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mobile persuasion - bj fogg

mobile persuasion audience

Mobile development is affecting our culture and society at a riveting pace. In an enlightening day-long conference I attended at Stanford University a few weeks ago, we witnessed a slice of research and development that wasn’t targeted to the mass consumer audience – but instead was more specifically targeted to health, fitness, social awareness and the future. Mobile Persuasion is a one day event by The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. The event brought a number of various research and design/technology professionals together for a fast-paced day of panels and discussions, spearheaded by BJ Fogg who kept the day moving at a fast, persuasive pace as we wove through more than thirty speakers. His book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do is aligned with the research and his weblog keeps up with his daily ponderings. From the web site:

Mobile Persuasion will bring together over 200 innovators, researchers, and companies creating mobile technologies that change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Applications include health, commerce, activism, social networking, advertising, conservation, and mobile gaming. This full-day event will feature expert talks and panels on how mobile technology can change attitudes and behaviors.

The event started with what turned out to be my favorite session focusing titled “Big Ideas in Mobile Persuasion: Changing our politics, our environment and ourselves.” I will go into a bit of detail here, and then link to other blogs that recap the event as well.Justin Oberman (MoPocket) condensing a fabulous presentation on the effects of mobile devices for social change into the allocated nine minutes. He started by asking the audience to switch phones with the person next to them and then (with their permission!) send a text message to themselves. In 30 seconds, not a person in the room could complete the task. With so many smart phones, we had some pretty dumb users. ;-)

Justin covered the basics of the mobile politics space and how various countries have dealt with converging politics and mobile technology. He mentioned “People Power 2” (Philippines 2001) when people took down the presidency using SMS. In South Korea, the Moo-Hyun election was affected in the same way (2002). Justin talks about the MobileSpace versus CyberSpace, and how in this case, the mobile device is not the persusasive technology, but a means to mobilize people who are already persuaded. He says “You are not going to persuade someone in 160 characters or less.”

BJ Fogg Interlude between speakers: “In order to change a behavior, you need to determine if they are lacking motivation or ability. You have to start with one or the other to affect change.”

Later, Alex Kass from Accenture Technology Labs showed a presentation on “Optimizing Human Performance through Mobile Coaching.” One example showed an individual using a bluetooth headset tied to a program on his device that monitored his % of conversation during a meeting. It allowed him to track and monitor much he talked versus others and helped to modify his behavior over time. Alex says “There are a lot of metrics for health and fitness, merely making users aware of how their actual behaviors compare to their goals will help a lot to improve performance.”

Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future said “We don’t predict the future, but we have various methods for establishing some trends.” He cited some studies that had been doing through Stanford University on Personal Mobile Futures and ethnographic studies they are conducting in China, India and Brazil. He was personally interested in the GEO web – the geospacial web. He talked about seeing all of the invisible information in a room – and seeing all of the data that has been embedded. He said this data is a new platform that takes persuasive or ubiquitous information and sythesizes it – like a Tricorder. He says the next wave is to take “sense making” with the sensor information to the next level and utilize mobile devices to gather information about air quality and soil quality and witness an emergence of location-based health services. He believes this will all improve the quality of your life. He ended by saying “We’re looking at a mobile future where peop.e take control of their own health.”

BJ Fogg Interlude between panels: “It’s true that you need motivation and ability to change a behavior. But I left out one thing – you also need a trigger.”

The day continued, with some great speakers like Josh Ulm from Adobe demonstrating about the need for immediacy and desireability for mobile success) and Gabriel White from frog design discussing the tie in between literacy and mobile device use in developing countries and Ian Smith from Intel Research talking about using mobile devices to encourage environmental awareness. R. Craig Lefebvre summed everything up in a wrap up of the day

kelly testing the N800

During the session, one of the sponsors (Nokia) started passing around the new N800 for review. I was able to play with the device and noted how ‘ultra-light’ it seemed which in the mobile space refers to the category of hybrid pc-mobile devices and not the true size or weight of the device itself. An excellent review of the N800 experience on Mobile Crunch cais available (thanks Henning for sending me the link) and my own experience was feeling the device was a bit bulky for my personal use and although sleek and fun to use the video camera (which turns around so it can face you for video chatting) it seemed one model away from one I would personally purchase and use on a regular basis. But I would of course have to try it first in order to properly give feedback. ;-)

The day was a success, with some rather flat presentations (to be expected) and some “duh” moments, but it was definitely a glipse at a persuasive future with a lot of healthcare, environment and social mobility in the mix. Nicole Armbruster from our office attended Bar Camp the next day – as BJ and others brainstormed and created web sites on various persuasive mobile topics. Here is the website her team produced. They focused on mobile adoption between the U.S. and Europe – with the results of BarCamp posted here. Shows you can do a lot in a single afternoon!

Posted on February 19th, 2007 in Thoughts
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Written by Kelly Goto

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  3. Pingback February 19th, 2007 by Persuasive Technology 2007: Not Your Typical Conference (and That’s a Good Thing) » The CLM Blog

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