Persuasive Technology 2007: Not Your Typical Conference (and That’s a Good Thing)

When you hear the word conference, what comes to mind?

If you’re an online marketing professional, likely you’ll think of Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World PubCon or ad:tech – and with good reason. Industry events such as these are heavily promoted, well funded and oft-cited in the blogosphere.

However, there’s another conference type that isn’t heavily promoted, isn’t usually well-funded and yet can provide one of the richest venues for seeing the cutting edge of research, participating in the generation of new ideas and building relationships between the too often disparate worlds of theory and application.

I’m talking about academic conferences.

Wait - aren’t those just for grad students and researchers?

Nope – or at least not the one I recently attended.

Chaired by BJ Fogg, head of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, the Persuasive Technology 2007 conference in Palo Alto, California brought together the world’s leading experts on creating computing products and interfaces to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.

Designed to give attendees "a stronger grasp of persuasion psychology (the big ideas) and new insights for designing video games, mobile phone apps, and web sites to motivate and influence people (the practical stuff)," this conference not only provided a venue for idea presentation, but also gave attendees the opportunity to participate in idea generation.

Through a unique conference format, each of the 40+ presenters had only 10 minutes to talk about their recent work and research. Naturally, 10 minutes to talk about subjects like using digital images to persuade viewers or the way peers influence others online doesn’t leave a lot of room for elaboration.

Fortunately, each speakers’ panel was followed by a question and answer session as well as a break in which all attendees could mingle together, ask questions, generate ideas and begin building relationships.

Unlike some industry conferences I’ve attended, Persuasive 2007 was deliberately kept small (less than 150 attendees) to facilitate a high level of interpersonal interaction. And what’s more, there was nearly a 50/50 split between industry and academic representatives, with a large percentage of attendees from international organizations.

And wow, what research.

Take Jeremy Bailenson’s work at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab on the implications of avatar representation for social influence. One of his team’s projects determined that people are more likely to vote for a presidential candidate that looks more like them than one who does not, without ever being aware of the similarity. Such research has significant implications for the alteration of facial images in the media, both online and offline.

Of course, all presentations weren’t as dramatic as Jeremy’s, but a number of them were valuable for their insight into future directions in online interaction and marketing. Makeda Mays Green’s work at the Sesame Workshop on the use of mobile phones to support children’s literacy learning is one example, as is Brian Cugelman’s project at the University of Wolverhampton’s Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group about the use of online social marketing for advocacy initiatives.

Much of the value in this particular conference however, came not only from its content, but also its structure – and it isn’t the first of its kind to come from BJ Fogg’s team at the Persuasive Technology Lab. Earlier this year they hosted a one-day Mobile Persuasion event, reviewed by Kelly Goto in her post "Mobile Persuasion – BJ Fogg."

From Kelly’s review and my own experience, it is apparent that events chaired by BJ Fogg have some consistent and atypical elements that contribute to their value: they are fast-paced (super short sessions, many speakers), provide time for attendees to interact during the conference, and then are followed up by some type of post-conference event. For Persuasive 2007, it was a wine-country weekend at BJ’s house, complete with hiking, swimming and a campfire.

In my experience, it is at these after-events when everything really comes together and the value of a conference can be realized. Once the formalities have faded away and people establish a level of familiarity with one another in an informal setting, then the real synthesis can happen – strong connections can be made and relationships formed.

So if you’re looking to expand your conference horizons, blur the lines between theory and application and build relationships with people you don’t typically see at the SESs and the ad:techs, then I encourage you to seek out these less-than-typical conferences.

And especially be on the lookout for ones organized by BJ Fogg and his team – there’s something special about them.