Chapter 11

Influencing Crowds

Crowdsourcing platforms provide a safe space where you can discreetly persuade populations to adopt new viewpoints and change their behavior. Although the influence process is slow and fragile, it confers enormous power and advantage. Through crowdsourcing platforms, you can spur populations to undertake actions and help you complete seemingly unachievable security objectives. This chapter explicates the process by describing what is possible, how you can make it possible, what is not possible, and how influence platforms differ from other types of platforms. It also walks through how to build and run an influence platform to collect intelligence on the ties between extremists and government officials by getting participants to talk about their daily lives and then submit intelligence about corruption in their government.

Understanding the Scope of Influencing through Crowdsourcing

Influencing through crowdsourcing platforms is the act of persuading populations to adopt certain ideas and/or undertake certain behaviors. Such platforms, known as influence platforms, differ from traditional types of influence operations in a number of ways. Influence platforms enable you to take advantage of the two-way communication that is integral to social media in ways that other influence operations cannot. The most apparent difference is that on influence platforms you work closely with the participants to engender influence. You do not inundate them with information through endless flyer drops and radio commercials, and try to hammer a viewpoint or data into their heads. Instead, with influence platforms, you slowly persuade participants to come up with ideas and change their behaviors by making them believe that they are the ones promoting the changes. Influence is a more subtle and powerful form of incentivizing. It is especially relevant at times when material incentives do not work or when people are reluctant to accept any type of incentives from you. Think of influencing as convincing people to let them be incentivized to think or act. You can influence others to do almost anything you would like them to do, although such overwhelming success is hard to achieve. Realistically, you can use influence populations to counter extremist propaganda, provide intelligence, coalesce against a violent regime, and adopt a more favorable attitude toward issues that are important to you. Keep in mind that building and deploying influence platforms is more of an art than a science. It requires an understanding of human nature and behavior to get it right, and such understanding is hard to teach.

Delineating Influence Goals

Influencing participants on your platform entails accomplishing two goals. The first is changing a participant's way of thinking. Every person uses a form of mental heuristics called frames to make sense of the enormous amount of information available in the world. Frames are the filters through which a person processes information. Generally, people only allow information to filter through that validates their frames and how they already perceive the world, while discarding other types of information. For example, the frames of political partisans are usually very robust and ingrained. They routinely ignore arguments and data that poke holes in their political theories, producing the headache-inducing shouting matches prevalent on television shows about politics. Changing a person's way of thinking and viewing the world necessitates introducing or changing his or her frames—a very difficult task. Unsurprisingly, frames are resistant to information that is trying to undo them. The task is made easier if you do not make it obvious that you are trying to introduce or change a person's frames. Also, peer or societal pressure heavily influences frames. Sometimes, a person is hesitant to indulge in a certain way of thinking or express himself as he really wishes because of societal pressure. Lifting that repression is a function of changing the pressure the person faces. Overall, working with frames involves either providing participants with new frames, modifying their existing frames, or enabling them to express repressed frames.

The second goal is motivating the participants to change their behavior and execute a specific action. Accomplishing the second goal necessitates accomplishing the first one. A person's behavior is heavily dependent on the frames he or she utilizes to make sense of the world. Information affects behavior, which in turn affects the type of information a person will seek out. As with frames, a person may resist undertaking an action because either he does not think he should, and/or he wishes to do it but his society does not condone it. We have already discussed incentivizing people to undertake actions and change their behavior in terms of participating in platforms. However, we are now discussing incentivizing people to perhaps take part in action that goes beyond simply participating in crowdsourcing platforms. The amount of behavior change required is higher, and thus the quality and level of incentives required are also higher. Fortunately, measuring change in a person's behavior is much easier than measuring change in his or her way of thinking. Anyone can see a person's actions, but no one can see the thoughts in his head. For your influence platform, strive to accomplish the second goal. Overall, changing a person's behavior involves either modifying his way of thinking and then incentivizing him to act, and/or enabling him to undertake repressed acts. See Figure 11.1 for a graphical representation of the relationship between information, frames, and behavior. Frames, behavior, and their interplay are complex and fascinating topics that we cannot do full justice to in only a few paragraphs. You should check out the notes for accessible material that can help you appreciate the topics more.¹

Figure 11.1 Relationship between information, frames, and behavior

Grasping How Influence Happens

Identifying and amplifying the most influential items can help you focus your efforts to achieve maximum effect and influence. Your methods must contain those items if you want to achieve influence. Picking out the most influential items is not at all an easy task. People and the things around them are constantly influencing each other. As people, we like to believe that we possess a unitary, consistent set of views; however, the reality is much more complicated. Our minds are a cacophony of impulses and stimulations that are constantly competing with each other to shape our thoughts and actions.² Various items can impact the cacophony and influence us, most of which function at a level out of sight of our conscious awareness. We now describe the most salient and relevant items.^{1, 2, 3}

As you may have noticed when arguing with someone, rational, logical arguments containing lots of objective facts are rarely one of the influential items. Do not expect much success by laying out, for example, arguments about why your target audience should believe your government and not jihadists about the true goal of your government's foreign policy. Such arguments contain information that our frames usually filter out. Suppressing our frames long enough to process and consider new and conflicting information is difficult and requires dedicated mental effort. We are not suggesting that you cannot use rational arguments to persuade others. We are simply saying that doing so is difficult, especially when dealing with critical security issues, and that easier ways exist to go about it.

Lots of items can subtly persuade and influence others, and the best methods employ a variety of them. One item is repetition. Constantly repeating a piece of information makes it more likely that a person will remember it and consider it to be true, regardless of its veracity. Consider how politicians are constantly repeating talking points. Whatever message you are delivering through your platform must be repeated, in lots of different ways, to ensure the point gets across. Another item is getting people to believe they came up with the ideas you want them to adopt. In many cultures, if you overtly tell them to do something or think a certain way, they will likely resist. Also regardless of culture, if you are a member of a group that a person considers suspicious, then the person is also likely to resist your ideas and commands. However, if you can make people claim ownership of the idea and think they are the ones who came up with the idea to think a certain way or do a certain thing, they are much more likely to go along. Good salesmen use this trick all the time. They subtly seed ideas and wait for you to adopt them as your own. Then when you communicate the idea to them, they say that it is a fantastic idea. You then go along and spend money on something you did not want to buy initially. The reason the idea ownership trick works is because people tend to value things they think they have created more than the creations of others. If you think you came up with an idea, you are more likely to value it, and hence follow through with it. Other items also relate to how the information is delivered. You are more likely to claim ownership of an idea or simply be persuaded by it if it comes from a credible source and incites interest in you. These items do not betray common sense. You are not likely to believe something a crook tells you. Also, you are not likely to listen to others if they are boring and droll. Thus, your influence platform must feature interesting media and material. You must also develop trust between yourself and your participants because if they do not trust you, they will not participate or may rebel against you. Perhaps the most influential item is social influence, also known as peer pressure or a person's culture.

In most cases, the society a person inhabits, whether it be a country or a small group, strongly influences how that person thinks and acts. In Chapter 10, we briefly discussed how most of us have a tendency to conform to match our peers and social network. We are unlikely to engage in actions and ideas that people around us do not engage in. Culture also delineates actions and ideas that are taboo, and either discourages people from indulging in them or compels people to suppress them. Apart from urging conformity and identifying taboos, our surroundings also impact the frames we structure. Cultures construct traditions and myths through repetitive rituals. The rituals, whether they are actions or ways of thinking, help construct and reinforce frames in people's minds. Simply put, our family, friends, and community teach us how to view the world, and few of us really depart from that viewpoint. A few, in every culture, have a tendency to be non-conformist and adopt new frames. They, in turn, influence their surroundings, which in turn influence the culture and other people. Your influence platform should take advantage of the power of social influence and of people who tend to be non-conformist.

Process of Influencing Others

Social media is ideal for influencing others for a number of reasons. As we already discussed, you need to provide interesting and repetitive information to your participants. Crowdsourcing platforms can feature all types of interesting media, such as pictures and videos, and there is no limit to how many times you can deliver a piece of information to someone. Also, because crowdsourcing platforms can increase the rate of communication between you and your audience, it increases the likelihood that your audience will become familiar with you and come to trust you. Using crowdsourcing platforms to get people to claim ownership of an idea and propagate influence through their social networks is more difficult and requires the completion of certain steps. The remainder of this section first presents a conceptual overview of the necessary steps, and then presents details about what the conceptual steps mean in the real world. The section focuses on how to seed ideas into your platform's participatory audience and then get them to take ownership of it and execute it. It also focuses on how to propagate influence through the audience's social network and shift their perspective on what they consider to be valid viewpoints and actions, and taboos. A walkthrough section then goes through the steps in greater practical detail.

Conceptual Overview of Influence Process

The first and most critical step is determining exactly where your audience is now and where you want them to be, in terms of ways of thinking or willingness to perform an act. You need to determine the starting point, the intermediate points, and the end point. For example, you may want your audience to provide you with intelligence about drug smugglers in their area. However, for a number of reasons, the audience may be unwilling to provide the intelligence. You then know that you need to take the audience from being unwilling to provide intelligence, to becoming willing, to then actually providing the intelligence. The overall process of getting people to move from the starting to the end point is similar to helping people navigate a dense forest.

Consider a forest such as the one represented in Figure 11.2. To the left of the forest is the starting point, where the participants are at the start of your platform. To the right of the forest is the end point. Notice that numerous end points represent the numerous ways to exit a forest. Some of the exits and end points are counterproductive and some are harmless. Continuing with the previous example, you can try to take your participants on a journey through your process, but they may end up at end points such as becoming more unwilling to provide you with intelligence, or becoming willing to provide only intelligence about anything other than local drug smugglers.

You can guide your participants from the starting point to your desired end point through the numerous pathways in the forest. You do not always know which path the participants are taking or which end point they are likely to come out of because you cannot always see them through the dense foliage, similar to how you cannot see inside a participant's head and know for sure what she is thinking while she is participating in your platform. As your participants choose and traverse the mental paths, you should nudge them on to the paths that will lead to your end point. If they veer too far off the correct set of paths, they will go on wrong paths, and end up at the wrong end points.

Use a variety of nudges known as cognitive inserts to guide your participants. Cognitive inserts can be pieces of information, events such as games, and actions from the platform moderators that nudge your participants and the people around them to adopt new ways of thinking. Through cognitive inserts you can seed ideas, and reward people who gravitate to the idea and then urge their peers to adopt it as their own. Cognitive inserts can affect individuals and groups, and as we discussed before, the group can also affect each participant's behavior through social influence.

Figure 11.2 Metaphorical representation of influence process

Real-World Implications of Influence Process

The first step in determining your audience and their mental state vis-à-vis your ultimate objective is critical. If you get this step wrong, you will surely fail. Pick a target audience whose members are at least somewhat open to your ideas or at least willing and able to listen to you because they are either disenfranchised or are in need of a thing or certain rights. If the audience is outright hostile to you, they will not listen to you no matter what. Also, if members of the audience are physically located in a very chaotic place such as a war zone, they likely will not have the time or resources to engage with you. In most cases, they will be too busy trying to survive and will pay you little heed unless you help them survive. Of course, you can take advantage of such desperate situations, but they usually can become unstable and unsafe very quickly. Lastly, the audience cannot be located in a place ruled by a regime that is so hostile to you that they will immediately shut down any efforts you launch and threaten the lives of participants, unless you can guarantee their and your anonymity. Thus, overall, pick an audience whose members have enough time and resources to engage with you, and are willing to at least engage with you because they are unhappy with their current situation.

Guiding your audience along a path first means picking a path for them and then enticing them to follow along. In most cases, your ultimate objective will not be attractive to them. For example, if you want an audience in a rural area to provide you with intelligence on local drug smugglers, they may be unwilling to do so because of the dangers associated with it or because they do not trust you to protect their anonymity. Instead, start with an intermediate objective that will appear benign and attractive to them so you can get their attention and get them engaged. For example, to attract the audience in a rural area, you can offer them an SMS service that they can ping to get weather forecast information. Rural farmers would appreciate such information, and so will be willing to participate.

Further, guiding them along the right path and to the right end point involves slowly introducing your ultimate objective to them. However, couch it in terms that they will understand and feel some affinity to. There is no right way to do this, because it depends heavily on the audience and your objective. One way is to align your ultimate objective to an old cultural norm or tradition that the audience held dear and is now being oppressed by their current regime or situation. For example, the rural farmers may have had a weekly tradition where they gathered together with their families in the open at night, but are now afraid to do so because of the looming threat of violence brought by the drug smugglers. Engage with the audience and bring memories of such traditions back to them. Convince them that they can regain their tradition if they help defeat the drug smugglers, which involves providing you with intelligence about them. Of course, the process from engaging with them about an old tradition and then making them act is not as easy as we make it seem. It will take time and more intermediate objectives. First, you may need to simply query them about how they would like to improve their lives. Doubtless, one participant will eventually mention the need to increase security in his area. Reward and praise that participant, and make sure the other participants see that. The participants will then likely move toward the rewarded participant's viewpoint so they can also bask in the reward and praise. Ideas elicited from the participants are then reseeded in the community, but in such a way that they seem attractive and powerful. Reward and praise other participants who then recommend starting a neighborhood watch program and providing intelligence about the drug smugglers in their area. Another way to describe this process is to pick a small grievance that the audience has that is indicative of a larger underlying societal problem. Then poke at the grievance and focus on it till it drives the audience to act to solve the grievance and eventually the underlying problem. You should realize that in almost all cases, an influence platform is a crowdsourcing platform with numerous and often mixed objectives.

Appreciating the Limits of Influencing Crowds

Influence platforms can significantly affect how populations around the world help you, even when they hold unfavorable views of you and your mission at the outset. However, successfully running influence platforms is difficult. Although certainly not impossible, changing people's minds is difficult. Getting them to perform an act that may be dangerous or taboo in their culture is even harder. Influence platforms also suffer from other limitations, which you should recognize and mitigate to achieve success.

Unrealistic Expectations

Influencing people in small ways is hard enough; trying to get them to drastically change their thought processes or their willingness to perform major actions is harder. Influencing primarily through social media is even harder. Do not set unrealistic expectations and expect amazing feats from the participants on your platform. Do not be surprised if individuals in dangerous and oppressive regions hesitate to provide you with intelligence about criminal entities around them, regardless of how much they come to trust you. Pick your target audiences wisely and look for some indications that the target audience is willing to be influenced. Build and deploy influence platforms in places with a lot of young people who are unhappy with their current situation. They are more likely to act against their culture's wishes and are more open to persuasion.

Adversarial Participants

In previous chapters, we have discussed how adversarial participants can ruin your intelligence collection and solution platforms and subvert your mission. Their impact is greater on influence platforms. Your ability to influence people depends heavily on your ability to persuade their social network to change their viewpoints. Adversarial participants who denounce you on your platform or call on others on the platform to resist you will coalesce support around existing practices and ruin your ability to change them. Platform moderators will play a key role in identifying adversarial participants and either persuading them to reverse their intentions or outright stopping them from causing too many problems.

Political Fallout

As with adversarial participants, political fallout plays an immense role in influence platforms. Although you should not lie about your intentions to participants, you also do not want to tell them bluntly that you intend to influence them. Telling a person that you are about to persuade him usually does not help when you are trying to persuade him. Overt persuasion especially does not work when the person comes from a completely different culture and is suspicious of you. Political fallout will likely reveal your ulterior intentions to your participants, thereby compromising your platform.

Unknown Unknowns

Although all social media platforms have some sort of influence component inherent to them, few are launched with influence as the ultimate objective. Many similar platforms, sites, and other media operations are obvious about their intentions, and so likely are not very effective. Lots of things can go wrong with influence platforms because they primarily feature human behavior and thoughts, which are chaotic and mysterious. As with other platforms, be wary and on guard. With influence platforms, you need to be especially on guard because the smallest problem can have a ripple effect that then disrupts the community you are building on your platform. Once disarray spreads, your platform will fail. Make sure to hire talented and dedicated moderators, who can identify and deal with problems quickly as they emerge.

Tweaking the Process for Influence Platforms

Despite the limitations and difficulties, influence platforms are unrivaled in their potential. Their potential derives from their uniqueness, which sets them apart from other types of platforms. You need to tweak the process from Chapter 8 somewhat and adapt it to fit the conceptual process we discussed before.

Although not mandatory in some other platforms, you absolutely must spend a lot of time and resources formulating your ultimate and intermediate objectives with influence platforms. Often, you will need to tweak your objectives over the lifetime of the platform. You may find that the participants are willing to help you with your ultimate objective from the outset or that they require more time and convincing. Formulating the objectives properly requires conducting a lot of target audience analysis. You need to understand their grievances, their history of cooperation and engagement with you, and the nature of the threats they face on a daily basis.

The influence platform must have a lot of social networking and messaging features. Influencing people involves seeding ideas into their social networks and encouraging their peers to change along with them. Participants must have the opportunity and space to communicate with each other so they can influence each other. The platform must also have lots of other features and preferably multimedia to get the participants' interest. Of course, participants who can message and network with each other can also send each other messages that are counterproductive for you. Hence, you need moderators to engage with the participants constantly and urge, not force, them to think and act the way you want them to think and act. Because of the inherent complexity of influence platforms, more things can go wrong, and so you need to keep close watch of everything.

The moderators must also help you keep track of the platform's success along with other performance measuring tools. Expect to reform your platform as you go along to better suit the needs of the participants. To reform it correctly, you will need lots of information about what the participants think about the platform, how they use it, and how they want it to change. Overall, everything about influence platforms is more intense and complex. Expect to dedicate a lot more manpower, time, and resources with influence platforms than you would with other platforms.

Now that you know where to tweak the process, you can start building and running influence platforms. In the subsequent section, we walk through how to build and run an influence platform. For ease of understanding and comparison, the steps of the walkthrough follow the structure of the process in Chapter 8. To aid understanding and to keep the walkthrough accessible and brief, we will simplify many concepts. Do not take the simplifications and assumptions in the walkthrough as evidence against the severe complexity of designing and running influence platforms. Some parts may seem unrealistic, but do not fret too much. Consider the walkthrough as an example of what is possible through crowdsourcing platforms, given a decent amount of luck and skill.

Influencing to Collect Intelligence on Corrupt Officials

Imagine you are a member of a government tasked with finding out if members of a certain foreign government, such as local officials, are either helping or have a friendly relationship with violent extremists who wish to hurt your government.

You, of course, cannot simply ask the foreign government about the issue because it will not want to admit that its officials are behaving questionably. Also, you may not have many sources on the ground that both have the relevant information and are willing to give it to you. You also do not want to make it obvious to the foreign officials that you are trying to collect intelligence about them. If they find out, they might change their behavior or protect their questionable relationships. You can incentivize the general public of the foreign country to provide you with intelligence about local officials. In some cases, they may have the best information because they are likely to see with whom local officials meet and talk. However, the general public may be reluctant to help. They could be either suspicious of your motives or scared that you will not protect their identity and cause them harm. Still, you may be able to influence the public to overcome their reluctance and help you. We now walk through the process of creating a capability to influence the public.

Define Objectives and Scope

Before you can start mapping out all the intermediate objectives, you need to take stock of where you stand at the beginning and formulate your ultimate objective. Your ultimate objective is to collect intelligence from the general population about the relationships their local government officials have with violent extremists. Currently, members of the population are reluctant to help you and you need to influence them to help them overcome their reluctance. You need to get the population from the starting point of reluctance to the end point of providing you with the intelligence you desire. Successfully taking them on that journey entails accomplishing a few intermediate objectives. To identify the intermediate objectives, you will need to find out more about your target audience.

Analyze Target Audience and the Media Environment

The target audience includes members of the general public in the country of interest who have some information about their local officials. Assume that the general public of the country is made up of people from virtually all walks of life. Some are affluent, more are from the middle class, and the majority of them are somewhat deprived and living in rural areas. You can assume from the trends in other countries that the affluent have reliable daily Internet access through personal computers, the middle class have somewhat less reliable daily access through personal computers and cyber cafes, and the poor have only sporadic access through cyber cafes, but tend to use a lot of SMS. The country, as a whole, still relies a lot on traditional media including televisions and newspapers. However, the youth across the income classes are quickly adopting social media and are fairly web-savvy. They know how to get around the Internet and are eager to consume more of it, especially parts of the Internet that feature rich media. Unfortunately, few functioning and well-designed sites on the Internet are targeted toward the audience, so the youth do not always have an attractive place on the Internet to express themselves and build relationships with others. Because you intend to crowdsource using the Internet, your target audience should be the youth and others who have at least some access to the Internet.

The public, in general, is not exactly happy with their government for a number of reasons. Looking at opinion polls and regional studies, you find that one of the biggest grievances people have with their government is that it is corrupt. Some, especially the young, more affluent, and more educated, are also somewhat worried about the possible relationship between the violent extremists and their government. They also hold unfavorable views of your government and are suspicious of its motives. However, they do have a history of engaging with charity and non-governmental organizations from your country and generally appreciate the help.

In summary, the target audience and media environment analyses reveal the following key insights:

• The target audience is made up of young people and others who have some access to the Internet, and who are generally web-savvy. They are eager to seek out more interesting places on the Internet where they can share their experiences, especially places that are designed with them in mind.
• Most are disillusioned with their government. They are reluctant to help you but are at least open to talking to you or partner Non-governmental organizations, as long as you can offer them some help to prove your trustworthiness.
• Most are concerned and fed up with corruption in their government, and some are concerned with the relationship between their officials and violent extremists.

These insights can help you formulate intermediate objectives.

Define Objectives and Scope, Redux

You can leverage the target audience's grievance with corrupt officials to influence them to meet your ultimate objective. They are likely to want to do something to identify and stop corruption, which is not that far from your problem of identifying and stopping links with extremism. If you can persuade the target audience to act on corruption, you can then likely persuade some to act on extremism. You can also use the fact that the young and the web-savvy part of the audience are always eager to seek out new and interesting platforms on the Internet where they can express themselves and consume interesting media. You can now start to lay out your influence plan.

The starting point is that members of the audience are reluctant to help you, but are willing to engage with you if can help them overcome their grievances somehow. They do not care about your ultimate objectives, but they do care about their main grievance, which is the corruption in their government. Some of them are also looking for interesting sites on the Internet that are designed with them in mind. However, before you can get them to do anything for you, you have to do something for them and prove your trustworthiness.

The first intermediate objective (IMO-1) is to get the audience to simply engage with you by creating a well-designed platform where participants can share stories about their lives with each other. IMO-1 will attract parts of the audience who are willing to communicate with each other and you, and are interested in participating in crowdsourcing platforms. The platform can focus on small parts of their daily lives and ways they can improve it. The platform will motivate the participants to constantly share information with you, even if the information is not directly relevant to you at first. Because the information is not that sensitive or interesting to you, participants will be less reluctant to begin sharing with you. Also, the platform will spur the creation of a social network among the participants, to whom you can seed ideas and leverage.

The second intermediate objective (IMO-2) is to get platform participants to share stories about corruption. Over time, some participants will become more comfortable with sharing information with you, and undoubtedly some of the information will involve serious subjects such as corruption. You can also pointedly ask information about serious subjects and get participants to open up to you about them.

The third intermediate objective (IMO-3) is to get the participants to provide detailed information about corruption, including names of the people involved. Note that guiding the participants from IMO-2 to IMO-3 is harder than we make it seem. To get the participants to IMO-3, you have to persuade them to act on their dissatisfaction with corruption and trust you with very sensitive information. You have to convince them that you have their best interests in mind, can do something positive for them with the information they are providing you, and can protect their identities.

The ultimate objective (UO) is to get the participants to provide detailed information about corrupt and other officials who are involved with extremists in any way. By the time you accomplish IMO-3, some participants will be comfortable naming names and will have built enough of a trust with you to give you even more sensitive information. Some participants who will help you will realize that their grievances with their government are ultimately rooted in deep societal and governmental problems that also give rise to the grievance of ties between officials and extremists. Spurred by the need to solve the deep problems, they will eventually become motivated to provide information about all sorts of problems. However, many, if not the majority, of participants will not help with the UO. Still, you only need some help and any intelligence is better than none. Figure 11.3 summarizes the objectives.

Figure 11.3 Summary of objectives

Design the Platform

Influence platforms are much more complex than other platforms, and so it is more difficult to separate out the design of an influence platform's components. To aid understanding and to illustrate the relationships between different parts of the platform, we will integrate the look and feel part and the incentive structure part together. We will also describe the moderators' duties. The platform will evolve over time as each objective is accomplished. Thus, the design of the platform will also need to evolve over time. To match this evolution, we will separate the descriptions of the design of the platform by each objective. Overall, the platform will have three components. The first will be the front-end interface that the participants see, the data management system and server that host the website and corresponding data, and an administrator interface that you and/or your moderators will use. In reality, the administrator and front-end interfaces will be built into the same website.

Designing for IMO-1

The target audience analysis reveals that the platform should be a website with lots of attractive and well-designed features. At first, it should attract participants and provide them with a space where they can interact with each other and you and/or your moderators. Inspired by websites such as OpenIDEO, Facebook, and forums, the website will feature social networking elements that allow participants to chat with each other. The moderator should also regularly post questions and query participants about their thoughts on various subjects. Remember that at this point, the goal is to simply deploy a website that gets people to interact with each other. It should not be too complicated.

The participants will be able to access the following four parts of the platform:

• Web pages with information about how to behave on the platform, how to use the platform, frequently asked questions, and the objective of the platform (something like “Building a Community Online”)
• The user account page
• The public messaging forum
• The query wall, with separate walls (web pages) for each query

The first part is fairly self-explanatory. Be clear and concise when drafting the rules and behaviors, and do not post dishonest information about your intentions. Again, you do not have to post everything, but do not lie about who you are or what you are up to. As we describe in the “Market the Platform” section later, you will likely need to partner with an NGO. The subsequent list describes the other three parts and the features the platform will have:

• User accounts—All participants can create a user account, which they can use to identify themselves and track other people. All usernames should, of course, mask their true identity. Participants will be able to access their own user account pages where they can see all the posts they have made and send private messages to the moderator. To register for a user account, participants have to submit some basic demographic information. Try, but do not expect, to always succeed at getting participants to submit more sensitive personal information. Make sure you explain to the participants exactly what information you are collecting and do not ever make it public.
• Messaging—Like in forums, the participants can start topics or threads and post messages or comments, and engage with each other. Moderators can also post messages to the participants and vice versa. All the messages between participants will be viewed publicly. Messages between the moderators and individual participants may also be done through a private messaging system. Also, the user account page will feature private messages between the participant and moderators, and enable participants to respond to moderators.
• Public messaging forum—All participants will message each other in two separate portions of the site. The first will be the public messaging forum that will have a bulletin board forum-type interface where participants can openly chat with each other about virtually any topic. They can start threads to pose questions and respond as they wish. The public forum will enable participants to engage with each other and the moderators, and develop the sense of community on the platform.
• Regular queries/query wall—The second messaging portion of the site is the queries section where participants will respond to specific queries and post comments on a Facebook wall–type interface. Every week or so, the moderator will post a question or query about a fairly pedestrian topic such as “Tell us about your school and what you find so interesting about it.” Each query will have a special separate wall or page that participants can access through the platform, where they can then respond and see and approve of the responses of each other. All conversations about the queries will happen on the relevant query's page, although participants should be free to discuss issues around the queries in the public forum. A separate query section will compel the participants to focus on the query and not get sidetracked by unrelated conversations. The queries will also make the platform stand out from other sites and provide a theme for the platform, such as asking the youth what they think about certain issues. Participants will then join, knowing that they are supposed to express themselves in a certain way.
• Approves—As on Facebook, the participants can like or approve of another participant's comment in the query section. An “approve” counter will publicly keep track of the number of “approves” a comment receives.
• Tokens (Intrinsic Incentives)—For each response to a query, participants will receive some sort of token. Moderators may also reward participants with tokens for good behavior (for example, being courteous to other participants or posting a lot of information) so as to point out to other participants how they should act on the platform. The number of “approves” a response gets will also lead to a participant receiving a predetermined amount of tokens. The moderators should also simply praise participants regularly for being involved.
• Leaderboard—This displays who has the most tokens and is the most active on the platform. The leaderboard will elicit competition between the participants and give a few participants something to brag and feel good about.

At first, provide participants with virtual instead of real, material incentives to ensure that the focus remains on building trust and a sense of community on the platform. You want the participants to engage for intrinsic reasons and not to simply earn some money or thing. Involving extrinsic incentives this early may result in participants engaging for the wrong reasons, and possibly even lying or gaming the platform to simply earn some money.

Design for IMO-2

At the point of IMO-2, the platform should have a solid core of participants who are regularly communicating and responding to queries. They will be few in number. A bigger portion of participants will be either new to the platform or on the precipice of engaging more. For IMO-2, the platform should roll out new features that pique the interest of participants, make it appear as though the platform is going to be around for a while, and get participants talking about serious subjects including corruption. Introduce and improve on the following features:

• User accounts—Participants can upload a picture (not a personal picture) as an avatar. Users can also start friending each other and receiving notifications on the user account page when a friend comments on their messages in the forum or query sections.
• Queries—Start posting queries that touch on serious subjects such as corruption, security, education, and community issues. Ask participants for suggestions on how they can improve problems in those subject areas. For example, ask “What are some improvements you would like to see in your local community?” Or “Are you happy with your local government? Why or why not?” Keep in mind that adversaries may be monitoring your site and even spying on the participants, so do not make the queries too pointed. Immediately identify a participant who posts responses—for example, saying that corruption is a problem—that help you achieve IMO-2. The moderator should then praise that participant or give him tokens. Others will then implicitly recognize what the “right” answers are and start to say similar things because they also want the tokens and praise. However, do not be too obvious, because participants will recognize that you are trying to social-engineer them.

Throughout the course of the platform, the moderators should ask participants for suggestions on how they would like to improve the platform. Implement some of the suggestions so that the participants feel a sense of ownership of the platform and that you are willing to listen to them. They will appreciate it and consequently become more involved.

Design for IMO-3

At the point of IMO-3, you should have at least some participants who are willing to talk about corruption. Reiterate that their identities are protected and encourage them and others to talk more.

Keep introducing new features into the platform. Also, the moderators should start asking more pointed questions about how the participants would like to solve the problem of corruption. If a participant mentions something along the lines of “I wish we had a place to report corrupt people,” then recognize the response and urge others to echo it, thereby building a consensus around the idea. If no one mentions it or anything close to it, the moderator should post the idea as simply a comment to a participant's comment. If the participants are adamantly against it, you likely have not built enough trust with them and you will have to try again later. It may take months to get the participants to IMO-3.

You can also enact the “special query or challenge” feature, where participants can respond with ideas to win material prizes and the chance to enact their ideas. The special query or challenge will pose a real-world problem to participants and ask them for solutions. Essentially, you will convert part of your platform into a solution platform. The material prize will get the participants' attention and help emphasize the importance of the challenge. One of the special queries will, of course, be asking participants to come up with a way to identify and report corrupt officials anonymously. Make sure to launch other special queries in other areas. For example, ask participants for a way to improve water quality in their area. You cannot make it too obvious that you are only interested in corrupt officials. Guide the participants to the “correct” response, which is a crowdsourcing capability where participants can send in sensitive information about a corrupt official.

After some time and enough participants are interested in the idea, launch a capability to do just that. It is as if you say, “You came up with the idea, you talked about the idea, you wanted the idea, so now here it is.” You can either deploy a crowdmap, a separate website, or an SMS platform where participants can submit information anonymously. The anonymous part is very important. It will communicate to participants that you intend to protect their identities. You may need to partner with an NGO or anti-corruption group (or create your own) that may actually do something beneficial with the information. The participants will also appreciate that their information is coming in handy and creating positive change.

Also, make sure to keep the new capability separate from the existing platform. It should be a spin-off, not an extension. You can discreetly put a link somewhere on the platform but do not advertise it too loudly. Participants will talk offline and you will attract unwanted outside attention. Some participants will not want to be involved, but they would like to stay a part of the community that already exists. You do not want to push them out and make it seem as if you really only cared about the capability to report the corrupt official. You can give tokens to participants who sign on to the spin-off to motivate others. Finally, make sure to spin off other ideas and websites. Someone may recommend creating a website that collects charity donations to fund school supplies for poor children. Say that is a great idea and build it with them. The resulting increase in communication and trust between you (or the moderators) and the participants will surprise you, and maybe even warm your heart.

Design for UO

The process for getting participants from IMO-2 to IMO-3 is the same as getting them from IMO-3 to UO. Encourage the participants to start talking about the problems of extremists and their relationship with their government. Tread lightly on the topic because it can inflame personally held beliefs and lead to arguments between participants. Moderators must be on guard to make sure everyone is behaving courteously. As with the issue of corrupt officials, incentivize and praise participants who say what you want them to say—we need a way to identify the officials involved with extremists. Post special queries for which the ideal response is another spin-off capability where participants can submit intelligence about extremist ties anonymously. Then create the spin-off capability. Do not create too many spin-offs at this point, otherwise you will confuse participants and they will, in turn, not take the spin-offs seriously. A handful should be enough. Also, do not convert one spin-off into another or mix them. Keep things simple and consistent to avoid confusion.

If the participants are not eager to start talking about extremists, then wait and try again in the future. Do keep in mind that there is no guarantee that your platform will work. Hopefully, you will have enough participants interested. You many need only a few because perhaps only a few have the information you want.

Keep the original platform going as you collect intelligence through the spin-off. If you are lucky and talented enough, you may be able to keep the platform going for years and use it as a prime spot to ask participants to legitimately solve problems or provide intelligence. Over time, you will also likely change their views or how they talk about certain topics and what information they consider. You can also leverage the community emerging on the platform as a way to coalesce support around various causes, such as improving women's rights or countering oppressive autocratic regimes. The possibilities are endless.

Build the Platform

Influence platforms are usually complicated and involve a lot of moving parts. You will need to hire developers to help you develop and build the platform. You will also need them to develop various privacy tools to protect the identity of the participants and data collection tools so you can measure the platform's performance. Keep the developers around throughout the lifetime of the platform, at least on retainer. You need them for general maintenance and to introduce new features into the platform.

You will also need to hire designers and area experts—people who really know your audience—to help you design a platform and ways of interacting with the participants. One of the selling points of your platform to participants is that the platform is attractive. You need designers to help make it attractive.

Market the Platform

You want to make sure that at any time you have a decent number of participants on the platform. No one wants to join and be part of a platform that has only five other participants. The exact number will depend on how much information you want to collect and the population size of the audience. If participation rates fall or are not where you would like them to be, you will need to release a burst of advertising to get people's attention again. The pace, intensity, and frequency of the marketing campaign will depend heavily on circumstances.

You will likely need to partner with an NGO doing charity work in the region or similar organizations to help participants overcome their reluctance. Some may be turned off by your UO, so you will need to explain what you are trying to do with some finesse. Again, do not be dishonest. If they find out, word will get out and you might not be able to launch your platform in the area. On the platform, you also do not want to make it obvious exactly which office you represent. If you are working on behalf of the British government, then say so, but you do not have to necessarily say which office. Work with the area expert to figure out what to say.

Depending on the circumstances, you may also need to target your advertising to only parts of the audience that you know will participate. You may want to keep adversaries from finding out or creating a lot of buzz because it might get the wrong people interested in your platform. In this case, focus on advertising on Internet sites and platforms frequented by the targeted part of the audience. Also, you may need to implement IP blocking and other mechanisms, such as making people provide their phone area codes when signing up, to make sure that people outside of the region do not sign up. Be cautious with implementing blocking tools, especially with IP blocking. Tools to mask IP are widely available and easy to use.

Moderate the Platform

In previous sections we briefly touched on some of the roles that the moderators will play. Moderators are essential to your platform. If you do not have good moderators, you will fail. You will need to hire numerous moderators to ensure that at least someone is keeping an eye on the platform at all times. Ideally, the moderators should have a familiarity with the audience's culture, way of life, and language.

Expect the moderators to participate heavily in the platform. Their duties will include:

• Enforcing the rules of the platform and making sure everyone abides by them.
• Identifying and dealing with troublemakers and adversarial participants. Initially, the moderators should reach out to them through private messaging and urge them to change their behaviors. In extreme cases or after repeat violations, the moderators can ban adversarial participants. Make sure they do not abuse the power to ban people. The platform is supposed to be a community where free expression is encouraged, so you do not want to seem too heavy-handed and oppressive. Allow some participants to post statements contradicting your objective and viewpoints. It will spark arguments that the moderators can then influence, and it will seem a lot more authentic and genuine to participants.
• Encouraging conversation and guiding it to appropriate ends. The moderators should expect to ask and answer questions, praise participants, change the topic of conversation, and much more. If the level of communication within the platform is low, the moderators should increase their participation. If the level of communication is high and your objectives are being met, the moderators should be less involved.
• Helping participants as needed and taking their suggestions. People like being listened to and looked after, and that fact is no different on the Internet.
• Keeping watch over the platform in general and making sure everything works without glitches and bugs. Moderators should tell you and your developers immediately if something is wrong with the technical aspects of the platform. Few people will put up with a broken website.

Measure the Platform's Performance

Use the various data tools to measure the platform's performance and ensure your influence platform is succeeding in accomplishing all your objectives. Example metrics include:

• Number of participants on the platform over time
• Age and gender of participants
• Number of posts or comments per participant
• Number of messages participants submit on spin-off
• Time to each intermediate objective

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Undoubtedly, your influence platform will need lots of reforms as time goes on. You will need to introduce new features and fix others that you thought might work but are proving unpopular. Assess your platform's performance periodically and read through the suggestions of participants to come up with reforms. If participants are not advancing to the next objective, you may need to make drastic changes. You can also try providing new material incentives on a regular basis instead of mostly relying on intrinsic incentives. You may need to offer material incentives at the beginning to get people to join the platform. Additionally, you can try to get the participants to interact with each other through more interesting media such as pictures or video. For example, you can post queries and ask participants to respond by uploading pictures. Lastly, try deploying a similar platform elsewhere and compare the results. A comparison of the successes and failures of both platforms may reveal insights about problems with each platform.

Influence platforms are complex and an advanced way of using social media technologies. However, many more advanced and impressive uses exist. Chapter 12 discusses some of these uses and how you can perform more advanced analyses on social media data.

Summary

• Influencing through crowdsourcing entails persuading people to adopt a specific idea and accomplish a specific behavior based on their interactions on a crowdsourcing platform known as an influence platform.
• Influencing is a more subtle and powerful way of incentivizing someone to do something.
• Influencing involves completing the following two goals:
  • The first goal is changing how a person thinks, which involves subtly modifying the mental shortcuts or frames he or she uses to make sense of the world.
  • The second goal is changing a person's behavior, which involves accomplishing the first goal and helping him or her overcome hesitation to perform a certain act.
• The following can influence a person's thought processes and behavior:
  • Repeating a piece of information will make it more likely that a person will remember that information and consider it to be true regardless of its actual veracity.
  • Making a person believe he came up with the idea you want him to adopt, because people value things and thoughts more if they believe they created it.
  • Delivering information to a person in an interesting and exciting way.
  • Building trust between you and the person you want to influence will make it more likely he will listen to you.
  • Peer pressure and a person's culture significantly help a person make sense of and act in the world.
• Influencing populations through influence platforms is the process of guiding your audience regarding your ultimate objective from where they are today to where you want them to be by way of getting them to complete multiple intermediate objectives. You guide them through cognitive inserts (games, information, other ways of interacting with them) and by leveraging the interactions between all the participants on the platform.
• To effectively influence an audience, its members must be unhappy with their situation or current lives in some way and have the time, resources, and willingness to at least engage with you.
• The intermediate objective must in some way help resolve the problem that is causing them consternation.
• Constantly reward and praise participants who approach your ultimate objective so that you can also persuade other participants to act similarly.
• Influence platforms suffer from a few limitations:
  • Influencing populations through social media is difficult and will fail if you have unrealistic expectations of your influence platform.
  • Adversarial participants can ruin your ability to leverage social influence on a platform to your ends.
  • Overt acts of influence or lying about your ultimate objective can destroy the trust between you and the participants.
  • Influence platforms are very complex, and so even the smallest thing going wrong can have severe consequences.
• Compared to other types of platforms, influence platforms are much more complex and heavily dependent on how well you define your objectives and understand your audience. They also require significantly greater social networking and messaging features. Also, the quality of your moderators will determine your platform's success.
• You can use influence platforms to get participants to provide intelligence about the ties between extremists and government officials by first getting them to talk to you about their daily lives and then getting them to provide intelligence about corruption in their government.

Notes

1. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago, Chicago; Luntz, F. (2007) Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. Hyperion, New York; Romm, J. (2012) Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion From Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga. CreateSpace, North Charleston.

2. Hood, B. (2012) The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Oxford, New York.

3. Adams, B., Sartori, J. and Waldherr, S. (2007) Military Influence Operations: Review of Relevant Scientific Literature. Defence Research and Development Canada, Ontario. Accessed: 15 September 2012. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a477201.pdf