Web Strategy: “Rewarding” your Social Network

This is probably the most important Web Strategy that I’ve written, so please pay attention. After having fun yesterday making fun of people that claim to have been “doing web 2.0 for 8 years” let’s get back on track.

This Web 2.0 or Social Media movement isn’t about technology. RIA, AJAX, XML, RSS, APIs aren’t important. Why? Those are just tools that lead us to what’s really important = people connecting to people.

What many Web Strategists (anyone that drives the direction of a website) forget is that they need to reward their customers. I’ve met many folks who have deployed websites and ask me; “we’ve built it, but they don’t come, how come?” There’s a couple of reasons.

“While we’ve already talked about at great length to “Consider joining communities that already exist rather than building them” (credit to the good citizens Tara Hunt for this idea back in 2006), there’s a few key things that one has to remember when building your website, and that’s building a network that rewards your users.

How do you reward your users? That’s easy, it’s actually more psychological and sociological more than a web feature set. If we’ve already agreed that this movement is about people, then we can look at existing physical people networks and see what rewards them. The beauty is that when the rewards happen within the features, the network starts to become scalable, they’ll stay on your site and invite others, without your extra prodding.

A few examples of how Social Networks Reward

Or maybe it’s that nothing pleases me more than to watch people comment and favorite my flickr photos, why? It’s this intrinsic deep rooted feeling (a reward) that I get from sharing my life with others –and in turn –they enjoy it with me.

Or take networking sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo, for some the real badge of honor is showing to others who connected one is. Sales, Marketing, PR, and recruiters may thrive on this. For others, it’s the small intimate connections one builds with a few quality folks. MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, also have similar elements.

Or maybe individuals want to be recognized, they want to be shown as experts in their field, or someone that helps others. Communities that self reward others can succeed.

Or maybe it’s the collective knowledge that’s made easy to boil up: the how to’s, the current events, the meetups that one never would have found before, there’s an affinity and attraction for all. What is it that your website can do to highlight the usefulness?

So think about your community, and discover what drives them, then reward them.

This is Web Strategy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 5:58 am and is filed under Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.