Marshall Kerkpatrick has a good post about the emerging trend of rewarding users in top social media sites. But what I really recommend is reading the comments section. You will find there a really high quality discussion about the future of the web economics. Should we give users incentives for interacting with our site? Should those incentives be based on money? Is it a good or bad thing?
On a side note, this actually show why talkbacks are such important thing today. Sometimes you can find more insights in the comments/talckbacks section that in the actual article itself. In this example, you can almost feel you are reading a live article - an article that updates itself over time by the power of the community.
Not many people know this, but my current start up I founded is working to answer exactly those questions. In the next week we will unveil ourselves to the world, and than of course I will have much to say about the all subject. In the mean time, here is an excerpt of one of my comments to the discussion (comment number 64):
Let me start by quoting Jason: “Quality. That single factor is what determines the winners in our business”.
That single phrase is the honest truth about user generated content and community bases sites.
People are going to Digg and Netscape.com because they can find there the most relevant information for them.
People are choosing a dating site by the number of quality guys and girls there.
You are reading those lines because of the number quality insights and professional users who comment in this site.So the real question is simply how you attract the most contributing, quality users to your site.
If you are YouTube it could be that your brand name is simply enough. But if you are one of its competitors, you probably need to give users more incentives to come to you.
If the incentives should be based on money, reward points or mare recognition simply doesn’t matter. It will change from business to business. Most of the time it will probably be a combination of a few.
The real question is how you know to recognize these top tier users and how can you reward them in a way that will give them incentives to not just glorify their own names, but to try and help making your site better.
By paying users Jason done much more than just getting top users, he made them feel part of Netscape. In order to get the most of your users, you should treat them not as users but as partners. Their success is your success. Your success is their success.
A smart man once said that if we want to learn about the future we should look into the past. What we see today in the Internet is not different from what happened with other “old” media platforms. In the early days of the radio and TV everyone was armatures, mostly doing things for the publicity. But as the years passed we started to see talent emerge, and than even stars and today also super stars.
I believe this is exactly what we will see also in the Internet. We will see some of the users going from mare users to media super stars. Those users will be the ones that can make the difference between a business success and failure. Those users will be worth enough for us to pay to in order to keep them.
