Are Behavior Awards Effective in Social Media Marketing?

I haven’t seen much evidence of success in three years of developing strategies and research for clients across a number of sectors. Yet it seems to still be happening – Huffington Post today is riding the FourSquare hockey stick upcurve of success; they’re giving out “badges” for good behaviour.

Are we secretly craving that return to elementary school days and getting those gold stars for good behaviour? Perhaps deep in our psyche we are. Or not.

Our attention for media channels is so fractured today. It would appear that when a new app comes out (i.e. Twitter) and begins an ascendancy in popularity, other Web services jump on to attempt to cash in – the halo effect.

But what are the expected and acceptable returns? A 2% uptick in traffic? Direct Mail campaigns are considered successful with a 2% return, 3% is knocking it out of the ballpark. Email campaigns have slid down to the 2% mark for a success metric.

Microblogging service Plurk gives you “Karma points” for building friends and engaging in conversation. Plurk has failed to garner the traffic and growth of Twitter. By a long-shot. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble managing my karma as it is without someone else messing with it.

While I see increased use of FourSquare and Yelp, they too rely on rewarding you for activity. The simple reason is creating loyalty since the more eyeballs and activity increases the value of the ads sold on the site. But is it sustainable? Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville are but fads.

The question is, will loyalty marketing behavioral promotions be effective? Modifying peoples behaviour through marketing techniques is never easy and often a losing proposition.

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)