return
People are inclined to return favors you have done for
them
Chances are you’re already giving something
away for free
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22. “Freemium” strategies...
Free newsletters and RSS Feeds
Free tips
Free webinars/podcast
Free trial software
Goal: Ask users/visitors to promote your content in
return for what they get
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23. The sub-conscious mind...
When something is scarce, people automatically perceive it to
be more valuable
Scarcity in time is extremely effective (example:
limited access to content, previews, etc.)
Scarcity in amount is equally effective in gaining
users/visitors attention
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24. Designing for trust...
Authority figures can trigger behaviors... Establishing
authority makes it easy for people to choose you, your
product or service offering over the next distraction
Social Proof “People are like sheep!”. The more
information we put in front of our users/visitors, the more
they rely on other people’s choices to make
their own
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25. Changing behaviors...
Commitment/Consistency: the moment people
decide on something, they start convincing
themselves it’s the right choice
Goal: Leveraging all of these elements as part of a
Persuasive Architecture enables smart companies to
rationalize social media initiatives
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27. Applied Persuasion...
Piano stairs - TheFunTheory.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw
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28. Key Points...
This is the age of Person-to-Person-to-Person communication.
Provides a B-to-C and B-to-B framework.
Many social networks have an underlying design based on
persuasive influence markers like reciprocity, likability and
social proof.
Social networks are redefining how people gain answers to
questions - and accessing news & information.
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29. You’ll Need to Dig Deeper...
Business strategies need to go beyond ‘parity plays’
Quantify successes by usability testing (leverage new
applications in the cloud like Verifyapp.com)
ROI will come from data-mining and behavioral modeling
Treat persuasive architecture just like technical architecture
(hire a Persuasion Architect or a User Experience Strategist)
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