‘Liking’ persuasion: case studies in social media for behaviour change

Contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have seen huge growth in recent years with a respective 1 billion and 500m registered users. Given such large numbers of the global population are using online social networks regularly, tapping into this audience to raise awareness of, and bring about positive behaviour change in, societal issues such as energy consumption and healthier lifestyles has promising potential. This position paper describes three behavior change case studies in domestic energy and physical activity that fully integrated with online social networks. Participant engagement throughout the pilot interventions was high with measurable consumption/activity behavior change evident. We also discuss our current social media and sustainability research

What do you think of the return of dungarees?: Social media interactions between retail locations and their customers

Social media presents new digital interaction opportunities and challenges to urban retail locations such as shopping malls, centres and streets. Platforms such as Facebook facilitate online communication with, and between, customers that is not possible through traditional media and marketing techniques. Using data gathered from the Facebook pages of six urban retail locations over 12 months, this paper considers the possible factors that shape online customer engagement and conversation. In particular, we present a thematic analysis of content in shared posts, and discuss how characteristics of a retail location and the structure of the consumer community shape these posts. Our findings are used to form suggestions to further investigate engagement between customers and retail locations via social media

The impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets

This paper focuses on issues of interaction with a particular type of mobile information system – virtual pets. It examines the impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets, and tests the hypothesis that younger virtual pet owners will experience closer companionship with their virtual pet than older owners. This is in response to the marketing stance adopted by virtual pet manufacturers who clearly target younger people as the main consumers of their products. The hypothesis was tested using survey data and companionship was measured using the Comfort from Companion Animals Scale. Support was found for the hypothesis at all definitions of young: there is a highly significant difference between the companionship offered by a virtual pet to young people than that offered to older people. Although this finding generally indicates that virtual pets offer more, in terms of emotional-engagement, to younger people than older people we suggest that much more research in this area is needed in order to better understand the phenomenal commercial success of virtual pets. In addition, there is an abundance of literature examining the benefits of owning real pets. It is possible that a virtual pet might be able to deliver some of these, and given our result, it is likely that virtual pets will be more likely to bring these benefits to young people rather than to old peopl

Mario, Luigi and Dave: the effect of language on the social structure of a bilingual online mobile game

In this paper, we explore the structure of a social community built in an online game that was released in two languages, specifically examining the behaviours of players involved in inter-lingual interaction. This asynchronous social game was released simultaneously in Italian and English. The player base was seeded with English and Italian players but allowed to grow organically without restriction. Despite the built-in segregation by language, we found that the entire player-base formed into a single social network and developed strategies for overcoming the challenges faced by a multi-lingual game community. Using Network Analysis, we break down the community in the game based on language and play style. We demonstrate that the behaviour of both English and Italian players was equivalent, and that play style had no effect on the likelihood of players deliberately engaging in inter-lingual communication. In the context of the strategies used by the players in our experiment, we discuss game design patterns that provide incentives for users to behave more socially and how to create tools to enable the players to cross the lingual and cultural barriers in online games

Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media extensions for simple mobile devices

Powerful behaviour change programmes can be developed through a combination of very simple, accessible technology, and an understanding of the psychological processes that drive behaviour change. We present a study in which very basic digital pedometers were used to record the number of steps taken by participants over the course of a normal working day. A Facebook application, named Step Matron, was utilised to provide a social and competitive context for pedometer readings. We were particularly interested in whether interactions between users via the application more successfully motivated physical activity than simply recording daily step counts in a similar application. Ten participants (1 male), all nurses working in a UK hospital, used the application across two conditions over the course of the study. In the socially-enabled condition, participants could view each other’s step data and make comparisons and comments. In the non-social condition, participants could only view their own personal step data. A significant increase in step activity was observed in the socially enabled condition. Our findings highlight the potential of social media as a means for generating positive behaviour change. They also suggest that simple mobile devices can function as an inexpensive, accessible and powerful trigger towards this behaviour change without necessitating the use of overly complex and expensive mobile applications or device

Tabletop prototyping of serious games for ‘soft skills’ training

Serious games offer a relatively low cost, highly engaging alternative to traditional forms of soft skills training. The current paper describes an approach taken to designing a serious game for the training of soft skills. A tabletop prototype of the game was created and evaluated with a group of 24 participants. Initial findings suggest that the game successfully created an environment in which it was advantageous to engage in appropriate collaborative decision making behaviors, as well as providing built-in opportunities for a tutor to guide under-performing groups

Gaming on and off the social graph: the social structure of Facebook games

Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph

Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls

In this paper, we explore the role of mischief as borderline socially acceptable behaviour within social computing applications. Mischievous activity pushes the boundaries of the implicit social contract present in all online social systems, and, we argue, is of vital importance understanding online social interactions. Using examples from games and other applications, we explore mischief as an act of appropriation, which reinterprets mechanics defined by developers in unexpected and sometimes upsetting ways. Although frequently interpreted as negative and anti-social behaviour, we argue that mischief serves a vital social role, and find surprising richness in the chaos

Co-viewing TV with Twitter: more interesting than the shows?

Social media services, and Twitter in particular, are changing the way in which many people consume traditional broadcast media. Real-time backchannel conversations are now common-place as audiences simultaneously watch TV whilst using Twitter to broadcast their own thoughts, sentiments, opinions and emotions related to what they are watching. This individual behavior, when aggregated, results in a new social experience comprising of mass, real-time, coconsumption of TV services that has, thus far, been neither recognized nor investigated by the HCI community nor the broadcast industry. This paper describes a work-in-progress which aims to understand user behaviour in this burgeoning area and provides some preliminary analysis of viewers’ Twitter activity surrounding the popular UK TV show, The X Factor

Automated visual surveillance of a population of nesting seabirds

Seabird populations are a valuable and accessible indicator of marine health: population changes have been linked with fish stock levels, climate change, and pollution. Understanding the development of particular colonies requires detailed data, but manual collection methods are labour intensive and error prone. Our work is concerned with development of computer vision algorithms to support autonomous visual monitoring of cliff-nesting nesting seabirds, and collection of behavioural data on a scale not feasible using manual methods. This work has been conducted at the University of Lincoln (UK), in collaboration with the Centre for Computational Ecology and Environmental Science (CEES) at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Our work has been ongoing for around 12 months, and focussed on robust image processing techniques capable of detecting and localising individual birds in image and video data. In our case, we are using data captured from a population of Common Guillemots (Uria aalge) resident on Skomer Island (UK) during the summer of 2010. This work represents a unique adaptation of computer vision technology, and we present a discussion of current and future technical challenges, processing techniques which we have developed, and some preliminary evaluation and results. In particular, we consider techniques based on feature based detection of birds and their body parts using gradient image features