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Do We Really Need These Stinkin' Badges?

Posted in: Blog, Social Media by SpiderWriters on April 29, 2010

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Ten years ago, I worked at a bookstore in Athens, Georgia which had a rather large hobby shelf nestled in between the biographies and the photography coffee books. Here one found those blue cardboard folders for holding dimes and statehood quarters, and photo albums for baseball cards. This particular time, however, the must-have fad among kids was the pog. Pog were essentially flat cardboard discs bearing different images and such – sort of like trading cards, kids collected and traded them by the thousands. Now, pogs had been around for decades in different incarnations (mainly as bottle caps of certain fruit drinks), but in the 90s they were all over the damn place, and by the century’s turn they had disappeared. How many attics and closets are storing plastic tubes of these little buggers, who can say?

This morning I received in my e-mail a notice from The Huffington Post that they are now awarding nifty new badges to frequent commentators and networking registrants. The rules are simple: if you blog and tweet HuffPo links enough, you get a nice little sticker next to your profile. The idea behind badges for social portal members isn’t new, either. Glue and Foursquare, two rapidly growing networks for product and information sharing, have similar award systems in place. It’s not uncommon for me these days to check Twitter and see somebody I’m following post that they’ve earned the “Underwater Basket Weaving” or “Goo-Goo for Lady Gaga” badge on whatever network. Basically it appears pogs have resurfaced in a sense – on cannot trade them online, but I imagine if you give a network a few weeks they’ll figure out how to do just that.

Why do sites give out shiny happy “stickers”? If one chooses to apply the Pavlovian principle to the Internet, it’s because we crave rewards. We sign up for credit cards to spend thousands of dollars to earn enough points to buy a CD, and we collect grocery swipe cards to save fifty cents on products we wouldn’t normally buy, but because they’re sale it’s okay – we’re saving money! Never mind that we’d save even more if we didn’t buy the prune juice we’re not going to drink anyway.

Social stickers are fun. They are incentive to declare us as authorities on major networks, and in turn encourage people to follow our profiles and promote our websites. With Glue, for example, I can browse the books I’ve written on Amazon.com and add them to my list, thereby promoting myself as an active Glue user and an author, and supplement my authority by adding books I’ve edited as well. If I’m active enough on the site, which is connected to my Twitter account, an alert is release whenever I earn a new sticker, and Glue users following will see that and perhaps follow my profile with the hope that I’ll like their stuff. By this logic, the happy shiny stickers can benefit your social marketing.

Now let’s say you haven’t written any books or have any products to sell – what good are all these stickers and all this time spent on social crack sites? One can argue that any time spent socializing on the Internet is networking. Part of bringing news of your services to people involves finding people you may interest. With Glue and Foursquare and similar sites, you have the opportunity to search people by their likes and dislikes, and from there build a trust that just might transfer traffic to your websites.

Will stickers and badges go the way of the pog? It’s possible. The way the Internet and social media advances, surely something new will come along that users Must. Have. Now. In the meantime, though, they sure are cute, aren’t they?

Kathryn Lively is a social media specialist assisting clients with social media optimization and travel social media services. She has helped a number of companies increase their traffic through social media writing and Virginia web design.