Encouraging Personal Storytelling by Example.

Online communities often face challenges of encouraging people to provide more, better, or particular kinds of content. In this paper we add to a growing body of work on interface techniques and domains for influencing people's behavior by encouraging people to contribute personal, rather than informational, content to an online community through presenting example content in a tutorial video. A study of 175 people who viewed a video that contained either more personal or more factual content attached to places on a map showed that people who saw personal content contributed more personally-oriented content and saw MyMaps as more useful for personal tasks than those who saw descriptive content.