Online Community – Be Careful With Incentives
We hear many newer community teams at clients and prospects who hold the opinion that to get members engaged, you should provide an incentive. We listen respectfully to their ideas and then give them several examples of how this process has actually worked against communities.
In one community we managed, an incentive was provided that tied into a huge global event the client was sponsoring. Despite having the best intentions, the incentive process went horribly off target. The incentive was a co-branded item worth about $15.00 plus shipping. To earn the item, the member had to actively participate in the community and perform certain actions. This lead to extreme gaming of the system during the global event. Instead of giving away a couple of hundred of items, the client gave away thousands. Why? Because in certain parts of the world, the news spread that you could get this item for free. So, the contest expanded virally across the globe. While that should be a good thing, it wasn’t. The new members drove the utility of the community down significantly because they weren’t the true target audience. Their comments and behaviors drove valuable targeted members to complain or leave. In the end, we ended up removing the incentives and reward program in order to maintain order and trust among our valuable members.
Here is another view on why incentives are not such a good idea for growing your community, courtesy of Dan Ariely of MIT using behavioral economics to describe the pitfall:
In short, incentives should be used sparingly and randomly in order to have the desired effect on your community. A formalized program can be gamed no matter how hard you try to prevent it.
Remember that it’s EGO that drives the participation of your top members. They crave recognition for their efforts, not trinkets.
Want to learn more about avoiding the mistakes that many companies make when building or managing their online communities? Contact us with your questions or leave a comment below.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Community Moderation, Social Media Industry, Social Media Trends. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Nice! Bob Sutton wrote about a 1996 research article on how simply thinking about money can reduce willingness to help:
Thinking About Money Causes People to Avoid Asking for and Giving Help: Research in Science Magazine
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/thinking-about-money-causes-people-to-avoid-asking-for-and-giving-help-research-in-science-magazine.html
And is that Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn carrying the couch?