Summary
The article dives into a new funding resource that many individuals and enterprises have used to achieve funding goals: crowdfunding. It specifically looks into the Kickstarter website.
After explaining what exactly kickstarted does and how it works, they go into analytical processing of what works create a successful funding vs not successful, in kickstarter if you achieve you goal you get the money, if not, you don’t get the funding money. The main trend they found is the language that was used to describe the campaign was a predictive factor related to the success of the campaign.
Some of these persuasive language elements were reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, relationship (linking) to the host, and authority. Most of these did not come as a surprise if you think about a verbal persuasive argument and what makes that successful: offering someone in return for their donating (reciprocity), giving them a time or product constraint (scarcity), showing that other people are donating(social proof), a feeling of belonging to a group that is donating (social identity), knowing the person and liking them (linking), and expert opinions on product donating for (authority). All of the data gather was from multiple statistical analysis and some other interesting things were find. At a enterprise level, creating a crowdfund lead to more collaborations between departments creating a concern for a collective group instead of there own self interests.
Personal Reflection
The data gathered was quite similar to what I would have predicted if I studied persuasive arguments in a verbal context, which is interesting that it has the same effect online. I am not interesting in crowdfunding and gathering more data on it, but I do find the way words and social behavior online can affect a users decisions to do or not do something interesting. I found that how they analyzed words and their meaning within them would be applicable for an extension to Tweetasaurus, in being able to analyze the context of the sentence or emotion behind it and then offer better suggestions based on this emotion. Additionally, can any of these persuasion techniques be used to help users of Twetasusaurs encouraged to use it for its better purpose than just a thesaurus? Such as, being able to see other’s changing negative words to better word to create this “social” environment of “social proof”.
Questions
How much does the wording matter? This analyzed the meaning of the wording, but say if someone was trying to appeal to someone’s social identity, but they did so in an ineffective way? Is there a way to measure if they users are “trying” be embody these characteristics, but failing?
I found it interesting that it brought people together at enterprise level, is there a way to see if there were any other improvements in the workplace?
