Building a community for your web app can be a very demanding task and many times lack of a good community can go on to become the prime cause of failure of your product no matter how well it was designed and crafted. Tapping the ego of your users is something that could save you some sleepless nights if it is integrated at the core of your web application.
Some time back we had the pleasure of listening to Kevin Rose from Digg and Wefollow talk at the FOWA, London and he talked about certain methods he used to increase his user base from 1 to 1,000,000 users on Digg. His talk gave us some real insights and one of them was EGO. He talks of building features that tap the users’ ego and self-esteem and this in return means greater participation from the user within the community.
As Kevin rightly mentioned on Boagworld, that this is more of a “taboo” topic of discussion and often marked as something “we should not do”. However, if we look closely almost all the popular web apps have tapped this “ego” of the user in one way or the other.
What is EGO?
Who does not like being on top of the Leaderboard?
While the traditional reference of Ego can be applied to this situation, I would like to refer to it more as “rewards” in term of the “social” status of the user. Now these rewards could be points, badges, some rank system or anything else that can be thought of that eventually ends up making the user feel “special”. This feeling of being special and “ahead” of other members of the community adds a very unique aspect of community status that users often run after.
Now these rewards or “ego-taps” as I refer to them are not a new concept or idea. They have been and are being utilized in our web apps even today. Let us look at the various means in which they are being implemented in various popular web applications today.
Karma Points in Forums
I am sure we can recall the “Karma” points that many forums often associated with their members based on their participation in the community. Such “action-based” rewards are the first degree of rewards which reward your ego for your actions. These actions and rewards have a direct first order relation wherein you perform an action (which benefits the community and web app in some way) and you get points. Over a period these points are collected and they give your “Karma” or Ranks on the forum. Your ranks could then be unlocking doors for some actions like kicking spammers etc that you can perform.
Retweets (Twitter) /ReBlogs (Tumblr)/ Likes (Facebooks)
The second type would be the Retweets, Reblogs and Likes that we see on popular social networks like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. These are not directly related to your actions but indirectly related. Who does not like to see their tweets RT’ed? Who with a human heart does not want to see people clicking whatever they post on Facebook with a Like and then comment on it. These are indirect social rewards that a user gets for generating good content for the community. Good content is what you wanted in first place so that more users can come to your community, right?
Completely Indirect and the Best method I have seen yet
I would give it to Twitter for integrating the Social Status so well in their service that it is now a measuring factor of the utility of a human soul (how ironic!). I have seen people following users blindly by seeing the Follower count alone thinking if so many others are following them, they must be “good”. For the owner of an account it gives them the idea of an audience that is out their and listening to them (while it may be possible that they are all spam followers owing to the nature of the users tweets).
When you integrate Ego so well in your product that it does not seem like an additional or dispensable feature but an intricate part of the service, you can be sure you have a killer product at hand.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many ways in which you can use the human nature for your advantage and at the same time make your users happy. For all the blogs out their how about adding a comment leader-board to your own site and see its effects! Feel free to suggest other ideas that you have come across and other opinions that you have over this topic.
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