Social Currency
We gave our unsolicited opinion on a website and potential strategy the other day and it really got me thinking about the importance of establishing some social currency in today’s Web 2.0 sites. The site was effectively a reviews and ratings site that was struggling to generate the traffic and comments that were wanted.
I believe the reason that people are not using the site is because it does not answer the basic marketing axiom of “what’s in it for me”. There is no social currency to be earned from leaving a review or a rating for the user. It has already been shown that cash or prize incentives don’t work for this sort of thing (ala all the video publishers that pay for content versus You Tube and still You Tube wins). You need to create a method of people earning social currency, whether that be through a rate the rater system of some other method.. Thereby there is something in it for those doing the reviews - to get a better rating.
I also think that in the plethora of review sites, even bookmarking sites there needs to be a second layer of demographics added to the process. In my opinion reviews these days are only useful if those reading them can identify with them. An example is on the Base Backpackers site where we take comments directly from HostelWorld. These comments include the reviewers age range and their nationality and sex. That way if you are an English lager lout looking for a party hostel and read a review saying that it is too noisy from an older American lady you can take the review at face value - or vice versa. We know that users are quite open with their personal information if they believe it is going to be of benefit to them.
I am reading Wikinomics by Don Trapscott and Anthony Willliams (thanks Nigel at AJ Hackett for the recommendation) at present and it was interesting to come across a similar argument put forward by blogger and media consultant Jeff Jarvis. Although talking about “ownership” of all the user generated content his sentiments echo the argument that for a site looking to gather user generated content the site needs to recognise the ownership of the content - reward the contributors with social currency, in my words.
“These collective benefits yield a richer web experience and enhance the wisdom of crowds (see my article on What is Web 2.0 for information on this). This new wisdom can be useful in helping people discover content, or in organizing the web around topics, or improving search results, and even in improving ad performance.”
“So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? Obviously the crowd does. Platforms like Google, Technorati and Yahoo (…) merely borrow it. And they can only borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if the pay dividends back to the crowd. And those that try to hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it … risk turning away the crowd that creates this value”.
Tags: Base Backpackers, Hostel World, Web 2.0