Good morning and welcome back for day two at SES San Francisco! Evert and I will be live-covering some of the sessions for you, so you should make sure to check back regularly. To not miss anything be sure to bookmark our SES event page and for the latest updates connect with us on twitter!
Today’s morning keynote will be done by BJ Fogg, he is Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University – and the keynote is titled “Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do”. So let’s see what he brought us.
BJ Fogg is mainly going to talk about Facebook and especially how FB is triggering user behavior. What Facebook does is “putting hot triggers in the path of motivated people” to take action due to their persuasive design. Triggers are things like a call to action message, a request, some kind of offer and also a queue. In case of Facebook this could be a news feed, advertisement, friend requests, group massages and so one. According to Fogg they clearly are the #1 in persuasive technology of all time – no other company did make it that good, reached that growth, etc.
Same goes for twitter; it’s also a platform to put triggers (in this case triggers are just the messages) in the path of motivated people – same goes for most of the emails, and – certainly interesting for us – search. Even though it’s a little different from Social, search does the same thing: For example, if you go to Google and perform a search for “lady gaga tickets”, what’s happening? Right, Google is putting triggers on their SERPs which enable you to actually buy those tickets – probably by clicking on one of their adwords placements. So these are triggers caused by Google’s financial system.
Continuing with this, BJ Fogg says, that control over hot triggers is key – if you look at “super-spreaders” like TechCrunch or really big twitter accounts they even have more power to place triggers were they actually benefit from. So this one of the key things: Being able to control the placement of triggers.
If you want to know more about what the Stanford Lab does, make sure you check out their Facebook page over at http://www.facebook.com/captology. And that would be it for now – see you in a bit for the next session!
