Trophies Driving Blog & Social Media Engagement

Last year, Seattle-based comedy bloggers Cheezburger Network (ICanHasCheezeburger, IHasAHotDog, FailBlog, MemeBase) introduced "Cheezburger Collectable Trophies" to an already extremely active member community.

The collectables (in the form of graphical badges that are displayed on the user's profile) can be earned, traded with other users, gifted and purchased. Members earn trophies by adding friends, creating content for the sites and sharing content on Facebook or Twitter. There are also many "secret" ways that users can discover new trophies by interacting with the site in different ways.

Trophies, also known as collectables or badges, trace their (recent) roots to the gaming world, with trophies being included in most game titles as well as online games such as Zynga's FarmVille and Mafia Wars. In recent years, the concept of "gamification" of social media has developed to such a degree that there are now sites such as Empire Avenue that creates a kind of stock market out of social media-based activity and reward badges.

Cheezburger Network is one recent addition to a long list of social media outlets introducing trophies - Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Foursquare all have well established programs. Badges and trophies present many opportunities to help build an online community. They can be used to encourage users to increase their participation in communities and collect badges by varying their activities in the community and trying new features and sharing methods.

It's very probable that these virtual honours and "gamification" will start to be applied into other areas of business, not only in social media and marketing.

Posted by Dan Biggs at May 9, 2011 4:45 PM

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