I think this is a pretty good Rule of Persuasion:

If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It

Persuasion is about Change and Change means going from That to This which is at least countable as a difference in a vowel, but more typically a difference in thought, feeling, or action. Like money, for example. You’d think anytime persuasion involves money, you can Count the Change. Listen to this business guy with Kia Motors who’s spending money on Facebook.

“The question with Facebook and many of the social media sites is, ‘What are we getting for our dollars?’” said Michael Sprague, vice president of marketing at Kia Motors Corp.’s North American division.

Sprague thinks like I do. You can Count the Change with money. This is so true that the assertion is obvious. But, if you’re spending money with Facebook, this assertion is obviously false.

“If a marketer measures [return on investment] as direct sales from the Web, then Facebook may not be the ideal platform,” said Sarah Hofstetter, president of digital ad agency 360i, a unit of Dentsu Inc. “But if the goal is to move the needle on brand health metrics, whether its awareness or engagement,. . . then Facebook should be a key part of the marketing mix for most consumer brands.”

I need to go Talmudic on this quote. Giving Facebook your money won’t make money for you, but it will make your brand metrics move (and here’s where it gets Talmudic) which according to Hofstetter’s reasoning still won’t make you any money because she did not explicitly say that brand burnishing will then make money for you. She runs that as an enthymeme, the persuasion syllogism that leaves out key information you naturally fill in so it all makes sense. Taking only and exactly what she says, a Facebook play only builds your brand and you get no sales in return.

See another enthymeme in the story.

Last year, the company began working with research firms comScore Inc. and Nielsen Co. to offer tools that let big brands track their social media campaigns on the site. Nielsen, for example, measures consumers who saw an ad on Facebook and compares them with a similar control group of Facebook users who didn’t see the ad. It then matches that up against shopper data to see how ad exposure affected sales of the product.

We noted earlier Nielsen getting into the measurement game with the New New Thing. That’s great. You can make apples to apples comparisons then. So, why doesn’t Facebook tell us what those comparisons show? All they’re saying is that they are working with Nielsen. Again going Talmudic on this and comprehending only and exactly what is said, Facebook is working with Nielsen. If you follow the enthymeme, you complete that information with something like . . . And It Works! But, realize no one is saying that.

There is some kind of good news with Facebook persuasion. Consider this case with Ford.

Ford Motor Co. said by using Facebook ads instead of Super Bowl ads in marketing its 2011 Explorer, shopping activity for the Explorer jumped 104% versus the average shopping lift of 14% following a Super Bowl ad.

So, tire kicking doubled. But again nothing about sales. Why is no one showing me the money?

Because there is no persuasion money in Facebook.

According to Facebook, my Persuasion Rules are the Old Old Thing against their New New Thing; I’m your Father’s Oldsmobile. There is no relationship between Counting and Changing according to the Facebook Rules.

Just give them your money and they’ll explain it to you.

The NY Times speaks truth to power and comes away with a mouthful of apple. Voice recognition technology is upon us!

VLAD SEJNOHA is talking to the TV again. O.K., maybe you’ve done that, too. But here’s the weird thing: His TV is listening. “Dragon TV,” Mr. Sejnoha says to the screen, “find movies with Meryl Streep.” Up pops a list of films like “Out of Africa” and “It’s Complicated.” “Dragon TV, change to CNN,” he says. Presto — the channel flips to CNN.

Mr. Sejnoha runs a voice recognition firm that is changing the world through spoken interaction between humans and computers.

It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too — and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

How disruptive?

Humans are wired for speech and tend to respond to talking devices as if they were kindred spirits, says Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I’m not saying voice recognition is bad,” Professor Turkle says. “I’m saying it’s part of a package of attachments to objects where we should tread carefully because we are pushing a lot of Darwinian buttons in our psychology.”

The first voice recognition software I used was Dragon which was going to revolutionize writing sometime back in the 1990s. You talk, it understands, the computer screen fills with your words: an essay, poem, or novel, a textbook, the Gettysburg Address. I fought the Dragon until I saw him smile and then I grabbed the keyboard.

If you do even a little reading you know that various experts have been trying voice recognition since the 1960s and Bell Labs. (Jeepers, do you remember when Bell Labs and telephones were the cutting edge of technology?) In other words, the science here is almost as old as I am and Siri is the crowning achievement. Sure, if you have a highly restricted vocabulary of words and further ensure that the sounds of each word are distinct, unique, and easy to produce, you can get voice recognition that works about as well as my Spanish does when we’re in Mexico. You can get a taxi, a drink, or a hat.

Beyond a few real-time missions there’s nothing close to normal conversational voice recognition. And, after 50 years of smart people whacking at this, you’d have to say it’s not coming to a home theatre near you anytime soon.

Here’s the persuasion pivot. We can’t create functional, easy to use, practical voice recognition software that any healthy person can use. The science just isn’t there.

But, we do have the science for Global Warming, Health Care Reform That Works, Green Energy, and on and on with the Cool Table litany of scientific science. The next time you read a Tooth Fairy tale about soda pop or red meat or glaciers or flooded cities or solar powered cars, just ask yourself. If we understand galactic weather, why doesn’t Siri understand me all the time?

And, if you want to see why we’ll never have practical voice recognition, watch this YouTube video.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive!

P.S. What happened to journalism speaking truth to power? This NYT article is nothing more than a PR puff piece for Nuance which is apparently French for Dragon.

Listen to the persuasive music coming from Facebook.

The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.

Hope with Nudge? That’s a persuasion plan?

It is a rare foray by Facebook into social engineering from social networking, and one with a potentially profound effect, according to experts in the field of organ donation.

Potentially? Profound? What experts?

BJ Fogg, who studies how technology can change attitudes as director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, said the prominence of organ donation on the Facebook site “will trigger people to make an important decision about whether to be an organ donor, a decision most people in the last year haven’t even considered.” Dr. Fogg added: “If you see all your friends do it, or have the illusion all your friends are doing it, it sets up an expectation of sorts and it may become a social norm.”

Facebook with 160 million American account holders. Organ donor as part of the status line. Nudges. Social Norms. Important decision making. How can it miss?

Easy. Spot the McGuffin.

Previous efforts to encourage organ donation have struggled, Dr. Cameron said, because the issue is sensitive and personal and because the decision is made at the motor vehicle department, where many people may not want to focus on the prospect of dying.

Did you see it? People can only do the TACT at the DMV when they get their driver’s license. Thus, all the Facebook Nudge Social Norm Trigger Important Decision stuff occurs away from the only time and place the Other Guy can do the TACT. And, worse still, people rarely go to the DMV, once every few years. Yet, somehow Experts believe that Facebook will create such powerful change that people will remember it over the course of several years and then when standing in line at the DMV, cursing the slowness, cursing the bureaucracy, just plain cursing, they will certainly remember all that Facebooking and check the Organ Donor box.

And these folks are Experts?

There is no, none, zip, zed, nada proven persuasion that works like this. It is a Queen of Tomorrow play. If indeed anyone could deliver persuasive messages that triggered an explicit TACT in one place at one time three years in the future, she could control the world. The hypothesis is stupid in itself. But, let me pile on.

Why would you clown around with this Facebook FauxItAllery when we’ve got scientific evidence of something that works killer good. Remember Tyler Harrison and Susan Morgan? Of course, you don’t because you are a Facebook Expert. Go reread this post on their research with organ donation.

They produced a 1900% increase, yes, a 1900% increase, in organ donation with a small media and point of TACT persuasion campaign. Real people. Real time. Real DMV. If Facebook Experts wanted to address the problem of getting more organ donors they would call Susan Morgan or Tyler Harrison and LISTEN TO THEM.

But, they didn’t, which tells you that they are not serious about the stated TACT and given that Facebook is aiming at an IPO in a couple of weeks, you might think a little deeper about this. Like the Ad Council and Clear Channel this is a fabulous self promotion play even without Ashton Kutcher. The Facebook play will have no impact on organ donor rates or even organ donor signups, but it sure makes Facebook look good. Concerned. Caring. Thoughtful.

And, don’t overlook the self persuasion effects here, too.

Dr. Cameron played a role in the change at Facebook. A 1991 graduate of Harvard University, he had written about his transplant efforts — and the struggles to find donors — for a class reunion booklet. That was read by a former classmate and friend, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook. At a reunion last May, Dr. Cameron recalled standing at a mixer when Ms. Sandberg told him that she had read about his efforts and had been thinking about the struggle to get more organ donors. “She said: ‘I think we can fix that,’ ” Dr. Cameron recalled. “It was a chills-up-the-spine moment.”

Veritas smeritas. The reunion notebook of Harvard connects old school chums who know the handshake and at a party over crimson and canapés, two power brokers unite to the save the world. That should send chills up your spine because it shows the vapid world of Experts. Whatever it took for Cameron and Sandberg to achieve their status, it clearly did not include a working knowledge of persuasion. Hey, I’m a world class surgeon. Hey, I’m a world class COO. Of course we’re persuasion Experts. How can we not be?

Does anyone believe you will see a fair evaluation report out of Facebook on this? My guess is that in a year or two you’ll see some little nugget that counts Organ Donor Status change on Facebook as the indication of campaign effect. As if what people write on Facebook is the truth. Doing the grubby work of tying exposure to Facebook messages to actual DMV records costs time and money and if Facebook engineers can’t write a PHP script for it, it’s not Science. Look for more Big Data with lots of Relative Ratios. But, you’ll find thousands of people dying while waiting for a transplant.

Still, mavens, you gotta give credit where credit may be due. If indeed this is all about IPOs and self persuasion, then the Facebook Organist is playing sweet persuasive music.

Potentially Profound Effect with Hope and a Nudge.

P.S. If you can find the angle, you can make a killing on Facebook, but not with their stock or their persuasion. They are vulnerable the way all hunters are when focused upon their prey. Facebook is looking to make its killing leaving them ripe for the taking. Think about it.

The darkness gathers.

“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”

You might recall this PB post about some guy who obtained his file of personal information from Facebook: 1200 pages!

We’re well into the Age of the Database now and what have we got to show for it? Where’s the Darkness At Noon? Where’s all the bankruptcy from overspending? Where’s the fixed election?

I’m just not seeing the downstream behavioral effects all this Big Data should produce. I appreciate the efficiencies and interesting insights (like the Target pregnant teen and her dad), but the New New Thing that Changes Everything is just not happening.

You could argue that there’s a Queen of Tomorrow out there who is using Big Data with Lawful Persuasion, but She’s being careful to avoid detection. But again, if you’ve got Lawful Persuasion and Big Data, who cares if anyone knows? You can persuade against that.

I will continue in a line of idiocy all my own. Nobody with Big Data is reading the Persuasion Blog like a philologist. You only appreciate Plato in the original Greek!

P.S. εξακολουθεί να μην υπάρχει αύριο βασίλισσα της? Still no Queen of Tomorrow! Opa!

Recall this fabulous persuasion play with health care workers and hand washing. Video cameras monitored workers and observers coded whether they washed their hand or not at baseline then provided real time, continuous feedback to all personnel. Hand washing rates skyrocketed after feedback. This graphic should refresh your memory.

Talk about an effective persuasion intervention. Just tell folks what they and everyone else are doing in real time and you get wildly better health performance. Everyone approves . . .

. . . unless you are a physician. They appear to fear the feedback. The good MDs at Journal Watch, a medical abstracting service, describe the study as . . .

Big Brother by the Sink.

Seriously. Physicians view this as the exemplification of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, and Big Brother Is Watching. If they read more widely they might even see shades of Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler’s totalitarian classic. Observation and feedback on a scientifically validated health behavior among all health workers is viewed as an obtrusive, evaluative, and controlling force.

We can move easily from this beautiful fiction to beautiful persuasion theory: Reactance! Docs perceive a video feedback system as an unfair restriction on their freedom. Down with Big Brother! Up with Freedom!

If you are selling this feedback system realize that you’ll probably need to get through a committee of MDs to obtain support and approval. Clearly, they are threatened with observation and feedback, just like most people. You might want to begin with a strong affirmation play to bolster their self esteem, then roll into your feedback presentation.

Even with smart folks who call themselves scientists, science can elicit Reactance and no change in the Other Guys. You’ve got to expect that response and persuade in front of it.