People are social animals. It’s in our biology. We just can’t help it. So if you want to persuade and motivate people to take action, put whatever you want them to do in a social context. Do you want people to use your product? Then make sure they know how many other people are using it. Do you want people to use your product more? Then get them to tell others about the product. By talking about it to their social network they are reinforcing to themselves how important it is to them (if you’ve talked about something to your network then you are more likely to be committed to it moving forward). If you want people to use your product more, then make it easy to use it with other people around; make it easy to use it together with someone else — make it an app that two people use, or that one person uses but wants to share what happened. Make it easy to share.
In some recent research for a client an online customer I was interviewing talked about going online to the customer’s site with her daughter and having mother/daughter bonding time while shopping online together. How many online shopping sites make it easy to shop together? What about a shopping experience and a shopping cart that allows and encourages two or more people to shop at the same time? On different devices? Even if they are in the same room.
How many times have you and a friend been online at the same site at the same time while in the same room and talking about what you are doing?
Intel’s experimenting with Billboard. It puts a 2nd screen on the outside of your laptop that you can use to show pictures, or even show your texts with other people around you. What if you could mirror what you are doing online if you so chose, so that the person sitting across from you could see what you were doing without you having to move your chair or having them turn their laptop to let you see?
How can you use the power of social interaction to persuade and motivate?
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