Tricky incentives // vanity engagement // Kathy Sierra (again)
After reaching ~200 members in our little authors community, its time to move off Slack. Part of my reason for running this personal site on Circle was to properly evaluate the tool.
I spent so much effort on it because all decisions are either binding (one-way doors) or reversible (regular doors). You want to be slow with binding decisions (like fundraising or idea selection) and fast with reversible decisions (like features and landing pages). Switching an existing community to a new home is a binding decision. Even though it could technically be undone, doing so is so expensive (in terms of both effort and churn) that it’s really not practical. Hence my heavy due diligence.
Anyway, at some point along the way, I got super into the idea of using automated member tagging to celebrate little accomplishments and milestones:
Dru Riley uses something similar to great effect in his trends.vc community, where reaching a streak of personal accountability/checkin posts unlocks access to “exclusive” spaces and tags.
I love the concept. For example, authors could “earn” the podcasting mic tag (seen above) by sharing a link to a podcast where they talked about their book.
All very clever, but I think I got a little bit carried away, and I started wanting to tag everything, starting down the slippery slope of conflating extrinsic rewards and vanity engagement for real value.
If I may quote from Kathy Sierra again:
Beware of faux-badass.
Gamification awards for purchases, visits to a website, comments, etc. typically reward behavior the company wants, not what the user wants.
Yep, that’s where I was heading.
It’s not about helping people feel badass.
It’s about helping them be badass.
So I’m dialing back the tagging, ensuring that tags only exist if they either encourage meaningful progress (i.e., getting the users to where they want to be, which is a successful book) or allow for meaningful connections (i.e., being able to find the people with the same focus as yourself).
This links up to the idea of vanity engagement, which is about encouraging observable behavior rather than impactful behavior.
No matter how pampered our users feel [by our careful customer service], if it doesn’t help them grow their skills, resolution, and results, it’s still faux-badass.
The role of customer service is to support and enable the users to not just feel better, but to be better.
So many community leaders misunderstand this. They begin each day with a question or a poll, optimizing for cheerful engagement rather than figuring out what will actually move their members forward.
Or to put it more bluntly: they begin every day by wasting their users precious time in order to self-servingly make their engagement graph go up.
Competing on out-caring the competition is fragile unless “caring” means “caring about user results.”
“Feeling loved by a brand” does not mean badass.
The proof doesn’t live in what we do, but in what our users do as a result.
Amen.
(All quotes are from 📕BADASS: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra)