In The Importance of Expanding Your Customers' Social Experience (registration required), Duggan notes that companies that focus on social media risk creating an undesirable distances between brand and customer. To solve this problem, businesses are using gaming tactics to increase social sharing, user-generated content, and advocacy by as much as 250 percent. For example, Samsung Nation is hosting a program for rewarding brand fans on its own network. By adding game incentives to a website, a business can gain more control over its social community and offer focused incentives.
Duggan outlines the following limitations of using social networks such as Facebook:
1. They offer little protection against losing customers to competing brands.
2. Customers have little motivation to upload content, engage in discussions, refer new customers, and maintain an interest in the brand outside of their initial transactions.
Businesses are fostering social communities on their own web properties, where they can more easily measure and influence user behavior, build customer equity, and turn customers into lifetime users. According to Constellation Research Principal Analyst and CEO Ray Wang, by 2013 "more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include a gamification concept."
That's the key to this article: building customer equity. While it's true that Facebook and Twitter content are ultimately owned by those organizations, businesses are still competing for audiences with social network sites to which a large percentage of users turn every day. In that light, any incentives to go to a favorite brand's webpage to participate in a gaming or social experience needs to be supported by news and information available on popular social network sites, which are here to stay.
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