Keen to contribute towards your state government’s treasury? Just drive past a police car with your mobile phone held to your head and you’ll get the opportunity to donate around $200 to the government. Road safety authorities aren’t too fond of people talking on the phone.

And for good reason: talking on the phone dramatically increases your risk of having an accident up to 600% (Violanti and Marshall 1996). It slows your reaction time down by 0.25 seconds, (equivalent to a blood alcohol reading of 0.08) which is apparently enough to cause an accident (Caird et al. 2008). It doesn’t matter whether you’re hands free or using a handset, talking on the phone while driving, is a very bad idea.

Having passengers in the car reduces accidents
What I’ve been curious about is whether having passengers in the car has a similar effect. Sometimes when I’m chatting in the car with someone and having an in depth conversation, I notice that they often start making driving errors (e.g. not looking before changing lanes) that could lead to a major incident. I get particularly concerned when I’m in the car with very visual conversationalists who insist on maintaining eye contact while driving. “Keep your eyes on the road”, I want to scream!

I needn’t worry. The research shows that having passengers in the car actually reduces the risk of an accident and the more passengers you have, the safer everyone is (Lee and Abdel-Aty 2007). It might be because the driver feels a greater sense of responsibility for safety when they’ve got other people in the car, it might be because ‘back seat drivers’ notice hazards that the driver didn’t pick up or it might be because in our sleepless modern society, passengers help keep the driver awake.

Visual cues are vital for driving safety
The reason why having conversations with someone in the car is safety enhancing, whilst talking on your bluetooth headset with someone will make you more likely to have a crash, is apparently because of ‘conversation modulation’. That’s basically when you stop talking to the driver because you can see and feel a dangerous situation coming up on the road.

Maciej et al. (2010) put people in a driving simulator and found that when the conversational partner had visual cues, they usually slowed down the conversation or stopped talking altogether to give the driver a chance to concentrate on driving. The person on the other end of a mobile phone can’t see what’s going on and so they keep blabbering on regardless. The hapless driver is distracted to death!

Stay safe: share a ride
The takeaway message is: leave your bluetooth headset in your bag, keep your phone switched off and have a conversation with the person next to you instead.

…Unless you’re a teenage male driver
In which case, you should kick your passengers out as well because the research shows they’ll make you more likely to crash. You can imagine why: having four testosterone charged males encourage you to ‘drag’ other drivers is hardly a recipe for safety.

Why I signed CoCoRide up originally

I’ll be honest: I originally signed CoCoRide up for Agents of Change because I wanted to be able to attract volunteers to the project who would work for free because they would be getting top class professional development. I figured professional development would be a significant lure for university students and pretty much the only currency I could offer volunteers given that CoCoRide is an early stage startup (hence no money) and a not-for-profit (hence no equity).

My experience in the program

I didn’t really participate fully in the program. I rocked up to the fortnightly sessions but I didn’t go to the individual mentoring sessions with Amir (the organiser) or join in the discussions on Yammer. I made the conscious decision that I didn’t really have time for another mentoring program and anyway, CoCoRide had passed all of the program milestones after week one.

I regret that lack of participation because I think I could have got a lot more out of it had I taken Amir up on the fortnightly mentoring sessions. Moreover, I regret not helping the other teams more. I was in an excellent position to share some of the things I had learnt while starting CoCoRide up, yet I acted rather selfishly and only thought about what I could get out of the program rather than how I could help the other teams.

My learnings from the program

CoCoRide is pretty far along already

The fact that we’d already passed all of the milestones after the first week was a good validation of the process that the CoCoRide team has followed so far. We’re on the right track.

The power of deadlines

I’ve learnt a lot just by watching how other teams performed in the program. A big learning was the power of deadlines to motivate people to MASSIVE action. At the start of the program, most people introduced their startup as “well…I’ve kinda got this idea that might work but I’m not really sure and you know I don’t really want to waste too much time on this because I’ve got a lot of other stuff on”. By the end of the program, people were giving excellent elevator pitches and actually sounded excited and committed to their startups. A big part of that was the experience that they had in booting up the prototype and validating their idea with customers.

Lean startup model

One of the skills workshops was on the Lean Startup model. Yohan from Vumero.com walked us through how his startup didn’t use the Lean Startup model and why that was a bad idea because they’d spent a lot of money on upfront development without testing the ideas with users. Hearing his story made a lot of things click for me about how CoCoRide needs to run. I had grasped this lesson intuitively (I’m a pretty frugal person by nature) but I didn’t have the whole intellectual framework until this workshop. It’s now part of my language and I will use the Lean Startup model to guide future decision making.

What I wish I’d done more of

- Help other people

- Got support from Amir and other mentors

- Brought the rest of the CoCoRide team along with me

The tipping point

In the past month, I’ve heard several people say something to the effect of “Oh we’re just going to use viral marketing. You know, tell our super-connected friends about it and before long we’ll have 100k page views”. They’re smart people, so I figure they’re not just spitting out nonsense here, they must have some reason for believing that virality of that magnitude is easy. When I asked them a few more questions, it turned out that many of them had Malcom Gladwell’s book “The tipping point“.

It’s a fun book to read. Gladwell weaves a bunch of compelling stories of trends that have spread faster than the flu in a crowded train (eww). The Hush Puppy story is the classic example he bases his arguments on. Apparently Hush Puppies were the height of dagginess until some trendy New York hipsters started wearing them. Everyone wanted to be as avant garde as these hipsters, and started rushing to Hush Puppies stores in droves to join in the craze.

Meet the Influentials

Incredible right? If this story is correct, then all marketers need to do is find those hipsters – the super influential people their target customers respect – and convince them to wear their shoes/drink their water/sign their petitions and before long EVERYONE will be scrambling over each other to get their hands on your product/service/change making initiative.

Ed Keller and Jon Berry pick up on Gladwell’s argument in their book, “The Influentials”. They propose a breed of marketing superheroes: the Influentials – the people that everyone else admire and sycophantically imitate.

I’ve got this image in my head of marketing directors rubbing their hands in glee, thinking about how they can slash their marketing budgets by appealing directly to these Influentials instead of forking out mega bucks for a Superbowl commercial.

Are the influentials really that influential?
Duncan Watts, the guy who retested the ’6 degrees of separation’ theory in the modern era (it still applies), is pretty adamant that the Influential hypothesis is flawed. In his 6 degrees research, he showed that contrary to Milgram’s original finding that most messages pass through ‘hubs’ (super connected people with disproportionate amount of influence in the community), most messages went through plain old ordinary folks with average amounts of influence.

Since then he has also done some nice empirical research into information diffusion through twitter. He found that the likelihood of a link going viral through twitter has very little to do with the influence of the person who started it. Instead, the best predictor of virality is how interesting (based on reviews from Mechanical Turk workers) the linked website is and how many people start off talking about it.

In other words, paying super influential hipsters to wear daggy shoes is very unlikely to create a trend. (A lot of people think Gladwell got the Hush Puppy story wrong – it probably had more to do with the parent company hiring a new marketing team). They’ve got to look and feel good first.

Key take away 1: If you want your product to go viral, it’s gotta be a shit hot product.

Making ridesharing viral
The reason I’m interested in this topic is because I want to come up with a way to make ridesharing mainstream. Given that we have zero marketing budget and given that word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising, virality is going to come from word of mouth promotion. So the question I’m asking myself and the team at CoCoRide is “how do we make our service interesting and valuable enough that people want to tell their friends about it?”.

What makes people try a service the first time?
We’d better start with first things first. We can’t get anyone to promote it if we don’t have any users in the first place. So how do we get users? A fundamental rule for intangible services like ridesharing is that consumers regard them as high risk and they’re unlikely to sign up if they don’t have a referral from a friend. However, if
the user feels like immediately understand the service and that the organisation behind the service is credible, they may well lower their barriers and sign up on the spot without asking anyone else. For this reason, if you can make the website for your service appear credible, then you will get more signups.

What gives a website credibility?
B J Fogg has done a lot of research into website credibility. His team at Stanford interviewed 2600 people and asked them to assess the credibility of a bunch of health and finance websites. The findings of the study were intriguing because they fly in the face of how people should assess a website’s credibility. Rather than looking at the factors that really matter, like whether the website had a sound privacy policy (you wouldn’t want to sign up for a website only to find out later that the dodgey operator sold your contact details on to a telesales company) and who was sponsoring the site, people primarily judged the websites’ credibility based on how good it looked.

Key takeaway #2: you’ve got to make your website visually appealing.
We’ve got a lot of work to do on this front at CoCoRide. Our website looks amateurish right now and that probably explains why we’ve got a pretty poor signup rate.

What makes people promote a service?
Let’s assume that CoCoRide finds an amazing designer and we transform the website so that it wows people when they first see it and they snap their mouse button in half in their rush to sign up for our service. What next? How do we get them to tell their friends about it?

Cheung et al. attempt to answer this question in their paper: “What drives consumers to spread electronic word of mouth in online consumer-opinion platforms“. They interviewed 203 people who were part of the restaurant review site, OpenRice.com, and found that the top three reasons for recommending a restaurant were:

1. Sense of belonging
The OpenRice.com members who answered “Extremely Agree” to questions like “I am very attached to OpenRice.com community. (Extremely disagree/Extremely agree)”
were more likely to leave positive reviews about restaurants. This finding ties in nicely with Seth Godin’s Tribe Marketing approach, where he argues that building a tribe of consumer advocates is the best way to market your service. The implications of this for CoCoRide is that we need to bring our users together in some way so they can feel part of the community as a whole. Perhaps some exclusive CoCoRide events would make sense. It would also be good to provide an easy way to recognise other CoCoRide users. Perhaps CoCoRide bumper stickers would be in order.

2. Reputation
This one’s interesting. Apparently OpenRice members who wanted to boost their professional credibility (perhaps they were restaurant reviewers or chefs) were more likely to leave positive reviews because it would allow them to be perceived as experts.

CoCoRide could tap into this by publicly demonstrating each user’s expertise. This would reaffirm our gamification strategy, which involves providing badges to users once they have shared sufficient rides.

Reputation could also tie into the phenomenon of ‘conspicuous conservation‘, in which consumers buy environmentally friendly goods and services so they can beat the Joneses. Those bumper stickers would tie in nicely here. Perhaps something fun like “Traffic Jam Unblocker”.

3. Altruism
Apparently it’s true: helping others does make you feel good. OpenRice members who posted positive reviews often said they were doing it because they liked helping other people avoid bad restaurant experiences.

CoCoRide could tap into altruism by labelling the act of picking a stranger up as helping them out. Drivers could have a badge on their profile: “John has helped 67 people get to their destination”.

Key takeaway #3: If you want to get Word Of Mouth recommendations, focus on building a tight knit community, create a reputation system and reward altruism

What are your thoughts on generating virality? What have I missed out?

Bartle’s Player Typology

Ziccherman and Cunningham use the old version of Richard Bartle’s motivational typology (Bartle has subsequently released a new version with 8 archetypes instead of 4) as the basis for choosing which gamification elements to include in a gamified system. Bartle’s typology was based on the playing habits of Multi User Dungeon (MUD) games, an old style of relatively primitive role playing games. A lot of the games were not much more than a computerised version of Dungeons and Dragons.

The four Bartle player types

Bartle broke play styles into four types:

1. Achiever: achievers like ‘levelling up’ and demonstrating their superior status to other people

2. Explorer: explorers like roaming around and finding interesting things about the game world

3. Socialiser: socialisers primarily play games to hang out with other people

4. Killer (or influencer): killers like to take advantage of other people. In the game world, they prey on new players, killing them for fun. In the real world, they might be sales people or politicians – people who become successful by influencing others.

Are Bartle’s types useful in gamification?

Reading about this framework made me wonder: is a motivational framework based off Dungeons and Dragons players really relevant for the rest of the population? After all, gamification aims to engage non-gaming audiences. MUD players definitely fit into the‘hard-core’ gamer category rather than the much larger casual gaming audience.

To be fair, Ziccherman and Cunningham do acknowledge the limitations of Bartle’s types. They suggest using the types as a rubric rather than a hard and fast rule and they agree with Bartle’s argument that the types are not mutually exclusive. But they made a statement that intrigued me:

For the average person, the breakdown might look something like this:
80% socializer
50% explorer
40% achiever
20% killer 

What motivates the average person?

Ziccherman and Cunningham don’t supply any evidence for their breakdown of the average person. So I went looking elsewhere. I found this interesting post from Bart Stewart who integrates Bartle’s types with Keirsey’s widely used temperaments, which in turn map to the Myers Briggs personality profiles.

Although there are many criticisms of the Myer Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), there is a heck-of-a-lot of data available from the millions of people who have taken the test. The MBTI personality profiles may not stay static over time for individuals (unsurprising in my opinion, people’s personalities do change after all) but the aggregated data represents a ‘thin-slice’ of the personality profiles of the average person in a given population.

Motivational drivers in the USA

The Myers & Briggs foundation claim (I couldn’t find a peer reviewed article) to have aggregated representative population-level data from all of the MBTI tests taken in the US (view here). I took this data and chucked in the matching Keirsey types and then had a go at mapping Bartle’s player types.

Based on this data, we get this breakdown:

If the MBTI data are valid, this makes it look like most people are achievers not socialisers as Ziccherman and Cunningham claim. Hmmm..

Motivational drivers in Australia

How about Australia? (Since I live there) Apparently the Australian Association for Psychological Type (AusAPT) released some statistics around MBTI frequencies in Australia. I say apparently because the link is now broken. All I have to go off is a copied and pasted version of the data on IntrovertForum.com.

I can tell you’re groaning already at the lack of data integrity here, but let’s play along anyway:P Here’s what we end up with

Everything is pretty similar except for the Achiever and Killer proportions. Wow, apparently Australians are more cut-throat and manipulative (killer archetype) and less achievement oriented than the US. This might explain the much higher incidence of ‘tall poppy syndrome’ in Australia vs the US.

Conclusion

These preliminary results are very interesting but I don’t have much faith in the underlying datasets. There are big concerns about the validity of MBTI testing (there are no controls for exaggeration and lying). Furthermore, the dichotomous nature of MBTI testing (you get crammed into discrete categories rather than appearing on a spectrum) means that the magnitude of achievement drive doesn’t show up in the data. Finally, given that the MBI didn’t publish the methods for their population level data, I’m doubtful whether the datasets I found are truly representative of the populations.

Next steps

What I’d like to do now is find some population level data for the Big Five personality trait assessment. (This looks promising)

Why this research is important

The CoCoRide team are in the process of choosing which gamification elements to use in a ridesharing system that we hope will change the way Australians travel. We want this to appeal to the mass market. This kind of system needs careful design so as not to alienate socialisers who have no interest in achievement focused game elements.

When you’re starting up a company with your new super-mega-ultra-unique idea that will change the world there are three key things you must remember: Communication, Communication and Communication. You must communicate and must do it well. This skill is vital to acquire new business partners, maintain consumer confidence and of course keeping your team in the loop and on the same page as you.

I remember when I started out in Cocoride, years ago in 2012 and we were communicating using our smartphones and laptops…go on you kids laugh at how outdated we were, we didn’t have surgically implanted iPhone 12s back then. It was essential that we knew what everyone else was doing to ensure our team was using resources effectively. There were numerous cases in which we weren’t sure what was going on. Although at times unavoidable such communication mishaps slowed down the company’s growth and as a result we achieved nation wide dominance in 6 years instead of 6 months…

Ok so maybe my brain is being a bit too optimistic about Cocoride’s market dominance forecast. However the lesson of communication’s importance is indeed invaluable. As obvious as it sounds you never truly realize how well you team can run until you see the power of effective communication at work. On the flip side failure to communicate quickly, accurately and frequently can lead to outcomes that are far short of what you dreamed.

Communication and lots of it is essential, much like having lots of sleep, which is one lesson that I need to  relearn…

Australia is losing its social capital
Federal MP for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, recently published a confronting book “Disconnected”. Building on Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone“, Leigh did a whole bunch of research into the number of people who do community minded activities like going to church, volunteering, joining a club or political party and being part of a sporting team. Leigh’s results show that just like the USA, Australia is losing its social capital.

Social bankruptcy is not good
You might be thinking “So what. Why do I need to be part of the community anyway? I’ve got my Xbox and my big screen TV. I spend lots of time with my family. Why should I bother reaching out to the rest of the community?”

Here are three key reasons:
1. Social isolation causes depression and premature death:
Schoevers and colleagues looked at depression and death rates in 4004 people over 65 years old. They found that the more socially isolated the people were, the sooner they died and the worse they felt along the way.
2. Low social capital leads to more drive by shootings
Research in the US found that communities with low social capital had more drive by shootings and other violent criminal acts. Gun ownership is part of it, but social isolation stands out as a significant factor on its own.
3. Social isolation costs us money
The Queensland department of housing wanted to find out how to foster economic growth in rural communities. They discovered that there was a direct link between social connectedness and economic growth. Disconnected communities had weak economies.

What causes social bankruptcy?
Andrew Leigh points at these contributing factors:

• Cheaper big screen TVs: why go out to the cinema when you can have the cinema experience at home?
• Eating lunch at the keyboard: there are more people working longer hours and that gives them less time to connect with colleagues and their communities:
• Feminists: women are now empowered to go to work instead of volunteering at the tuck shop
• Turbans: Australia is now home to hundreds of different cultures. As much as politicians celebrate diversity, many people are still put off by people who dress and eat differently. As such, mixed communities are typically less connected than boring 100% Anglo Saxon tribes.
• Self-scan counters at supermarkets: we don’t have to talk to each other anymore. Why waste time asking for directions when our GPS can tell us how to get there?
• Solo commuting: we’ve got loads of cash and cars are cheaper than ever. Why let someone invade your privacy when it doesn’t cost much to drive by yourself?

Julia Gillard wants you to rideshare

Prime Minister Julia Gillard loves Andrew Leigh’s work. She gave a speech at Parliament House praising the research and imploring Australians to lift their game and build more connected communities. She asks every Australian to do “the small things
than can help rebuild social capital step by step, day by day”. One of those ‘small things’ is rideshare instead of commuting alone. A shared ride in to work is a great opportunity to  meet someone new, and maybe even break down cultural barriers.

Will you take up Gillard’s challenge and share a ride instead of driving alone?

Does nature really prefer public transport?

In Feb 2011, Metlink Melbourne launched its “Nature Prefers Public Transport”campaign. According to Metlink senior manager Michelle Herbert, “Public transport really is a great choice for the environment. One full tram removes as many as 140 cars off the road and one full metropolitan train takes as many as 800 cars off the road.”

To find out if the evidence stacked up, I did some research using Transportle that lets you “compare the real cost of travel”. I looked at the case of three people travelling into the city together on the train and in a car. Let’s start with the results (I’ll explain the method later)

The results: ridesharing is cheaper, faster and more environmentally friendly
Here’s what it looks like with three people travelling into the city 235 times per year. These figures are per person.

The results show that even though taking the train is more environmentally friendly than driving a car by yourself, if you take two people with you, then ridesharing is 1.7 times as fast, 3.6 times cheaper, and has 1.54 times lower carbon emissions!

How I calculated this
I went to Transportle.com and used the following settings to compare a trip from Mt Waverley to Flinders St, Melbourne twice per day:
Train
Used default settings:
- Full fare zone 1 daily metcard
- 96g CO2 per passenger km

Car
- Car model: Mazda 3 2010 sedan diesel (Australia’s top selling car in 2011) – 143 g CO2 per km
- Fuel price: $1.30/L (today’s price)
- Distance: 21.97km

Dividing by 3
Then I divided the car cost and emissions by 3 to get the figures per passenger under ridesharing

Disclaimer – what this leaves out
This doesn’t factor in extra driving needed to pick up passengers. Let’s assume the driver has to go an extra 9km to pick up passengers.

The verdict:
Stop taking the train and start ridesharing!

What do you think?
Notice anything we’ve left out?

Driving alone is a luxury
While this alone time might be relaxing and help you process the day’s events, it does come at a cost. When you drive by yourself, you have to pay for the petrol, you are fully responsible for the environmental impact and you may become socially isolated.

Driving alone isn’t fair
Right now you’re not even paying the full price for the silence. In Australia, drivers pass on the cost of congestion and carbon emissions to the rest of society. Many people would change their driving habits if they had to pay a London style congestion tax every time they drove into the city as Treasurer Wayne Swan has suggested.

Getting your solitude fix outside your car
At CocoRide, we recognise that solitude is important for a lot of people, particularly if you are introverted and find being around other people draining. In light of that, we are not telling you to cut out solitude time altogether, just to get it in other ways.

Why not give these options a go, so you can share a ride without driving each other up the wall:
1. Breathing meditation
2. Go for a run
3. Write a journal

Do you drive alone to get some alone time? What other ways can you find solitude without clogging up the road?