Behavior Design Meets Digital Influence

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley. Today, we have not one but two guests. Joining me from Holland, we have Bas Wouters and Joris Groen, authors of the book Online Influence. It was first published in Dutch, but now it’s in English. I have to say, it is a really fascinating book. It is jam-packed with info and lots of illustrations, a great read for any digital marketer. I’m going to let Bas and Joris introduce themselves. Bas, you go first.

Bas Wouters:      Yes, thank you, Roger, for this great introduction. Yes, my name is Bas Wouters. I’m an entrepreneur who became really fascinated about behavioral science and the practical applicability of behavioral science. I’ve been personally trained by Dr. Robert Cialdini. I’m one of his 14 certified trainers in the world. Also, I’ve been trained by BJ Fogg and, like you mentioned, the author of the book Online Influence, which I used in my own companies to build my businesses.

Roger Dooley:     Joris?

Joris Groen:        I’m Joris, psychologist and UX designer. I’ve always worked in UX, founded the company Buyerminds. We’re specializing in what we call behavior design for the online world. Currently, I’m working and designing at Booking.com, trying to make the check box more persuasive in helping people to make bookings in Facebook Messenger. Also, the co-author, of course, of Online Influence.

Roger Dooley:     Yes, it seems like Booking is quite into behavioral science, from what I can tell. The last international conference I attended was in TESOL. It was Tom Welling’s Conversion Hotel, only this one was called the something else conference. There were some folks there from Booking, including the director of experimentation. Forget his name, but-

Joris Groen:        Lucas Vermeer.

Roger Dooley:     Yes, exactly.

Joris Groen:        Yeah.

Roger Dooley:     Yes. Very interesting stuff. We may get into some of the ways that Booking uses this technique, but first, one thing that I loved about the book was that it starts with… It builds around BJ Fogg’s Fogg Behavior Model as a framework. I learned about Fogg’s model, with a little bit of modification into my own persuasion slide framework, because I had a few different objectives with that. To me, that is a great, fundamental way of thinking about any kind of influence or behavior change process. It’s such a simple concept, but into that, then, you can insert things like Cialdini-based influence principles into the motivation side, or what BJ Would call motivation. Whoever wants to take this, I’ve explained the Fogg behavior model occasionally to my listeners and viewers, but one of you try and summarize how that concept works, recognizing that we have audio listeners who can’t see the nice illustration in the book.

Joris Groen:        That’s great that you ask it, because we did a training, the Tiny Habits Certification. We were actually trained to explain the behavior model in one minute, so I can do it one minute if you want.

Roger Dooley:     Go for it.

Joris Groen:        The behavior model says that every behavior, every small behavior, big behavior, starts with a prompt. ‘Prompt’ means something in the outside world that asks you or reminds you to do this behavior. People don’t do much stuff on their own account. Then there’s two other conditions. One is motivation. This prompt will only ignite the behavior if there’s enough level of motivation. You have to really want to do it. The other factor, and it’s often overlooked, is ability. Maybe people are motivated, but it’s too hard. Ability has to do with how hard or easy a behavior is to do. That’s it. One more thing. Motivation and behavior are like communicating vessels. If you are very motivated, the behavior can be a little hard, and you still will do it. If you’re not so motivated, we can still persuade you by making the behavior extremely easy. This is the foundation of behavior design. Looking to behavior in this systematic way helps you to boost your results in any field.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Of course, Cialdini is famous for his first six and then more recently seven principles of influence. The first six have been with us for 30 plus years. Both BJ and Bob have been on this show before. I’d encourage our audience members who want to dig in a little bit deeper to find some of those past episodes, because it’s great to hear those words from the masters themselves. Indeed, they are both masters of behavioral science.

Joris Groen:        Yeah.

Roger Dooley:     One of the things that I know they bring up every time and you have mentioned in the book as well is ethical persuasion. I’m going to get this up front rather than leaving it as an afterthought to discussions of persuasion, where it’s like, “By the way, be sure you use these techniques in an ethical manner, because doing so in an unethical manner would really be bad.” To get that sort of cautionary tale in first, who wants to talk briefly about the ethics of using the techniques that are in the book and that we’ll be talking about?

Bas Wouters:      Yeah, I’d like to answer that question, Roger. Of course, the ethical side probably has been mentioned a lot of times in your show. It’s really important, first of all, to use these principle ethically, but we always say the science itself cannot be ethical or unethical. It’s science. This is how we make choices. This is how behavior comes to light. The way of using it, we are big advocacies of using this in an ethical way, of course, because it bounces back as a boomerang if you don’t do this.

In our book, we describe six questions or six ways you have to ask yourself if you are doing things ethically. I think it’s really important that people realize these things. One of them is a pretty obviously one. Do you tell the truth? Would you tell this to your father, mother, brother, or sister? Also, is it wise? That’s also my favorite question. ‘Wise’ means, if this person say yes to my request at this moment, will he say yes to another request in the near future? If your answer is no, probably, it’s not a good thing to make the request right now.

Roger Dooley:     Right. That’s a basic principle, Bas, that if you are going to induce somebody to do something that they’re going to regret a day later or two days later, then you’re probably not persuading in the right way. The truth thing is important, too. I guess there’s shadings of truth, because for instance, something that you see on travel sites, obviously, I guess you are there, these scarcity queues. There’s only two rooms left at this price. Clearly, there can be totally false scarcity queues.

There was an economic paper a year or two ago that looked at some of these things. They found that, in some cases, the site always said the same thing. It didn’t matter what time of day it was or when it happened or if you bought it. There were always only two left, so that was clearly lying. Then you’ve got these shadings of truth. There’s only two left at €200, but there might be two more at €200.20 or something like that. There are others where it is true. There were only two left, or yes, there’s more rooms, but those rooms are going to be €201, which for the consumer will be a significant difference.

I don’t want to belabor the ethics point, but it is important to try and use these things and not in a manipulative way but in a way that will end up getting your customer to a better place in their life, not something that they would regret.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, exactly. Especially… It’s always about scarcity principle somehow, this discussion, because it’s so powerful, and it’s also really tempting for companies to be a little bit creative with scarcity.

Roger Dooley:     Scarcity is more easily manipulated than the, say, social proof. You could lie about having 20,000 customers for your software, but you couldn’t fake it and say, “Yeah, it’s not really 20,000. It’s really 2,000, but I can say 20,000 because of X.” You’re either lying or you’re telling the truth in that case, but scarcity can be adjusted pretty easily.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, you can create this, basically, by changing a price for a limited amount of products or…

Roger Dooley:     Or time even. I don’t sell training programs, but I’ve seen certainly people selling training programs and, “Only 24 hours left to take advantage of this deal.” Maybe, in two days later, it’s going to be another 24 hour window. Who knows? You can manipulate scarcity a lot more easily than you can manipulate some of the other principles.

One of the things that I… I obviously am familiar with a lot of the examples in the book, but something that either I hadn’t seen or perhaps saw it, and it was so long ago, but I have forgotten seeing it, was a way of using authority. Now, we all use authority. On your books, we share an endorser. Bob Cialdini is on the cover of both of our books. That’s using authority. What better authority than the person who pretty much invented the science of authority? It’s used in a lot of ways by having a celebrity or an expert endorse your product, but one clever use of that was when a receptionist answered the phone, just in transferring the call to somebody else. The receptionist may be a dying breed these days, it seems, with the way we use our communications, but to me, that would be worth perhaps hiring a receptionist, even if you could automate that process, just for that cue. Why don’t you describe that technique?

Joris Groen:        Bas, this is—

Bas Wouters:      Yeah, this is the Cialdini field.

Joris Groen:        Your favorite example.

Bas Wouters:      Yeah, this example is a really interesting example indeed. It was from a real estate agency. When somebody called and they were asking, for example, to private housing, then the receptionist transferred the phone. “Okay, I’ll give you Mike, and he will help you along.” It will make a small change. The small change was, the receptionist introduced Mike credentials. They said, “Okay, I’m going to transfer you to Mike. Mike has been in this world of working for over 20 years, and he helped more than 1,000 customers find their perfect house.” When they did this, the number of appointments raised with 20%. Out of the appointments, the sales rates of the total appointments raised with 15%. Just by adding two sentence, this was a huge impact. Of course, we translate this to online. You can think on something like confirmation of an appointment. The person you’re going to speak to, you can already give the credentials there, which is a powerful tool.

Joris Groen:        Yeah. Now, a lot of websites, they actually have this receptionist, which is the AI chat bot assistant. There, I think you will see this technique in the future, on websites, where the bot does a hand-over to one of the experts and then give this introduction and to raise authority. That’s also cool to see that, all those maybe old techniques from the ’70s are becoming very hot right now to be used by chat bots in one-to-one conversations that they have.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. I think another application for that… You gentlemen both speak at conferences, online, and in person, maybe again someday soon, I hope. Something that I’ve read from experts like Nick Morgan and Michael Port, who are speaking coaches and communications coaches, is you always have the person introducing you establish your credentials in a credible way. Don’t leave it to chance, like send them a two page bio and then have them pick some random facts out of that bio. By having them give you the right introduction that will set up your talk and its relevance to the audience, that will increase your credibility, help people pay attention, particularly in the early going, while you’re establishing your credibility. You can’t do that yourself. You can’t say, “I’m an expert in X, Y, Z, so please listen to me,” because then people think you’re a jerk, but if the person introducing you says that you have those credentials, then that’s fine. Whether we do it with a receptionist or a digital chat bot or a person who’s introducing us, even in an in-person networking event, if you’ve got a wing man who’s going to introduce you to somebody, they should do so in a way that will set your credibility up for whatever it is that person that you’re being introduced or that group that you’re being introduced to will appreciate.

Bas Wouters:      Yeah, definitely. Sorry. It’s interesting you—

Joris Groen:        Yeah, did you see our webinar? You can still see the recording. Guess what? We actually asked somebody to introduce us before we were on stage.

Roger Dooley:     Right.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, we took advantage of this principle.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because there are certain things that a person cannot really say about themselves. They can try working around it and maybe giving some examples that would establish the credibility, but it’s really helpful if somebody else does that, regardless of the venue, whether it’s digital, in-person, or whatever.

Joris Groen:        Yeah.

Roger Dooley:     What are some of the other, maybe more unique applications of, say, Cialdini principles that you’ve found work in this digital world? One thing I wanted to mention, too, that’s really nice about the book is, a lot of your examples are using mobile screens, or simulated mobile screens, not necessarily screenshots, but rather than this sort of traditional website look, a lot of them are little, digital phone looks.

Joris Groen:        Yeah. Thanks for noticing that. We saw that a lot of books that we loved from five or six years ago feel already outdated, because they used real screenshots from websites from that time. We decide, we want to make something that goes for like ten years.” We use wire frames, a more abstract form, and also try to do a 50/50 mix of desktop and mobile screens. That’s very good.

Roger Dooley:     That’s excellent, because so often, too, the interface is quite different on two devices. You just can’t do the same things on a big laptop screen or even expanded desktop screen versus what you’re going to have on a little phone.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, exactly. That’s a difference as well. Also having the wire frame allows you to leave out all the non-relevant details so you can maybe communicate a principle very fast by showing them.

Roger Dooley:     Right. It gets dated a little bit more slowly, too, than… You look at last year, the website, and you say, “That looks kind of old now,” but the wire frames are more generic. What are some of the other, maybe more surprising examples or techniques that you’ve found work really well?

Joris Groen:        Actually, what I’m most proud of is our section about prompts, because many books about persuasion, the word ‘prompt’ is maybe not even mentioned. It’s also because, usually, when it’s about persuasion, it’s between two people talking to each other. Somebody’s already prompted by a question or by a conversation, so that’s maybe less relevant in those settings. Online, it’s the most important things, because you open your screen, and you’re bombarded with different things to do this or this or that. That’s why we started with this chapter, and we said, “Yeah, in order to be the winning prompt, you can use one of our proven prompt strategies,” which sounds really cool, I think. We have four-

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. Joris, let me interrupt one second here and remind our audience that BJ Fogg used to call what he now calls a ‘prompt’ a ‘trigger.’ If you’re familiar with the older versions of the behavior model, this is also the trigger. Anyway—

Joris Groen:        It’s the trigger, yeah. I think he changed the name because it’s… In a lot of workshop, people have a hard time understanding what a prompt is in the behavior model. They think a prompt, “That’s something that motivates me. It’s some idea that brings me on an idea to do a behavior.” Actually, it’s just a signal, something in the outside world, an icon or a word or a subject line or an ad or a button or a header that activates you to do an online behavior. If you understand that concept, I think you took already a big step into online persuasion.

You were asking about principles. One principle that I like is the simple question strategy. This is… Later, we found out, just by our own experience mainly, that if you ask somebody a simple question, like on a web page or somewhere in your application with three or four answering buttons that close the question, so to speak, you get a lot of response, in many cases, more than any other way of trying to probe them. Somehow, people, if they read a question, unconsciously, it’s a simple question that you read it automatically, they have this irresistible urge to answer, to press one of these buttons. Then, of course, you take over the screen, and you can take them to the next step in your persuasive journey. This is one principle that I’m really fond of using.

Bas Wouters:      It would be great, Joris, if you explained the case you’ve done where you want the conversion rate optimization or what for the—

Joris Groen:        Yeah. You see it now more and more, in e-mails especially, when you ask your customers to write a review. Of course, you can write them a message and then say, “Please, your opinion is important. Click here to write a review.” You can also just start with a question. “Hey, did you like it?” Then you have three buttons, yes, no, or as expected, or better than expected, or disappointing, whatever. Having these three buttons staring at you makes it, for many people, irresistible to click. Then we know, of course, from Cialdini, if you’re taking the first small step, you’re more likely to take the next step.

Roger Dooley:     You talk about these small steps as being really important. That makes a huge amount of sense.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, we’ve had a struggle, because Cialdini calls it ‘commitment inconsistency,’ and BJ Fogg calls it ‘baby steps.’ This is where the two frameworks meet each other, so we had a fight. “How shall we call this chapter?” Because BJ Fogg model is so important, we called the chapter ‘Baby Steps,’ because I think it’s easier for people to pronounce and to remember. It has to do with, if you can make somebody take a baby step, you are halfway, actually.

Roger Dooley:     What sort of a micro-commitment strategy these… I’ve got one slide. One person who’s advocated this is Ryan Levesque, a digital marketer, wrote a book called ‘Ask,’ about gathering information about customers from surveys and actually using those as part of the sales funnel process. He talks about micro-commitments. It very much mirrors what you talk about in there, which is, start with a simple, non-threatening question. Don’t ask people for their personal information right away, because they will not give that to you. They’ll be intimidated, but if you ask them for some very simple questions that don’t reveal personal information, they don’t find threatening, as each time they answer another question, they’re increasing their commitment to this process. I’ve got a slide in some of my speech decks that shows a process like this. I think it may be one of Ryan’s. I’m not sure, but it’s very much like his if it’s not his, about assessing what kind of a tennis player you are. It starts off with one simple question, “Are you male or female?” Maybe in 2020, that question is more complicated, but…

Joris Groen:        It’s threatening, yeah.

Roger Dooley:     At least at the time the text was written, that was a reasonable question. It goes through a couple of those, just one per screen. You’re whooping through these screens with almost no effort, no thought, you’re not intimidated at all. Eventually, you get to the ones that are more complicated, that require a little bit more reading. I took all those questions, and I pasted them together in one big form. It was a horrendous form. If a customer ever looked at that and said, “Should I fill out this form?” they’d look and maybe go from top to bottom, and they’d say, “No, that’s look like way too much effort.”

In fact, there was some work done using… I forget what… Some kind of neuromarketing technique from a company called Synapbox that I’ve been affiliated with. They found that, when people are presented with a web form, before they complete the first box, they tend to scroll up and scroll down to see how long it is and what’s involved. That’s another barrier to these micro-commitments. When you’re using a micro-commitment strategy, they can’t see what’s ahead. Eventually, you’ll learn. I don’t do hotel surveys anymore, because I know that, even though they start off with a simple question, eventually they get into these really long things that have charts with 10 different lines and 10 different rating levels. It’s awful.

Anyway, it’s such a simple application. I like the fact that you point out. That’s where Fogg and Cialdini intersect, too, that they both meet at that point. That’s great.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, it’s crucial in human behavior design and persuasion to be able to… It’s also creative. As a designer, you have to try to come up with good, smart baby steps that are safe, non-threatening, fun, that really get things to start of your conversation or your journey. It’s extremely important to put all your efforts into that first step.

Roger Dooley:     I wrote my entire book, Friction, about pretty much the ability step in Fogg behavior model, about how making things easier makes more of those things happen or vice versa. One of the things that I didn’t really talk about that you mentioned in the book, or I didn’t spend enough time on it, is the setting the expectation of effort, which we talked about. Somebody sees a super long form. They’re just going to say, “No, I’m not going to do that,” but then there are more sophisticated people who may, “Sir, I’ve seen this kind of form before. They start off simple, but then it ends up, 50 minutes later, I’m still answering questions.” By setting that expectation of effort… If it’s a two-minute process, tell people it’s a two-minute process, assuming that’s reasonable.

I’ve gotten e-mails from people saying, “Roger, I just need 15 minutes of your time to complete this survey.” It’s like, “No, I’m not going to give you 15 minutes of my time, sorry.” That’s setting an expectation about that is not a good expectation, but if you have a very short process, if you know it’s going to be low-effort, tell people up front, because otherwise, they might not even take that first little baby step.

Bas Wouters:      Yeah, interesting point.

Joris Groen:        Yeah, so I think this is the way to go, to make it as short as possible and then exceed people’s expectations. When you do that, it’s also good to say in the beginning, “Hey, this really only takes 30 seconds or three steps.” That’s also important, because people have negative expectations about everything in these days, after being fooled so many times online. It’s really good to set those expectations.

Roger Dooley:     Something else you talk about are decision aids. Most of our audience members are familiar with the paradox of choice, how when there’s too much choice, that can simply be paralyzing, can be intimidating for customers, and they’ll take no action at all. Explain a little bit about decision aids in the digital world and how brands can help those decision processes along and limit that, or at least reduce the effect of the paradox of choice.

Joris Groen:        It’s good that you mention it, because we’re talking about the ability, making things easier. Most people think about copy and reducing steps and all kinds of those things, but actually, every time you have to make a choice during a checkout or when you’re buying a product online or subscribing for… And you have to choose which package, that’s the hard thing. That’s where your brain explodes, like, “Which one will I take?” It’s a very difficult process.

I was just in the shop. I had to buy this microphone, because you told me I couldn’t use the one from my laptop. I had only half an hour, and it was a great experiment under stress, under time pressure. I hated it, but I had to buy it. If I was online, I would just go, postpone the decision, because there was no way I could choose which microphone was the best for me. Luckily, there was a sales guy, and he was just saying how this one is the best sold, so I took this one based on social proof.

Helping giving people cues on which option to take, which is the best for you, this is one of the most important things in making the online journey easier. Decision aids, telling, “This choice for this microphone is for podcast or—” On no box, there were… They could have said, “It’s for Apple Macintosh and PC.” There were all kinds of microphone that didn’t have… They just say, “Yeah, it works on a PC.” Then you start, “Is it PC or not?” Yeah, I think that’s decision aid. It doesn’t have to be a wizard or some funky tool. It’s just like-

Roger Dooley:     No, Amazon doesn’t use wizards, but they are very effective. If you think about choice, Amazon would seem to be the ultimate example of paradox of choice, because they have millions of products, any category. Microphones, they’ve probably got 10,000 microphones, but they have all these decision aids that they incorporate. They’ll flag something as a best seller, so you’ve got social proof. They use their star ratings and the number of ratings, too. If you see something that’s 4.7 stars, and there’s 3,000 reviews, that’s telling you, first of all, this is a popular product, so you’ve got social proof there, but you’re also getting this wisdom of crowds, that this is a better product.

Then they will do things like say, “This is Amazon’s choice.” Presumably, that’s a little bit of authority. They’re saying, “We’ve analyzed all the products that we carry and looked at the variables that you don’t have time to look at.” Somehow, hopefully it’s not because this is the most profitable product for us, but they give you Amazon’s choice. Usually, if you compare that to some of the other choices, it does look like a pretty good choice. Typically, they’ve got good reviews. They’ve got some good sales volume there, so you know that it hasn’t been influenced by just a few reviews or that the product is simply too new to have any thorough feedback.

Of course, they sort the product various ways. Then they provide all these filter aids so that you can then filter by price. You can filter by brand, by, depending on the product, all kinds of characteristics. If you’re buying a monitor, screen diameter or whatever. They can take what would seem to be an unimaginable amount of choice and really peel it down for you, not that you can’t occasionally get lost in searching for a product on Amazon. I certainly have.

Joris Groen:        It’s all about trust, isn’t it? Nobody wants to compare stuff. Also, when you look at web analytics, the portion of people that are actually using these compare tools is really small. It’s like 1%, in that order of magnitude. If they trust you to say, “This is the best choice,” and then you give one reason, “This is because this microphone is good for streaming. If it falls from your table, it doesn’t break,” I’m happy. I don’t need to have this whole specification table. I don’t care. I don’t know anything about microphones. I just need to have a good feeling about my own decision, that I made an informal decision. It’s very irrational. They are building trust and giving some simple reasons. Social proof can really help people make these choices and feel good about it, because most people, they have choice regret after they bought something. That shouldn’t happen.

Roger Dooley:     It depends on your use, too, because if you are going to use a microphone occasionally for recording podcasts, all you want is something you know is going to work. If you were about to set up a podcast studio in your home, then you would probably have a different buying process. You would probably dig deeper into the reviews. You would look for some expert advice. You’d look for some authority references. “Gee, do any big name podcasters—”

Joris Groen:        It’s also, if there was only one microphone in that shop, I would have just bought it. It’s also the fear of missing out. You see, “There’s 10 different ones, and ugh!” Then you actually, first time in your life, start to think about microphones at that moment. This is very crucial information when you design your choice set.

Roger Dooley:     Do you have any thoughts for how people can analyze their digital customers’ experience or digital users’ experience? Everybody has free or very inexpensive tools at their disposal. Anybody can put Google analytics on their website or their app. There’s so many tools. What sort of an approach do you recommend for people who want to go, obviously, beyond, say, “Okay, this is some good advice I’m getting in this book. Now how can I see if this is actually working, or how can I see if my customers are doing what I think they’re doing?”

Joris Groen:        Yeah. That’s the multi-million-dollar question. There’s no one method of investigation that’s actually good enough. What I always say is, you have to take five or six different angles or views on your data, on what’s happening, like web analytics but also try to talk to some customers, interception questions, interviews, and then try to combine it and see the big picture in that data. What you see a lot is that people are really focusing on one tool, like web analytics. Then you have this whole team of 12 people asking themself, “Yeah, why don’t people don’t go from this page to this? There’s a big drop-off. Then they go there.” They don’t have a clue what’s happening. They don’t even look at the design. They just look at Google analytics. They only see the name of the page. I’m seeing that here. Look at this page, and then try to imagine yourself there.

Roger Dooley:     Right. That’s where you’re finding though. By looking at the analytics, you see that there’s that drop-off occurring. That then gives you the information you need to go back and analyze what’s going on, because otherwise, if you looked at it purely from a design perspective, even the smart design perspective, you might not see that happening, because we all know as designers, we see something as being very obvious. Clearly, when you want to do X, you simply press this button here, but for the first-time user, they may not see that button. They may see other stuff that looks like it’s clickable. Who knows? It’s hard for anybody to analyze, I think, their own—

Joris Groen:        Designers see problems that are not problems. “This is not our phone. We have to change it, or this picture is so outdated.” They all agree that this is the problem, but when you look at data, there’s nothing wrong. Maybe you have a 99% click-through rate on that page, so you better focus your efforts on something else.

Roger Dooley:     Right. I think AB testing, too, or some type of testing. The tools can be very inexpensive for that. I know Booking, of course, has an entire experimentation department, but even small businesses, if you’ve got some kind of volume to your website or to your mobile app, you can conduct very simple experiments. You can use e-mail to conduct very simple experiments to see what messages resonate, because for all the advice that you can get in books, from Cialdini’s to Fogg’s to mine to yours, all that is good advice. It’s based on sound science, but nothing is going to work 100% of the time. You’re always going to have a situation where social proof… Huh, that social proof didn’t work. Either the number isn’t convincing, or maybe it’s, people don’t want to think other people are using this product. They want to think its theirs alone. You don’t see luxury product manufacturers talking about how many customers they have. It’s always good to have-

Joris Groen:        Yeah, or just… Exactly, because it’s also in the book. If you talk about increasing motivation, it’s always about adding content to boost motivation. Social proof takes up extreme real estate. People have to read it and process it. Anything you add to boost motivation hurts ability, the other access, so it might as well that there’s no effect from your motivation boost, but there’s a negative effect from making your site more complex and harder to read. That’s why I say, you always have to test this stuff and what you’re doing. Totally agree.

Bas Wouters:      There are easy tools free for… For example, Google App Optimize is a free tool where you can easily start testing and do your first baby steps there, finding out what your data has to show, of course.

Roger Dooley:     I could geek out on this stuff all day, but I don’t think we can all afford that time, so let me ask you, how can people find you and your work and your ideas online? Bas, you go first.

Bas Wouters:      Yes, you can go to our website, OnlineInfluence.com. You’ll find a lot of information about what we do and about us. You can find me for the best on LinkedIn as Bas Wouters CMCT. A lot of Bas Wouters out there, but there’s only one Bas Wouters CMCT, so they can find me there on LinkedIn.

Roger Dooley:     Great. Joris?

Joris Groen:        Yeah, just my name, Joris Groen, on LinkedIn. Go to OnlineInfluence.com to see where you can order the book and maybe subscribe for our courses that we are still developing. Yeah, also, I’m very excited about that. Actually, it’s the video version of our book. There’s lots more examples where people can just sit back, relax, and watch me explain it.

Roger Dooley:     Great. I really did enjoy the book. It is full of very practical information. For our audio listeners, I’m holding it up right now. It is available in English. Let me remind our audience members that all the resources we talked about on the show as well as links to the various places that you mentioned will be on the show notes page at RogerDooley.com/podcast. There will be text, audio, and video versions there.

Gentlemen, thanks for being on the show.

Bas Wouters:      Thank you, Roger, to be-

Joris Groen:        Yes, thank you. It was a real honor. I’ve always been a really big fan of your work. I really appreciate that you invited us.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.