If you have checked a leaderboard on Foursquare recently, or compared your Twitter follower count with your friends, then you know how prestige works to motivate users to participate. In a guest post at paidContent, Ty Ahmad-Taylor suggests that media companies – and other digital businesses, can use prestige to actually drive revenues.
It boils down to creating a venue for users to move upward through some game or exercise and then be able to tout that progress to their social graph. One additional dimension is users being able to see how they stack up against the general public, a concept known as the leaderboard. … The rise of prestige as a new form of currency has ramifications for businesses facing decline like print or broadcast.
Suggestions range from prediction games for stocks, sports and entertainment (eg. box office results). What about weather? Is there someone in your community who could more accurately predict tomorrow’s high temperature than your own staff (or service)?
I wrote a proposal a couple years ago for a Knight News Challenge grant (rejected!) based on social gaming for news. The idea was to reward users for finding and submitting news and give them points and rank them against other users. Would there be more reception for such an idea today – especially if we used the badge meme instead of boring old points? “Internet famous” is a powerful motivation for users. And local media companies need to see the opportunities it presents for loyalty, branding and – just maybe – revenues.
