Why people do what they do

Using Technology to measure influence.. and cause behavior change

Isn't it interesting to know why people do what they do? I have always had a keen interest in understanding this concept. While I am studying here at Carnegie Mellon about how innovative technologies are being leveraged to make businesses more productive, I took this really cool course called Influence and Persuasion Online.Yes, it is all about why people do what they do.

An interesting outcome of this is the post lecture analysis we do. I wrote a blog post where I (tried to) logically explain what draws people to use online services. I examined Klout.

Here is the post:

After reading about influence and persuasion I have realized that there are so many ways businesses are using these techniques for increasing click rates, social interactions etc. The example I have chosen to discuss in this blog post is a website (and an app) that not only influences people to use more social media but also focuses on measuring one’s influence over multiple social networks.

The product is Klout (Klout | The Standard for Influence). Klout is a 5 year old startup company that “now pulls data for half-a-billion people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites.” Klout basically gains access to your online social network accounts and measures the data you have generated through those accounts. It analyzes all that information and highlights topics where people are more influential. Each activity has a score attached to it. The higher your score, the more influential you are. On the business side, marketers use those scores for targeted advertisements.

Let us now analyze how does Klout use customer behavior understanding to grow their business. We know that the users would generally want a higher score and therefore they are persuaded to increase their activity. Something like Gamification. But what is important to understand here is, the process of how the change in behavior is achieved which persuades those users.

The FBM model states there are three elements which must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur. Those three elements are motivation, ability and trigger. According to BJ Fogg, usually one should consider these elements in an order for good results. The order is Trigger, Ability and Motivation.

In the case of Klout, we have to determine what is the trigger that causes Klout users to change their behavior and increase their online social activity. Is it the score which triggers action? Not really. While the score acts as a motivation, it is the constant well engineered emails one receives from Klout that triggers actions. Emails that notify you of your weekly improvement, which friend is ahead of you etc. Such emails act as a trigger point which takes the user to increase their activity on say, Facebook or Twitter, even if the user does not have anything to tweet or post an update. They are able to do it because all of the social activity can be done very easily today using smartphones. That proves the ability part.

As I mentioned before, the motivation is a result of the score. The score in this case is a measure of the influence any user has on social media, which is used as the motivation factor.

It has been noted that after registering for Klout, users tweet and like more, thus changing their own behavior. Though such a tool is effective in persuasion, I think it creates a sense of weird competition which is not needed. For instance, marketing companies now ask job applicants for their Klout score. I don’t think an applicants Klout score is a good reflection of his ability to perform in any job. What do you think?

Note:
If you are interested in learning how exactly Klout calculates your score you can visit this link: The TRUTH About Your Klout Score: How Your Phony Number Is Calculated