Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Social Tuesday - Lockerz - Social Bribing

 If anyone isn't aware Plixi is now Lockerz - LINK

Watch the video. It is going to try to make up for Facebook's failings. The Chief Alien has always felt Facebook made a fatal error courting Brands and Marketing instead of building the best Person to Person communication platform out there. Something we would pay a monthly fee for. We have railed against all the failures that Facebook has had to date: Open Graph, Brand Pages, Facebook Ads, Places, Deals. We have also destroyed with their own stats how little sharing goes on the network, how few people actually do anything on the network, and how the live feed is so cluttered with white noise it is almost useless. 

There is a big reason usage per person per day is down over 30% in the last year from 55 mins a day to 38 mins a day. We posit using Facebook stats that there are only between 20million and 30million US consumers active on the network on any given day out of 250 million Americans 14 and over. Not a bad pool but you can see why activity is so low.   

Today as a Marketer 8 of 9 US consumers are unreachable via Facebook.

But Facebook never tried Bribery! Maybe that is all we needed to share more. Would we share more if we earned points like we do Airline Miles. Would be stay with a network that we invested time and effort and have something! We have NOTHING with Facebook. Remember all the Myspace Pages we tricked out and put blood and sweat into then left? We we have put in even less into Facebook.

Lockerz is interesting that for activities you earn points that can be converted into deals. When I watch the video some things I can get with. Others I am not so sure because of human behavior will play out. They give an example of sharing the Camera I bought with friends and getting points. Then if someone buys it I get uuber points. But would a friend want that exact Camera? What if I said 'It's great but wish it had this feature'. Would maybe it being Brand Specific vs Model Specific be best? 

And how much do we want to share. Based on the fact the average Facebook user shares only 1.7 items a day out of the hundreds we see or can...the answer is not much. We didn't want Beacon. And there is a level of sharing we want ie "Cherry Picked Good Stuff...Gems...Steals etc' but we do not want to know everything everyone is buying, watching seeing. That becomes massive spam. Imagine if our Facebook feed was loaded with just 20 things each 'friend' did today. We would leave the network.

But what if the bribe was so incredible we put up with it? Would we just share without participation just for the points. It could be a gold mine of data for someone but maybe not quite the network they envision.

No comments:

Post a Comment