#jboye09 Persuasion: How to Make Your Media More Persuasive

I'm here in sunny Denmark attending the 2009 J Boye conference where the presenters dig into many subjects, but one of my personal standouts is psychologist BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is jazzed-up about how technology is used to influence our behavior. This has been his particular obsession since 1993 and by the looks of it — in our age of social media platforms — he's hit his stride.

Forget trying to modify attitudes, he says, this is too difficult to measure and may not lead to behavior change. Focus on modifying behavior — it's measurable and closer to your real goals. This is how Fogg kicked-off the morning. Here's how he says you can do it.

The Psychology of Persuasion

The psychological pattern of a behavior change is like a dance move, says Fogg. It's something you can learn, understand and apply to different situations. He asserts that there are 3 things required for a behavior to happen:

1. Motivation — pleasure or pain, hope or fear, acceptance or rejection, etc.
2. Ability — the actor in the scenario must be able to perform the action
3. Triggers — the behavior requires a trigger (e.g., a banner ad is a trigger for a click)

For those of you who appreciate unscientific formulas, behavior = motivation + ability + trigger.

Simplicity Underlies Ability

We believe in the beauty of simplicity and so does Fogg. In his model, simplicity is a composite made up of 6 sub-factors. He further explains simplicity as "a function of your scarcest resource at that moment."

The resources in question are:

1. Time
2. Money
3. Physical effort
4. Brain cycles
5. Social deviance (less is better for most of us!)
6. Non-routine (more routine = simpler)

Simplicity plays a key role in Fogg's model of behavior in that if simplicity is low, then the ability to perform the action is low and the probability of the action being performed is reduced. Simple, right?

In the below video BJ Fogg discusses the 6 factors in his model of simplicity.

Focus on the Triggers

Fogg is both Director of the Stanford lab and a private sector consultant. During his talk he drew upon research and a body of field work. Based on these experiences he stated that "often motivation exists, therefore it's more important to focus on facilitation (ability) and triggering."

Another reason Fogg dislikes focusing on motivation is that it feels icky. I'm inclined to agree with the latter statement and I'd like to believe in the first one as well. Thinking a bit more about this, Gerry McGovern quickly comes to mind (see some of his writings here).

Gerry's mantra is that the web is about completing tasks. If you believe this or have evidence to support this, then what logically follows is that when you have access to an web audience then you are typically dealing with an audience that has a some kind of motivation — there is a task or two they are interested in completing.

If you can identify and segment the people who have a motivation related to your behavior goals, then you can focus less on the motivation component of behavior and more on the ability and trigger components.

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Tags: behavior, bj fogg, captology, jboye, jboye09, persuasion, social media, stanford university, web content, web optimization

I'm here in sunny Denmark attending the 2009 J Boye conference where the presenters dig into many subjects, but one of my personal standouts is psychologist BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is jazzed-up about how technology is used to influence our behavior. This has been his particular obsession since 1993 and by the looks of it -- in our age of social media platforms -- he's hit his stride.

Forget trying to modify attitudes, he says, this is too difficult to measure and may not lead to behavior change. Focus on modifying behavior -- it's measurable and closer to your real goals. This is how Fogg kicked-off the morning. Here's how he says you can do it.