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Editor’s note: Sanford Dickert is in California at the Supernova conference this week. Check out all of our Supernova coverage from Sanford and Shannon Clark.

Supernova Panel: "People: What We Know and What It Means"

Speakers: BJ Fogg (moderator), Charlene Li, Eszter Hargitti and Elizabeth Churchill

BJ Fogg from the Persuasive Computing lab - how do you motivate and persuade people.

Studying people: can study what is in people’s brain, also look at how people perceive others, diads (how people interact), small and large groups, clusters of groups and cultures/world.

Elizabeth Churhill - Yahoo Research - ethno-centric fieldwork

Presentation: People - what we know and what it means….to us and to them

People are endlessly creative - few tools are good at complex knowledge sharing

Very few tools are good at helping teach people (instructables) - teaching how th groups share knowledge to each other - video, text, cell phones, etc - to share procedural motor skills. [Take a look at Make from Bre Prentis]

Technology and people: most of mosts people’s time are not online - how do we design for offline

Data about people - get the data in the large and in the small - quantitative data versus quantitative data. Sharing Flickr photos - argues for mixed methods necessary.

Q/A:
EHargitti: wants to get into mixed methods. Need to make sure that you need to find people that are not easily accessible.

CLi: Why do people share? Auturism and sharing. Asking them why - because they want to "help" people.

BJFogg: Here are the numbers and here are the stories - helps in the persuasion of understanding.

EChurchill: Eszher’s comment - we are trying to go outside of the network - and trying to understand. Trying to mix the big and the small - in the autursitic - can help people transition into different states of sharing.

Characteristics of sharing - usually metric was size of 2-8 people, as people got older - tended to share less.

SClark: Have you looked at how people have had their first set of reactions? Limited engagement causes limited enthusiasm. No feedback - you tend to go away. High feedback in the beginning usually drives to loyalty.

EChurchill: Retention is driven by high quality first contact. Good community managers need to do the outreach to the people on the edges to drive people within the network.

BJFogg: has anyone "gamed" the system?
EChurchill: a few have the explicit model, but most have an empathic methods
CLi: People are now building gaming systems - rewarding "good behaviors" and punishing "bad behaviors"

Eszther Hargitti - Northwestern Communications Department - mainly interested in social inequalities on the Internet

Presentation: Uses of the Internet

Internet skills - differences in skill: did not know how to search for information (43%). Difference found in age and such.

Differences in skill among young people - skill differences come from people who have lower levels of self-reported know-how: women, Hispanic, African-American, parents with lower levels of education.

Use of Web 2.0 apps not really getting traction with the 18 yr olds.

Online know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, user background is related to digital savvy.

More details at: http://www.webuse.org

Q/A:
CLi: difference in sharing - women tended to share coupons/discounts - interesting about skills being the connector. In terms of skills - how often are you likely to ask questions/to share things.

EChurchill: procedural know-how - lexicon is part of skill. Skillset is part of their lexicon.

BJFogg: we assume that all teenagers have these skills in technology - but the challenge is that most do not know. Example of class where students had to submit to the class with video - major issue of student knowledge.

EHargitti: you would assume that people with knowledgeable people around would gain more skill. But, in those situations - the challenges are often fobbed off to the knowledgeable one (think parents having children do the skilled and not learning themselves).

Founder of CLUB: Is it a matter of skill or a matter of time/priority as you get older?
EHargitti: it is still skill related. Motivation is another factor.

Audience: Internet skill to socio-economic status - what about high-powered computer?
EHargitti: intellectual curiosity is so tied to skill - which is almost impossible to disentangle.

Lots of students are told not to use Wikipedia by the universities - but do not understand why. It is incredibly surprising to some when you show them the Edit button.

BJFogg: why do people comment or not comment?
EHargitti: we do not truly know yet - all sorts of reasons - when we asked why people are not sharing? A lot of issues of being critiqued, privacy issues, stalkers - just beginning phases of this research.

BJFogg: why do people do things on Facebook? About the psychology of using Facebook - about looking good.

Charlene Li - Forrester Research - interested in large-scale research

Answering: why do people create?

Four-step approach to the Groundswell (http://groundswell.forrester.com)

• P - People - access your customers’ social activities
• O - Objectives - decide what you want to accomplish
• S - Strategy - plan for how relationships with customers will change
• T - Technology - decide which social technologies to use

What are the motivations of making people go up and down the ladder? People can do all sorts of these things - and go up and down the ladder. Always seems to be based on positive feedback.

Age is also a major driver of adoption. Need to think about how to drive people up the ladder - taking a look at the generational breakdown shows how generations break into different social technographics groupings.

Example: alpha moms - more spectators and critics - putting blogging tools not going to be useful since they have no time. But better to make it easy to find the content and to allow for reviewing and critic feedback.

Q/A:
EHargitti: wishes there was a way to understand how and why people go up and down the ladder/change group positions.

Audience: have you researched people who have blogged for more than five years?
CLi: who blogs? Why do they blog? Lots of information out there.

JMichalski: where do remixers fall in your ladder?
CLi: remixers = creators

MRissel: when it comes to SaaS, how do you make a conversation about "tracking time" (his company’s product)?
EChurchill: it is about what is important to people (like tracking time) then people are connecting to the emotional and the rational need that the blog might handle.
EChurchill: what are the power dynamics at work? the context?

CLi: There are over 200 social-networking sites - only in Silicon Valley do companies spend their time on the websites talking about their product. In "normal" marketing, websites talk about the problems they solve, not the features of the product.
EChurchill: one of the efforts in evaluating the effectiveness of a technology - watched the problem of solving a personal need (e.g. navigating through a city) and discovered what the users did with their phones/technology.
BJFogg: behaviour momentum
CLi: this stuff is really, REALLY hard. You need to start small. And people overlook the mailing list as a Web 2.0 technology (applause from a few people in the room).

SClark: Self-reporting?
EHargitti: men tend to self-report a lot more comfortable. But, the actual measurements show that men and women tend to have the same skill.

QHardy: we tend to love the tools - not the actual need that is being solved. We are privileged in the things that are good for the network itself. The highest good is that which makes the network vibrant. Why? What are the skills that give this to us?
EChurchill: a lot of people behind the scene are about the experience as goo as we can. It is our responsibility (people in the room) to respond critically - this panel is about problemitizing this issue.
EHargitti: most of my research is on the diversity of usage - people are likely to get much more out of their internet experiences if they do more than just checking the weather. As to sharing - it does matter since those who share tends to influence the discussion.

Audience: is the bifurcation of "online"/"offline" causing research problems?
EChurchill: yes - there is a grey area of engagement - but people are contextually in different situations.

Final statements:
EChurchill: it’s about "complexity, complexity, complexity"
EHargitti: Silicon Valley is not the model of humanity - look beyond this bubble…
CLi: remember that the world is more than online/offline. Be aware of the connections within…

Sanford Dickert is with Contagious Conversations, a social-media consulting firm offering general contracting services for the digital age. Sanford is part of the New York Tech community, helping to strengthen the technology community though his work in coworking (cooperBricolage and New Work City) and support for various networking organizations (co-producer of the New York Tech Meetup when events are brought to the Cooper Union). In other roles, Sanford has been an Adjunct Professor at Cooper Union and Polytechnic, teaching on Web 2.0 concepts and product development, as well as the Chief Technology Officer for the John Kerry for President Campaign. In his "spare time", he also publishes his thoughts on social media, political technology and online engagement in a number of publications.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 7:41 pm and is filed under social networking, Conferences, Supernova. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.