Social proof, also known as informational social influence, occurs in social situations when people are not sure how to behave. They make the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation and assume the behavior of others will yield the best outcome.

“Positive Social Proof” is similar to the “Bandwagon” or “Cromo Effect” in that people tend to join a way of thinking, a movement or in an activity. When introduced to the environment they see clear indications that its very popular with people either similar to people they are attracted too (celebs, wealthy, sexy).

Why is social proof important?

In a time of information (and social) media overload social proof plays an important factor in whether or not people notice your content. If people don’t feel that your website or blog is popular they may leave your page before comprehending what value there is for them. Many sites under represent their content. A List Apart is an amazing informational website for “people who make websites”.  You would never guess their popularity by looking at the homepage. The articles don’t display how many comments, there’s no way to “thumbs up” an article, there’s no social proof. Yet this article has over 30 comments.

A List Apart Website

Visitors not familiar with the site may leave immediately; but if they saw it had been favorited dozens of times and had over 30 comments, even if the article was not of interest they would be more likely to look for other content, subscribe to the rss feed or even tweet, bookmark or digg the site.

Easy ways to demonstrate positive social proof on your site

TweetMeme

TweetMeme

As you see on the top of this article TweetMeme allows you to display a button to tweet or retweet an article as well as the total number of tweets. On this blog list page the 10 most recent articles are displayed, and next to each list article is the total number of times each were tweeted. When a visitor looks at that page and several articles have a high number of tweets the content looks much more interesting.

Star Ratings & Article Views

Ratings & Views

Give readers and easy way to show they like your content. For every person willing to leave a comment there may be 9 that will click the star rating according to the 1-9-90 Rule. This rule suggests that for every 100 people, 1 person will actively engage by creating original content in the form of comments, blogs or mentions.  9 people will passively engage, perhaps repurpose content, retweet, favorite content or submit a star rating and the other 90 will be lurkers, not engaging at all. So its important to give the visitors the tools they need to participate easily in their chosen method.

Show who’s on your site

MyBlogLog

Displaying your recent visitors is a great way to show social proof. If you have a platform with participating members it should be easy to develop a system. There are a variety of systems out there you can add to your sites, including comment systems, member management tools and visitor tools.

Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog provides a widget you can add to your site that allows people to join and displays photos of recent visitors. Additionally anyone that visits your site that is already logged into Yahoo! will display automatically. The addition of thumbnail images titled “Recent Visitors” can go a long way to demonstrating positive social proof.

Recommendations

Recommendations

Related articles, “you may also be interested in”, “customers who bought this also bought”… there are a variety of ways to display recommendations. Some software simply analyzes the sites log files. Much more sophisticated tools such as Istobe’s recommendation engine technology is an always-humming factory of predictive models and proprietary algorithms developed by MIT graduates.

There are plenty more tools out there – I’d love to hear about social proof design patterns you’ve seen out there.