Facebook, Strategy
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Guilt Can Be a Powerful Motivator

Posted by John Saddington on Jul 24, 2009

missmeonfacebook

Emotions are powerful; leveraging them (or manipulating them) in the online space can lead to large amounts of traffic and groundswell, and can also help make sure those numbers are kept and maintained.

Facebook does this in an interesting (good?) fashion by showing you some of your friends that will “miss” you if you deactivate your account. Guilt is one obvious emotional response.

Honestly, I’m not so sure that the above people will actually even notice that I’m gone if I left (but I did refresh the deactivation page a couple of times I found a few that might notice…).

But I think this strategy is genius and underscores the importance of tapping into that emotional-investment that one may have with a social networking property and challenges everyone who’s attempting to connect and create community with whether or not they are establishing an emotional connection on any sort of level.

Have you thought about tapping into the emotional level with your organization’s web properties?

[HT: Mashable]

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John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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3 Responses to “Guilt Can Be a Powerful Motivator”

  1. Jim
    Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 11:21 pm

    I've been contemplating shutting down my fb account, but it would probably not be a good idea at the moment…so i'm taking a fb vacation and focusing on blogging/commenting and my workload.

    Reply
  2. George Hicks
    Monday, July 27, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    Dude, it freaked me out to see my mug on your blog post! I would miss you…sniff, sniff. I do want to connect our congregation with our website. It's not happening right now. I've tried to build community with a Facebook page for our church with limited success (mostly my own lack of time). I plan to transfer our site to WordPress and use Facebook Connect to build on the social network that most of our people are already invested in.

    Reply

  1. Posts about Mashable as of July 24, 2009 » The Daily Parr

    [...] America and WWF . Special thanks go to Hyatt for allowing us to host the events at their hotels. Guilt Can Be a Powerful Motivator – churchcrunch.com 07/24/2009 Emotions are powerful; leveraging them (or manipulating them) in the [...]