Design for conversion, befriended conference!

Last week on the design for conversion conference, we had a whole debate on conversion to mobile devices in specific. But then also other things came across like the whole social networking and media. Finished with the lazy times where you just hang out in your couch in the evening watching the tube.

This conference has a specific concept, it is a mix of speakers and creative labs, which focus on new applications on mobile in this edition.

The speakers I really liked were Jerome Nadel and Eric Siegel.
Jerome giving an overview how social media and networking goes into the mainstream, and Eric about predictive analysis.
Jerome talked about the the 6 C's

Community
Contribution
Connected
Control
Channel
Change

From Post to grab
From Filmrolls to flickr and picasa
From CD to Itunes
From Free + Premium = freemium
From Ecommerce to Mcommerce
Digital empowerment
Digital tribes
Performance+persuasion = conversion
From collective experience to forecasting

People are thinking with reason and emotion, but most of the time we react on impulse and therefor emotion. If we succeed to trigger the emotion effect, we are likely gone persuade the audience to let them things do, that they would not do before. This was also the topic on our conference 'Design for persuasion'.

We are talking about the broccoli and donut effect. Reason and emotion.

In order to persuade a specific audience, you have to figure out who you want to persuade, as all people are unique and belonging to a digital tribe.

2 billion people are online and 2/3 is on mobile. A complete society change is going on, and there is a first generation that is experiencing the social aspect of the digital age. Clearly in a year or 5 things might be different, people will behave differently, as it is always is a cycle we go trough when new things pop up. Think about the usage of the first mobile phones in the 90's. Predictions in the 70's, there is no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home (Ken Olson 1977)

Since we can keep track of all the profiles online (details are up in the cloud), we can also start to predict a certain behavior. And there the predictive analysis comes in. If you are going to the same site over and over again (e.g. immoweb), it is very likely that you are interested in houses for rent or to buy. We can filter the profiles (collaborative filtering) and do focused marketing efforts.

One can start worrying about our privacy, the term big brother is now getting very real, as we are being tracked everywhere. On the streets, shopping malls, internet (and here we participate in sharing a lot of private information), mobile (gps) in the cars. I'm wondering how we will look at this in like 10 years from now.

Jerome closed his presentation with the following quote

When people lead -leaders will follow, the digital empowerment.