Persuasion News & Articles

Every click and every second counts. So optimize your marketing campaigns by focusing on delivering relevant, personally meaningful messages.

CNN.com's designers have gone out of their way to make their work difficult. They could have built a very simple home page with just their logo and a handful of links:

• The Most Important Story
• The Second Most Important Story
• The Third Most Important Story
• An Unimportant, Yet Entertaining Story
• Yet Another Story about Michael Jackson

If this was CNN's home page, the designers could go home and not have any work for weeks. After all, what is a news site's home page but a list of links to the most important stories? (And the unexplainable insatiable curiosity about Michael Jackson's latest antics.)

Yet, these links aren't effective for users because they're missing a key component: the Trigger Words. Trigger words are the words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking. They contain the essential elements to provide the motivation to continue with the site.

In his opening keynote this morning at the J. Boye 2009 conference, BJ Fogg presented his views on why Facebook and Twitter are the rock stars of social media, and how they got there.

Weaving in psychology and behavior models into the conversation about technology and new media, Fogg introduced the notion of persuasion being all around us and tried to help the audience understand better how exactly it works.

Love it or hate it, Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology of all time. Here's how they hook us.

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.