What is a hot trigger?

A hot trigger is a call to action that I can act on right away. An example would be a link in my email inbox that calls me to act, like an emails I get from Facebook that tells me that somebody has tagged one of my photos. So what is happening, first I just want check my emails and some minutes later I find myself spending time on a Facebook page looking photos, this behaviour wasn’t planed or let’s better say it was not planned by me, it was planned by some Facebook guys ;-).

BJ Fogg has mentioned the design mantra:
Put “Hot triggers” in the path of all motivated people!

That’s what you need to do to win in the consumer space, triggering behaviours. Put your message in to the existing path of your target group, existing path would be email inbox, their Facebook news feed, their twitter stream into thing they already doing and you focus on the motivated people.

Facebook has very good systems to change human behaviours; maybe this is even what makes Facebook so successful.
BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and author of the book, Mobile Persuasion, spoke at the SES San Francisco 2010 on the topic of social media and its ability to create hot triggers influencing human behavior. BJ Fogg believes that companies must put hot triggers in the path of motivated people in order to effectively compete in the consumer space. BJ studies the growth of Facebook and how the application uses triggers to influence the behavior of its users. BJ also discusses the impact of mobile on society and how it will become the dominant tool to influence human behavior. BJ concludes by discussing some of the publications his lab is producing for 2011.

You can keep track of BJ Fogg’s daily musings on twitter @bjfogg

Here is the video form the SES in San Francisco: