Is Social Media Making People Hyper-Competitive?

You might call it “keeping up with the eJones‘” in a way. Take FourSquare for example…the more you “check in” to a place the greater a chance you can become “Mayor” until someone unseats you. Or LinkedIn with that little blue bar that says you’re “only 75% complete” for your profile…don’t you just want to push that bar to the 100% point? C’mon now, be honest.

Of course this is going to drive all those “lets make a level playing field for kids in school” educators go batty. Because even social media services like Club Penguin have “status” levels and indicators – because it is human nature to be competitive.

The value to almost all social media services (Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn etc.) is eyeballs. So how they keep eyeballs and get more eyeballs is to leverage “game theory” in the primary framework of the service.

And let’s face it, we benchmark ourselves against our social peers. Whether we like to admit it openly or not, it’s true. We look at the car we drive compared to our neighbours or peers, the clothes we wear or of course…whether someone uses a Mac or a Windows machine, Blackberry or iPhone. These things all say something about who we are and where we stand.

We’ve reached the point where socially, people seem to think you’re an odd duck if you aren’t on Facebook and not on LinkedIn if your a white collar professional.

The social media channels that will do best in the coming years will be those who figure out successfully, how to harness game theory and drive our competitive nature. Not all approaches will work with everyone, but they will appeal to certain segments. And that can be just enough to make them large and monetarally valuable to marketers or potential buyers.

So there we are…we’re all just game pieces in a set of complex games finding we now have to keep up with the Jones’ in Cyburbia as well. Funny sometimes how eLife mimics real life isn’t it?