August 16, 2006

What is your social networking site giving you in return?

Mike Rundle has an excellent post over at Business Logs discussing how successful social networking sites give users something in exchange for their content.  Mike suggests that users get pleasure from submitting content and this pleasure has a multiplier based off the return for submission.  He postulates that if you submit a story to digg.com it takes about 5X in terms of effort for a return of 50X in pleasure (where X is the multiplier).

I think Mike hit the nail on the head.  When Jason Calacanis recently offered to pay diggers for submitting content to Netscape.com he was utilizing Mike’s theory.  For Jason, the effort required (in both switching from Digg and finding the stories) would be minimal compared to the pleasure multiplier of getting paid.  I’m not sure if he actually hired any but if I was a top digger - currently ranked 536 - then I would have seriously considered it.

Moving forward, sites need to seriously consider what the user is getting in return for there effort.  Getting consumers to fill out simple forms has always been a challenge, now every new site wants their users to add pictures, videos, bookmarks, posts, etc.  Web 2.0 is fueled by the community, the community is fueled by its user generated content.

Posted in Relationships, Social, Technology, Word of Mouth