Late last year we collaborated with Stanford’s Byron Reeves to answer that exact question with respect to home energy consumption.   Our hypothesis was that it would be possible to use the same forces that drive consumption, namely competition and perceived social status, to curtail consumption.   We just needed to change the game and alter the incentives.  The result is shown in the short video below.

A front page story in today’s New York Times features a similar story that proves this really works.  Read “Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy” to find out how the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is doing the same.

In our business, it’s this type of result that inspires me and gives me faith that we’ll be able to use our know-how to do much more than just sell people more stuff.  In theory, we should be able to  use social software and games to create a movement around almost anything that people care about, and help guide behavior towards healthy outcomes.

What do you think?

We talk a lot about building online movements around here, so this piece on the Times of London’s tech blog caught my eye. Facebook protest movements have been easily parodied as “passive” - but we’re all aware of the role that social networks played in the election of Barack Obama.

The Times’ Murat Ahmed, once an intern at Westminster himself, seems prepared to give some credence to online protests, at least to their ability to make UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (or her poor interns) miserable with a deluge of email. A Facebook group - comprised of those unhappy with proposed new legislation on expanding internet surveillance - is urging its members to cc: Smith on every piece of email they send. The cleverly passive-aggressive subtext: “you want to see our emails? Ok then, here they are!”

I just read this and agree with much of what James wrote about: We may have just entered the era of “total brand identity & control”… which comes at an interesting time when brand’s are more and more being asked to let go of their identity into Web 2.0. Thoughts?

Reuben explored this question in his most recent AdAge guest blog post…and given the complexity of the issue, it’s just a start.

We’ve got a lot of highly skilled and enthusiastic gamers around here, but we need to set our sights on the big leagues: top-tier competitive gamers are now attracting major brand sponsors. The New York Times’ Stephanie Clifford recently highlighted Dr Pepper’s plans to place a professional gamer on bottles that will be distributed nationwide. The player in question is Tom Taylor, a 21-year-old who has a three-year, $250,000 contract to play video games, particularly Halo 3. Taylor, aka Tsquared, will appear on about 175 million bottles from January to April. “Dr Pepper struck the deal with Major League Gaming, a New York City company that organizes teams and competitions.

This year, the league has 50 professional teams, each specializing in one of five multiplayer games, including Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.” Taylor is one of several players with these increasingly lucrative deals.

OK, here’s what I mean by this:

Have you ever gotten a Facebook email that someone sent that you only discovered 3 months after the fact?  I have, and I often wonder, “Did they really want to speak to me, and if so, why didn’t they call on the phone”?

But I am also guilty here, though usually with a good degree of calculation.  For example, I try to think about what my goal is, what the other person is doing and how to best communicate without wasting time.  While still enjoying the other person (this is important, or we’d stop phoning or having meals together).

So here goes — my list, ranked in order from Most Intimate to Least Intimate

1.  Face-to-Face (this works even better if the faces are being fed food)

2.  Synchronous Video Chat like Skype

3. Asynchronous Video Chat like Seesmic

3.  Realistic Virtual World with Avatar that Resembles You in Real Life

4. Facebook private conversations

5.  Textual Microblog Social Networks like Twitter

6. Fantasy - oriented Virtual Worlds where you do not resemble yourself

7.  Social Network public conversations (not including Twitter, Pownce and other microblogging)

8. Blog Comments

9. SMS

10. ESP

What do you think?